Good morning, my name is Victor Chang. If you're interested in case interviews, you're in the right place. We have a good-sized day today.
We're going to go about eight hours. I have a lot of material for you, and I am going to do a total brain dump of everything I know about case interviews. as much as I can in about eight hours.
Let me start off by telling you my story and a couple things we'll cover today. I, let's see, I'm a former McKinsey guy and I went to my undergrad at Stanford. I did a master's there too shortly thereafter and was recruited out of Stanford into the McKinsey analyst program.
This was a couple of years ago. Four hundred people applied out of Stanford, which is a decent school. I think in my year four got offers or six got offers, four took them.
And in total that year McKinsey worldwide hired about a hundred analysts. So across all the countries, all the continents. About two years later about ninety of those ten hundred or basically encouraged to leave the firm, go do something else and come back. I was one of 10 that was sort of promoted to an associate and asked to sort of jump on the partner track and continue on.
I have done case interviews on both sides of the table, and it's very interesting once you've sort of been on both sides. You sort of get very intimidated when you're being interviewed, and when you're sort of the interviewer, you're sort of annoyed that you have this thing in your schedule you've got to get rid of. So I'm going to try to demystify a lot of stuff, try to get rid of the things that I've tried to do.
try to make sure that, I think the more you know, the less intimidating it is. And I don't know if you guys are intending, but I was sort of scared to death when I did this as an interviewee. Scared to death.
And I realized it wasn't necessary. So a big part of it is familiarity, another part of it is sort of skills. And let's see here. My goal for today is a couple things. I would like to give you guys familiarity with the process, the case interview process, and I'd like to give you a couple of key skills that will get you through.
sort of the first half of the case interview. I always think of the first half as skill-driven, teachable, and the last half is really sort of like your talent. So the opening of the case is very formulaic.
Getting into the case, the first 10, 15 minutes or so, is very formulaic. Ending the case, very formulaic. The last sort of middle 20, 30%, that's where sort of business judgment, acumen, analytical insights, sort of raw horsepower mentally and as well as experientially. experience really comes into play, and that's talent.
So my job is to make sure you get through the beginning, the middle, and the end, and your talent is really left to shine on your own. And we can sort of get rid of the rest of the stuff. OK?
The other thing, my goal for today too, is to give you confidence. Like I mentioned earlier, I was very scared going through this process. I did fairly well. I actually talked about companies I got offers from, which I don't usually talk about. But I got offers from basically all the firms I applied to, all the major ones except maybe one.
Kinsey, Bain, went to the final round of booze but sort of declined to go because I had the offers I wanted. I got offers from Monitor, Mercer, L.E.K., A.T. Carney, which was sort of the top. top firms when I was sort of recruiting. And, oh my.
So I'll give you sort of some insight in terms of what I thought worked well for me. I will say this, there's more than one way to be right. There's more than one way to be right.
This is not the only way, it happens to be a way. So, love to have an open, if you guys have an open mind today, and then sort of take what you want from it and then use what you can. A couple things in terms of how this workshop is intended to be different, and I don't know what you guys have seen so far, but there are a couple things that we'll be talking about that I never saw sort of other firms do in terms of providing training to potential candidates.
First thing I'm going to talk a lot about is the interviewer's mindset. It's sort of getting to the psychology of why they do the things they do, and if you understand what they're thinking, it's a lot easier to impress them. Right? It's sort of like the number one thing. one skill for a marketer is if you know your customer extremely well, a lot easier to sell to them.
Same thing with interviews. If you know how they think, and by the way, they're very predictable. And some would argue you're a little boring.
So once you understand that and how the firms think, everything makes sense. So all the new twists they were doing in terms of, I know there's some new twists in terms of case interviews like group format and sort of half-solve cases you've got to finish and all kinds of things like that. Once you understand the mentality, it makes sense. And if they ever do new things.
in the future, it'll likely make sense too. So some of the firms have been doing that. And when I sort of read about it, because I haven't done those, that's sort of the new twist before, I thought, that's brilliant. That is so smart, because I know exactly what they're trying to accomplish.
by doing that. And I can sort of guess as to what kind of problems they were having in the recruiting process by not doing that. So it sort of just sort of opens your eyes into how that world thinks. The other thing we're going to do is I'm going to go into very specific... processes in terms of how to tackle very specific cases.
So not sort of certainly the high level conceptual, but I want to drill down to what questions do you ask in which order, depending on what the answer to the previous question was. You can't do that for the whole case. but I guess I said the first chunk of the case is fairly formulaic until you start getting data back the other thing that's important to keep in mind particularly since most of you guys are from Harvard the case interview in an HBS case is very different and I saw a gentleman with an HBS case can I borrow one real fast? you still have it handy?
and they give you the difference too So an HBS case has what? A lot of pages. Too many pages. Right? My wife went to HBS and she was always complaining.
So an HBS case has 21 pages. Okay? A case interview, this is what you get.
