Advancy Interview Process: How to Get an Offer (2026)

Key Insights

• Advancy New York runs five stages: resume screen, timed online test, HR behavioral, a 90-minute case, and a final case with the office's managing partner.
• Most candidates handle the case math. They lose the offer on communication and business sense – generic frameworks and missing the "so what."
• Strong candidates connect their experience to Advancy's work and defend their reasoning under pressure.

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Iris Chen went through Advancy's interview process in 2023. Now she interviews candidates herself, and the first question she asks about every one of them is whether she'd want that person on her team.

"As a candidate, you naturally want to show the interviewer your most impressive story and give the strongest possible answer," Iris says. "As an interviewer, I realized it's more holistic than I thought. It's also about the reaction you give when the interviewer hands you a new piece of information. Can you process it, adapt your thinking, and come up with a useful insight?"

Iris is a Senior Consultant in Advancy's New York office, where she works on commercial due diligence and corporate strategy across life sciences, food ingredients, and industrial chemicals. She joined after a master's in business analytics at Johns Hopkins and made senior consultant in under two years.

We walked through Advancy's current recruiting process with her stage by stage – what each round tests, where candidates lose the offer, and what separates a strong Advancy candidate from a strong consulting candidate in general.

Who is Advancy hiring in 2026?

Advancy is a Paris-founded strategy firm with 280 consultants across nine offices, including New York and Boston. It works in six areas: chemicals and advanced materials, ingredients and life sciences, healthcare, consumer health and consumer goods, industrials and business services, and retail, luxury, and entertainment.

The New York office has grown fast. It went from about 20 people in 2022 to more than 60 in 2026, and that growth is why Advancy has worked to make its interviews more consistent.

"We're trying to make the interview process more consistent in the way we ask our questions and the way we evaluate candidates," Iris says. "That rules out the variable of different interviewers having different criteria."

For the firm's full background, start with our Advancy firm overview.

What is the Advancy interview process?

The Advancy interview process in New York has five stages: a resume screen, a timed online assessment, a 20- to 30-minute behavioral interview with HR, a 90-minute case interview with a senior consultant or manager, and a final 90-minute case interview with the managing partner of the New York office. Iris says the structure is the same one she went through in 2023.

Stage	Format	Who you meet	What's being tested
Resume screen	Application review	HR team	Relevant experience, sharp bullets
Online assessment	Math and logical induction, timed	–	Basic math, pattern recognition, composure under time pressure
First round	20–30 minute behavioral interview	HR	Clear communication, individual contribution, why Advancy
Second round	~90 minute case plus behavioral	Senior consultant or manager	Communication, analytics, business sense
Final round	~90 minute case plus behavioral	New York office Managing Partner	Communication, critical thinking, business sense, and composure under pressure

This is the New York process. Other offices run their own variations, so confirm the steps for the office you're applying to. Advancy's hiring process page and open roles are the place to start.

What does Advancy look for on a resume?

What separates resumes at Advancy is how clearly your past experience connects to the work Advancy does.

That experience can come from almost anywhere. "Any past experience, whether it's an internship or even a school project – as long as you can connect it and show our HR team you have a relevant background, it'll be massively helpful," Iris says.

Speed matters too. During fall recruiting, the HR team works through so many applications that each resume gets less than a minute. Every bullet needs to show the keywords, your contribution, and the result in one clean line.

Iris's own resume is a good model. In a statistics class, her group got a data set from a local hospital with no defined goal. She found the real problem – a high false negative rate on COVID tests – analyzed the steps in the testing workflow to find what the false negative patients had in common, and designed a workflow improvement plan the hospital accepted.

"I started from identifying the problem, quantified the analysis I did, and showed the recommendation for the client and the result," she says. "That's a really good way to mirror the workflow of a consultant."

Write each bullet like a small consulting project: problem, analysis, recommendation, result.

What is on the Advancy online assessment?

The Advancy online assessment has two timed parts: a math test and a logical induction test. The math section is basic calculation and works as a gatekeeper. The logic section is "a little bit like a brain teaser" – you're looking for a pattern in the information you're given.

"It's not that difficult to resolve if you can find the pattern," Iris says. "The key is to stay calm, be detail oriented, avoid careless mistakes, and be mindful of the time."

The timer is what trips people up. If you're stuck on a question, move on and use the time on the ones you can answer. Practice with a clock running so the pace feels normal on test day.

What happens in the first-round behavioral interview?

The first round is a 20- to 30-minute behavioral conversation with HR. It checks whether you can clearly explain your experience, your individual contribution, and what you learned from it, as well as why you chose to apply to Advancy.

"If you're able to communicate your past experience with sincerity and we genuinely believe in you, that's already a good sign," Iris says. The second test is whether you can tell a story in about two minutes and leave the interviewer with a clear picture of what you did and what came of it.

The red flag she hears most: candidates who talk about what their old firm or team achieved. "I don't get a sense of ownership in that type of answer," she says. "I really want them to talk about what exactly they did."

The strongest answers go one step further and connect to Advancy's day-to-day. "When I ask about your proudest past experience, can I see the elements of market research, Excel modeling, problem solving, and delivering a recommendation? Do those elements naturally flow out of the conversation?"

