Internship recruiting for consulting is months earlier than ever. In this session, former Bain consultant Maile Dyer breaks down the exact preparation strategy – from networking and resume positioning to digital assessments and case prep.
Instead of guessing what to do next, learn how to sequence your preparation so you peak at the right time. You’ll learn:
- What to prioritize first in the MBB recruiting process
- How to network strategically (and actually increase your interview chances)
- What digital assessments like McKinsey Solve and Bain TestGorilla are testing
- A structured plan for case interview prep alongside classes
If recruiting timelines feel fast and overwhelming, remember: you don’t need to do everything at once – just the right things in the right order. If you want a personalized plan, our Black Belt program provides structured prep with an MBB coach.
Resources
- Black Belt: An accelerated prep plan with expert coaching to land your offer (80% of Black Belts land at least one offer)
- Document Edits: Get personalized resume and cover letter edits to highlight what consulting firms really care about
- Application Deadlines: Don't miss your date
- Consult with Katie: Explore whether a Management Consulted program is the right fit for you (15-min call)
Transcript: MBB Internship Recruiting Playbook
I'm Maile Dyer. I'm originally from Kauai and I loved it, but wanted the exact opposite experience and moved to New York City. I went to NYU, studied economics and psychology.
I actually knew what management consulting was, but I decided not to apply as an undergrad, which I think was a mistake, so I'm glad you all are here. I instead did market research. So I went and applied to market research firms, did that for several years, and then realized, you know, market research is just one thing that consultants do. So I really wanted to go and get a broader strategy toolkit. So I went and pursued an MBA at the University of Chicago at Booth. And that's when I did my major consulting experience. I interned the summer between my first and second year and then went back full time to Bain in New York. So I was a consultant and then a manager, and then have been coaching with Management Consulted for a couple of years now.
So I'm a coach and I'm also a case competition facilitator. But my main thing is coaching. And so, like all our coaches, we're here to help throughout the entire process. So everything from, you know, what firm should I apply to, to how do I network? And then through obviously interview prep, both case and behavioral prep. And then even sometimes with the decision — hopefully you get a couple of firms or maybe more that you can choose from — and then we're happy to help there too.
Today's Agenda
So let's get into today's agenda. The first thing we're going to talk about is your application, just what's expected and how to develop a resume that's going to stand out. I'll then get into some of the networking aspects. So this is actually something that's pretty important to ensure that you actually get an interview. And then we'll talk about digital assessments just briefly. So now that they are like commonplace at all the MBB firms, we'll talk a little bit about that. And then we'll move on to case and behavioral prep, so that you have an idea of what's expected.
Application Requirements
All right, so in terms of the application, it's a little bit different by firm, but of course all three here do require a resume, and that is obviously table stakes. It is oftentimes the most important thing that they look at, and so you want to make sure that your resume is in top shape.
Cover letters are — I guess for Bain it is required. BCG is optional. McKinsey actually does not read cover letters, so there's no need to submit one there. In terms of submitting for BCG, we think if you do have a strong cover letter, you should submit it. That makes sense too, if it can tell your story a little bit better.
Test scores are obviously table stakes as well — make sure you have access to those. And then in terms of digital assessments, each firm has a little bit of a different experience. So Bain has Sova and Test Gorilla. BCG has CCDA, which is more of a behavioral video type of assessment. And then McKinsey has Solve, which is more of a game that you have to play. So we'll go in a little bit more about that in a few minutes.
Resume Format and Content
All right, so in terms of the resume — this is, as I said, very important. We recommend that you stick to four sections, and those specifically are education, experience, leadership, and personal.
Education — obviously you should have your college there and anything else that's relevant. We do recommend that you put education post high school. And then in terms of experience, that's usually your work experience, whereas leadership is where you put all of the great things that you've done on campus or even sometimes things outside of campus. So if you volunteered at a nonprofit or something and you have a decent leadership role, you could put that in that section. And then finally, in terms of personal, that's where you could put your languages, your skills, and your interests. We do say that it's pretty important that you put the interests in there just so that there's something in there that kind of connects you a little bit, and it often can serve as a nice icebreaker.
So again, these four sections, and we do say that a one-page resume is really the gold standard here.
Now, in terms of the actual content for your bullets, we do recommend a CAR format. So that's context, action, and results. And I think a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that the resume is a job description and just listing out your responsibilities, when really you should be thinking about your resume in terms of a highlight reel. So what are the big accomplishments that you achieved in that role? And so you should be really specific as to what you did. Did you analyze some sort of data? Did you build a model? Did you interview people? And then what was the actual result? And to the extent that you can quantify it — so a 10% increase in attendance, or $5 million in funds raised, or whatever it is.