Nothing. You get maybe one sentence. The difference between the two is you need, in a case interview, you need to have processes for eliciting data from your interviewer. So that's the skill.
And towards the end, when you flush out all the data, they start looking similar. You have data to analyze. And so when you get cold called, when you're opening up a case, that's really the last like 10 minutes of a case interview.
It's like a cold call. So now what do you do if you're in the client situation? But at the beginning of the case interview, you have nothing.
You have maybe one sentence. Kustnik, company's in trouble. What do you do? No data. And so the skill, big part of the skill is getting the data.
data, getting the right data in the right order. And one of the challenges is, and you'll see this sort of in terms of how consultants think, is there's an infinite amount of data you could get. So your case writers have gone to an awful lot of trouble to include information in these cases, right?
But you have a blank slate. You could literally get anything and everything. And that's actually a very big challenge for consultants is they literally will walk into a client. Client will say, I'm in trouble. I need help on X.
What do you do? I have 45,000 employees. You can interview any of them. Which one do you want to interview?
I have terabytes of data, millions and trillions of records of information. Have at it. And you don't have time to do all of it.
So a big part of the skill is figuring out what to ask for. There are a couple things I won't cover today. I won't cover like regular job interview questions. Where do you see yourself in five years?
What's the strength of yours? What's the weakness? You know, some mistake you've made, that kind of stuff.
I'm not going to talk a lot about sort of the more recent twist to case interviews. I haven't done, I haven't been on either side. of those, so my knowledge on that sort of third hand. And I'll give you a resource of where to go for more information on that. And I'm not going to talk about estimation back of the envelope cases.
And I'll tell you why in a second. You guys familiar with what that is? how many golfers are in America. You sort of estimate how big a market is. And I hope I don't offend anybody.
But those are actually fairly straightforward cases relative to the much more complicated ones I'm going to talk about today. And I think there are resources out there that have done an excellent job of covering that. And so rather than duplicating it, I'd rather sort of focus the majority of the time on the things I don't think people cover in enough detail.
So I want to cover the toughest cases and the most confusing ones. ones where people get tripped up and the more straightforward ones I'm going to point you somewhere else. There's actually a great book that I picked up recently.
You probably have heard of it. It's a book I think called Case in Point by Mark Cosentino, who I think used to be part of HBS's career services thing. And it's a great book. So I really like his sections on estimation questions in the back of the envelope.
He actually had a couple of insights I didn't even sort of realize that were very useful. And I really like his coverage of the new sort of case twist. and specifically what the formats are, and he has some good examples there. So I'll refer you there, so you'll get what you need by going to that resource, but I won't cover that today because I'm going to cover the more complicated stuff.
Also, in terms of questions, if you have questions, raise your hand. I'm going to watch the time carefully. I have things scripted out very tightly.
If I've got time, I'll take them. If not, I'll just defer them, and we can handle it on a break. Let me talk a little bit about why I'm doing this. Two reasons. The first is, the first time I gave this workshop like this, it was to four people.
And it was just a bunch of friends of mine. And I sort of... I have sort of swapped a lot of the offers at sort of my year and so the year behind was very curious as to how I did that. So I'm like, oh sure, I'll tell you guys, no problem.
I had no problem sharing. And four people out of the four, I think three applied for consulting jobs, all three got jobs. One was at Booz, one was at Bain, one was sort of a boutique firm. And the interesting thing was they all kept their notes and without telling me, they started circling it to their friends in like subsequent years.
And so three, four years later, after I sort of got my job offer. I got emails from people over the internet. Are you the Victor Chang who did this?
You know, who did the case thing? And I just got into it. This person I got into McKinsey said, thank you so much because it really helped.
And then it's sort of been floating around sort of underground. And I thought, well, if you're going to pass it around, might as well sort of clean it up because I sort of know a little bit more now, have a little more perspective on the process, and sort of do it with my latest thinking. So that's the first reason. The second is, I actually, you know, my business, I don't have like a case.
consulting practice or anything like that. I'm not a recruiting firm. I'm not looking to hire people.
I sort of have my own thing and this is sort of something that I like doing. And I really have a charity that I like to sort of promote. And so if you don't mind me taking five minutes out of an eight hour day to just tell you about this great charity, I'd really appreciate that. There's an organization called KidPower.org and that's their website.
And what they do is they train kids how to be safe. Okay. And they actually sort of train kids all the way up to people who are disabled and seniors, sort of the people who get preyed upon in society.
Been around 19 years. They've trained a million people worldwide. They have a very highly leveraged model.
They have no money, but they train a million people. And what they do is they sort of train the trainer so they leverage existing infrastructure. So they open up Vietnam as an affiliate office for $5,000. No ongoing overhead because they tapped into the overhead of an existing organization there. Very impressive.