Before your interviews, pick two or three stories, practice each one at two minutes, and check that each shows research, analysis, and a recommendation you owned.

Where do candidates lose the Advancy case interview?

Iris scores case interviews on three things: communication, analytical skills, and business sense. Most candidates handle the math and the charts well. They lose the offer on communication and business sense.

Talking through the math

Even on the calculation, there's a gap between candidates. The strong ones walk through each step clearly without reading out every number – concise, but still easy to follow.

A framework built for this case

Iris wants a framework built around the customer, the product, and the market in front of you. "If a candidate proposes a solid framework, but I feel like the same framework can be dropped into five different cases, it's probably not tailored enough," she says. That tells her you memorized frameworks without thinking about her question.

Getting to the "so what"

This is the hardest skill to build. Many candidates read a chart correctly. The strongest go one step further and translate what they see into a business implication.

Iris gives a gym case as an example. A chart shows attendance across different classes, and no class ever has more than 10 participants. A typical candidate might simply observe that the maximum attendance is 10. A stronger candidate asks what that pattern means operationally: if every class appears to cap at 10 participants, the gym may be constrained by room capacity rather than customer demand.

"It's the difference between reading the chart and connecting it to a real business operation," Iris says.

Responding to new information

Strong candidates adapt as the case evolves. If the interviewer introduces a new fact or redirects the discussion, incorporate it rather than staying anchored to your original framework.

What happens in the Advancy final round?

The final round has the same format as the second: a case interview plus behavioral questions, this time with Sylvestre Pires, the Senior Partner who built and leads Advancy's New York office.

What changes is the intensity. Expect a faster pace, more probing questions, and frequent challenges to the assumptions behind your analysis. The goal is to see whether you can stay structured, think on your feet, and defend your reasoning under pressure.

"That mirrors the job at Advancy," Iris says. "When you build an analysis, you might need to walk through each step one-on-one with your senior consultant or manager to make sure it has enough rigor that the client can trust our work."

Her advice is to treat each challenge as another problem to work through rather than as a signal that your answer is wrong. Strong candidates remain composed, clarify what is being questioned, and work logically through the answer.

Before the final, practice defending your numbers out loud – where each assumption came from and why it's reasonable.

What separates a strong Advancy candidate?

Iris comes back to the same answer: how well you understand what Advancy does and tie your experience to what Advancy values.

One of those qualities is curiosity. Advancy has deep roots in technically complex industries, and that heritage has shaped a culture that values intellectual curiosity, analytical rigor, and a willingness to get deep into unfamiliar topics.

"Curiosity is a big part of the culture here," Iris says. "We want people who genuinely enjoy understanding how a business works, who are comfortable asking questions, and who are willing to go beyond the surface to figure out what really drives the answer."

One candidate made that point for her. Asked about his past consulting work, he chose a project involving a highly specialized product. He explained what it was and how it was used in plain language, then connected his market analysis to a clear commercial implication for the client.

"Immediately I could see the type of thinking we need on a commercial due diligence project," Iris says. "He was curious, had all the hard skills, and was directly transferable."

That curiosity is also what the job asks of you every month. "One month you'll be working on food ingredients and the next you're looking at very technical medical tools," she says. You need to learn fast and enjoy it.

Before your interviews, read through Advancy's practice areas and think about which experiences best demonstrate transferable skills, intellectual curiosity, and alignment with the way the firm works.

How fast can you get promoted at Advancy?

Promotion at Advancy is based on merit, with no fixed timeline. Iris was promoted to senior consultant in less than two years.

She points to two reasons it happens. The firm is growing and has a steady pipeline of projects, so consultants get exposure to many projects early. And as a lean firm, Advancy gives junior people real responsibility as soon as they're ready.

"I believe more and more of my colleagues will experience the same path," she says. For another example, read Fatine's story, and for where the firm is headed, The Future of Advancy.

On pay, our consulting salary report lists Advancy's New York base salary for undergraduate and master's hires at $100,000, with a performance bonus of up to $15,000.

Iris's advice for Advancy candidates

"Stop being stressed and stay true to yourself," Iris says. "The interview process is about presenting the true you to the interviewer."

Treat each interview as a two-way conversation. It's a mutual selection process, and outside of talking to people who work at Advancy, the interviews are the best way to learn the firm's culture.

And talk to people before you apply. Most of her advice comes down to tailoring your experience to what Advancy needs, and the best way to learn what Advancy needs is to ask someone who works there.

"A lot of my colleagues are very busy with their projects, but they're all warm and friendly people who want to help candidates," she says. "We're a fast-growing company, and we want strong colleagues to work with us. So never hesitate to reach out."

(For the record, Iris runs the same process outside work. She plans trips in Excel, optimizes them for time and budget, and presents the itinerary to friends and family on slides. She's now the official travel planner in her friend group.)

For more on the New York office's culture and how it got started, read our earlier conversation with Advancy's Keith Fogerty.

Conclusion

Advancy’s case rounds reward candidates who can build a tailored framework, get to the “so what,” and pressure-test their own thinking when challenged. Those are skills you can train. If Advancy is on your list, Black Belt pairs you with coaches who know what consulting interviewers look for, so you can close your gaps before you’re in the room.

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