And then finally, know that your resume is really your story. It's going to be — it's fair game for your interviews. So know that it has to be things that are completely honest, as well as know that you could be asked about specific lines in there. So make sure if you put an interest in there, you actually have an interesting top five example.
Networking
So we need to go on to networking. This is something that you should start today. The reason is we have less than a month before McKinsey's internship deadline is going to be here. So it is important that you network because it does open doors that applications alone can't. Referrals do increase interview chances.
Now, I will say it's important that you are targeted with your outreach. And so the first thing that we recommend is to build a contact list. So if you're applying to, say, BCG Chicago, for example, there are a lot of people that you could reach out to. And so we recommend that you first start with maybe people who attend the same school as you. So are there alumni in that particular office that you can reach out to? And I would either use your school's alumni platform, or you can for free go to LinkedIn and just search for people. But you could filter for the firm, the office location, the school that you attend, as well as other things — like maybe there's somebody who is in the same major as you or something like that.
We recommend building a list in a spreadsheet, and then you can actually rank in order who you think you should reach out to based off of who you think you have the most in common with. And the more that you have in common with someone, the more likely they'll be to respond. So if it's somebody majoring in the same thing as you, or again, from the same hometown, I recommend that.
But generally, we say there's this 2x2x2 rule, which is that you should try to limit your outreach to just 2 people from the office that you're interested in and contact them 2 times in the span of 2 weeks. That's because we don't want you to necessarily be bombarding the entire office. You don't want to be the person that's spamming the whole office. So do some targeted outreach. If you haven't heard back, you can move on to the next 2 people.
But given that we have a tight timeline here, I would maybe recommend instead of the 2-week time period, move it more towards a 1-week time period. For example, you reach out to somebody today, and you follow up with them on Friday — if you don't hear back by, say, Tuesday — I would move on to the next 2 people.
But as you're reaching out to people, also know that you will need to prepare for these calls. So make sure you have a 1-minute or so, or maybe 2-minute, intro of who you are so that when you start the call, you can introduce yourself appropriately, and then have a list of questions that make sense for that person that you're contacting. As always, you want to make sure that you're presenting yourself in a very positive way. So obviously, don't be disparaging of the firm in any way, or of yourself, and make sure you make a good impression.
Mid-Roll
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Hey, Strategy Simplified. My name is Katie and I'm a Black Belt alum. I used the program to help me land an offer at BCG, where I spent three years in the Middle East. And now I'm back — I'm on the Management Consulted team to help you land the offer that you want to get. How does the Black Belt program work? We start with a one-on-one onboarding call so that we can develop a personalized plan and help you understand where to focus your energy. And throughout the entire recruitment process, I'm here along with our team to push you, to cheer you on, and to help you do whatever it takes to land that offer. If you'd like to chat before you sign up for Black Belt, you can click the link in the show notes to book a complimentary 15-minute call with me and we'll figure out what best suits your needs.
Digital Assessments
So then we move on to the digital assessments. And this is important to note because it's been a more recent development for all the firms, but the idea here is that it's really the bridge between your application and receiving a round one invitation. So we treat them as what we call round zero, which is — after you apply, you get an invitation to complete a digital assessment.
And they are testing a few things. It depends on the firm, but typically it is around structured thinking — so can you actually figure out how to approach the problem correctly? Can you actually do the math, set up the problem, calculate the math correctly? And then in terms of decision-making under pressure — you do get a finite amount of time to complete this. So it's important that you move quickly. But also you might not be given perfect information. So with whatever limited information that you have, you need to make a smart decision relatively fast.
This is just one data point in how firms evaluate you. So try not to be discouraged if you don't feel like you aced them. Also, in some of these situations, there's not like one exact perfect right answer. So know that it's sometimes how you think that they care about.
I will say a great performance on this likely won't really move the needle for a candidate that already has a strong resume or profile, but it can help those who maybe are more like a borderline candidate, or maybe your test scores aren't as good as others, or sometimes non-target schools — it can really help.
And so we say to prepare for this, we do recommend general case prep, because this is a good way of practicing all those skills that are needed for the digital assessments. And we have several practice tests from these firms on the Management Consulted site, and Black Belt actually does include practice tests from each of the firms. So if you have access to the platform, I always recommend folks to actually go in there and practice so you're not caught off guard — at least know the format.