I actually took one of their courses. This guy had a. I got two daughters and I wanted them to be safe and I was very surprised that they could take something that was so useful even apply to a little child who doesn't have to understand that there are no bad people out there but can learn things like asserting your personal space which is like a key skill like my I taught my two-year-old how this assertive personal space and apparently that skill if you carry that on over the years really dramatically reduces your chance of having bad things happen to kids so I was sort of very you know worried to death as a new dad wanted to learn how to do this found this organization And they are sort of one of the best at sort of teaching people these skills and sort of retaining it. And I'll actually be using a little bit of what their teaching skills here today as well.
A couple of examples I want to talk about. There was a seven-year-old girl who took one of their training classes. And one year later was a guy at the zoo tried to molest her. And she got away because she knew what to do. Another teenage girl took a class.
Two years later was wrestled to the ground by a kidnapper. And fought him off and escaped. I'll let you tell the story. And finally, another example is a 10-year-old took a class.
One class, one time, no other training. 13 years later, was out in the woods walking with an old friend, old boyfriend, when the old boyfriend said, you know, that's kind of odd. There's a guy he recognized.
And it was an ex-disconsoled employee who was rushing him with a baseball bat. Really pissed off. He sort of not...
This is sort of an unusual thing for him. So you sort of froze. She stepped in, took them out, and they went home.
So I thought it was amazing that after 13 years, you still remember this stuff. And so they're one of the best at sort of what I call teaching by doing. So they basically role play a lot.
And that seems to help really attain the skills. The person I'm working with there is, her name is Irene. And Irene is really interesting.
She started this organization when she was with two of her own kids and I think two of their friends in broad daylight in the middle of downtown. Someone tried to kidnap one of the kids right in front of her and she got the kid back but sort of felt like I mean how brazen can someone get and And sort of started this charity to sort of help teach others and sort of the interesting story Which I which is why I'm talking about it today is I don't know if you guys heard of the the poly class kidnapping maybe about 10 15 years ago very high-profile kidnapping in California and Interesting thing was up until that point in time. She was just a very shy person sort of I think by nature and Didn't really want to be pushing And I'm sort of helping her be more pushy too. And what happened was that girl got kidnapped, but all the teachers in this organization, they knew the family really well. They had actually invited her to the classes, right?
But she didn't go, and she ultimately got kidnapped and was killed. And so Irene always wonders, you know, sort of the guilt trip thing, you know, maybe if I was sort of pushier, maybe it would have made a difference. I don't know. And so it's very interesting.
Ever since then, about 14 years ago, She's been sort of very motivated to get the word out and I sort of really respect that passion. So sort of here's my suggestion for my request for today. I have spent about 20 hours preparing materials I'm going to go through today, about six to eight hours worth, and my request is this.
If you find today useful, and it's my plan, that you make a $50 donation to kidpower.org, and that happens to be the cost of what it takes to train one kid directly in terms of them training themselves rather than through an affiliate. And I'll give you the case because we're numerically driven people today. It takes about $150,000 to get a Harvard MBA, right?
Went up since my wife is here, I don't have to pay that bill. And the MBA opens doors, right? It gets you interviews that you may not have otherwise gotten.
And today, my goal is to help you ace the interviews that you do get with the MBA for only $50. So that's like pretty compelling, and if you can't see the math, then you might have other problems. All right, so it's a good deal.
All right, enough of my guilt trip there. Here's my agenda for today. We are going to cover very briefly case interview basics, talk about the interviewer's mindset in general when they're on the job and when they're interview mode. Okay, sort of if you understand them sort of in general then as they get to the interview mode it sort of becomes more specific. I'll talk about sort of a general process for how to open, analyze, and close a case.
All very important steps and we'll spend most of the time today on demonstrating These principles in action, okay, so probably half the day is just case, case, case, case, case. So I got like five or six of them that I'll sort of role play, and we can sort of go do more if we need to. I'll close on some tips on how to practice the interview skills. I had a lot of practice.
I mean, I did live interviews. I don't know how many actual interviews I had, but I had about 60 cases in my recruiting process. I got about 58 of them right.
Bombed one, but it didn't matter because I got my other. 14 from that firm nailed and then I had one that I think I offended the person and so didn't get the offer there. Still pisses me off to this day.
It's been a long time. So I'm gonna talk about practicing. By the time I had my first live interview it was probably my 30th or 40th case.
Makes a big difference. The first person who ever helped me on a case, I think was the first person, was a business school student actually at Stanford and I sort of begged her to sort of coach me through the process and to give me a case and she was very kind very generous. So this is sort of my way of sort of paying it forward. And I bombed.
Like, I bombed. And so I could tell that she was like, oh, gosh, I'm wasting my time. So a very nice lady, but she was very patient, sort of coached me through it.
Still remember the case, by the way. I know what I screwed up. You know, you always remember the ones you miss, right? But that was sort of the first one.
And it was, I bombed, but it was sort of in private, right? It had no consequence. And it takes practice. I mean, I practiced a lot.
And I was looking at some of my old notes, and I was pretty anal about the whole process.