Polling the Audience
All right, so we're going to move on to a poll here. How many cases have you done so far? And specifically, think about the cases that you did out loud with them. Not just cases where you've watched or read, but ones that you have actually done one on one.
All right, the poll is up and live. So get in your answers. I'm excited to see where folks are at.
All right, let me share the results here. So it looks like about a third said none so far, and 59% said 1 to 5. So still early on — that's OK. But you'll want to very quickly ramp that up. And so we're going to start a little bit today. But hopefully everyone gets more to the 6 to 10 range in the next week or so.
Case and Behavioral Prep Overview
All right, so moving on now — we're going to talk a little bit about what interview prep entails. And we do say about 80% of your time should be spent on case prep and then 20% on fit, or what we call behavioral prep.
So just in case you're not clear on that — case prep is where you get a prompt and you have to run through the entire case with an interviewer, often live. And there's all sorts of analysis and whatnot you have to do. Fit or behavioral prep is more so where you're asked questions like tell me about yourself, or why consulting, or tell me about a time when you had to work with a team.
So again, 80% of the time spent on case and 20% on fit. We do say that you should start with case because that is just, quite frankly, the more important piece, at least in round one. And at the same time though, we don't want you to forget about behavioral prep. I do know people who aced the cases — the cases — literally were told they completed it the best out of anybody, but didn't get the second round because they were told that their behavioral interviews were not very good. So don't forget about it and start early if you can.
Introduction to Market Sizing
Okay, so we generally believe that market sizing is a great place to start case prepping. And we are going to work through some market sizing problems live. So if you have a pen and paper already, that would be great.
So I'm going to talk a little about market sizing. Market sizing is pretty standard across firms at the undergraduate level. Sometimes they are actually ahead of round one, or they're kind of like a standalone problem. I know like EY-Parthenon often gives a market sizing problem, sometimes McKinsey, et cetera. So it's good to know how to do these.
The point of these is that it's really a way to showcase some basic casing skills. So can you structure the problem? Can you set up a market sizing problem? Can you make reasonable assumptions about the inputs to actually calculate the market size? Can you actually do the calculations? So if there's something like market sizing, you're not going to be given a calculator, so you do need to be able to do the mental math and talk through it live. And then can you pull out an insight? So what's the final answer? Does it make sense in the context of what you know about similar industries and things like that?
We say start with about 10 market sizing cases. Usually that's what people need to be able to figure out — there's kind of a formulaic approach to this. But if you still feel like you are not up to par on market sizing, we do recommend that you do more until you're able to do these very quickly.
Market Sizing Exercise: Croissants in New York City
Okay, so we are going to actually try to do a market sizing problem, and I'm going to give you 2 minutes. So on your own, I'm going to set a timer — we're going to size the market for croissants in New York City. So think through how you solve the problem and try to actually calculate it in the 2 minutes that we have here.
All right, so let's stop there. I realize that there might be several of you who actually don't even know what market sizing is, and that's okay — we're about to learn it. But let's go ahead and just take a quick poll and see how many steps did you take to solve the problem. And again, if you said zero because you don't know, that's totally fine. And the other question we're going to ask is, what is your expected market size?
I just want to pop in here and say — I'm going to tell you right now, everyone's answer is probably going to be wrong. So it's totally fine.
So it actually looks like a number of folks did actually take several steps. That's, quite frankly, way better than I was expecting, so that's good. We generally say you want to have at least 5 steps when you market size. So I'll go over that in a little bit. And then in terms of how to size the market, it's typically revenue per year — that's what's expected. I will say it is good to clarify at the beginning with the interviewer because sometimes it's actually units per year. But I think the safe assumption typically is revenue per year.
Okay, so we got a wide range of answers. The point here is that there's no one right answer. What we're looking for is the approach and how you actually solve this problem. And do you make reasonable assumptions, and ultimately do you calculate something, and do you sanity-check it to see if it makes sense.
The 5-Step Market Sizing Formula
So this is what we would say is kind of our standard formula for how to do market sizing. And obviously it might vary depending on the question that's asked, but here I have 5 steps at the top, and there's really kind of a 6th step below.
But you start with step one — you take a population, or the number of households, or a number of businesses, depending on the question. In our situation, we have croissants. And so I would go, consumer product or consumer good — I would start with the population. So I'd start with population of New York City and go from there. Now you'd want to use something like households if it was something like — if you're trying to calculate the revenue per year for ovens, that's going to be more like a household thing because it's just one per household typically. But here we have population for the croissants, so let's start there.
And then we say for step two, we want to break it into 3 to 4 segments. And so the way that you segment it is up to you. We have a few options that we recommend, which I'll get into in a minute. But for mine, I just did this really quickly before this call, and I picked age. So I decided to take the New York City population, which I think is about 8 million people, and I decided to break it down by 0 to 20, 21 to 40, 41 to 60, and then 61 plus. But you can use other age ranges too. That just seems fairly easy to get through.
Once you break it into segments, you'll then want to get into the percentage who actually consume. So it depends on the question — in our situation, it's probably the percentage of people who actually go out and buy croissants. So you want to take those 4 segments that I made and allocate actual percentages for each of those segments. So maybe I think for ages 0 to 20, maybe 40% of that age group is actually buying croissants. But again, make a reasonable assumption. Your percentage for 0 to 20 is probably not going to be the same as 21 to 40. So make sure you allocate different percentages if it makes sense to.
And then you'll move on to step four, which is frequency of purchase. So how often are they purchasing it? Maybe it's once per month, maybe it's twice per month, whatever it is — make a reasonable assumption and make it such that you can say, okay, they're buying approximately 50 times per year, or 20 times per year, whatever you think it is.
And then step five would be to allocate an average price. Again, the price of a croissant for a 0 to 20 year old might be different than a 21 to 40 year old because maybe a 0 to 20 year old is just buying a basic croissant and it's cheaper. So you'll want to make different assumptions there. And then you're just multiplying it all out.
On top of that, we do say that there's an extra percentage that you want to add in for anything that you don't think is covered in your market sizing but still would be important. So in this case, I took the New York City population and sized that. What I'm probably missing are visitors — people who come to New York City to visit and buy a croissant here. And so I'm not going to go and separately calculate that out because that would take a bit of time. But I might just allocate an additional percentage. So I might say, okay, to factor in visitors, I might add another 10% on top of the market size I just calculated. So that would be the amount I calculated for the population plus the visitors, and that would be my total market size.
Now, I think the one thing that I'm missing here — for a lot of things, you're not buying them every single year or every single month or whatever it is. Something like a car is probably not purchased every year, and so you'll have to factor in a replacement rate. So say a car is replaced every 10 years or so, you'd want to take this amount and divide it by 10. So just don't forget about that.
What Market Sizing Is Testing
All right, so the next thing is just to explain what market sizing is actually for. And that is specifically structure — making sure that you stay organized and have an actual approach laid out, like we just saw. In terms of problem solving, are you actually able to do the math and calculate it out? And does your answer ultimately make sense? And then finally, are you able to communicate throughout?
So this kind of math is different than what you're used to in school, where you might be just writing out your problem and solving it on your own. In this situation, you're communicating with the interviewer what exactly you're doing, what your calculations are. So the interviewer needs to be able to actually follow what it is that you're calculating because everyone kind of makes different assumptions. So the interviewer has to be able to follow along.
Segmentation Options and Key Statistics
Okay, and as I mentioned before, in terms of the segmentation, you can choose a few different options. A lot of times it is age-based, so you can do different age ranges that make sense. Or you can go with income — different income levels, geographies — sometimes that's suburban, rural. Gender is another one. Sometimes they do it by need level, honestly. I've never really seen anyone do that in a way that makes sense, but that's another option.
We generally say the segmentation approach is the strongest if you want a robust answer. Although I will say there are some situations, especially when market sizing is within a case, where it's not necessary to do segments. This is often the case with Bain, for example. They might have market sizing embedded in a case. And for those, it's not necessary to do segments. In fact, they want you to very quickly just take the population and use outside numbers — take an average across what you think the segments would be.
Okay, some basic info that would be helpful — some of these stats here — just so that you have a good starting point and they know you know some of these basics. Typically you don't have to memorize many things with casing, but I would say with this it's important.
We say US population — obviously if you're applying in the US. The population of the city you're living in, in case they decide to do it based off of where you currently are. Obviously the population of the city you're interviewing in and where you'll often be working. And then we say like the population of 2 countries per continent or so, just so that you can sound a little bit smart. For example, you might know the population of Spain — I think it's like 50 million or so. And maybe your case is on Portugal, and you don't know what the Portugal population is. But you can reference and say, oh, I know Spain is 50 million. Portugal is a lot less than that. I'll assume it's — and they can correct you as well.
When we say 2 countries per continent, India or China is not really a fair comparison. So it's best to pick countries that are more representative of that area.
And then just going back to the US population — that is the most frequent market sizing that I've seen. So use a number that's going to make sense for the problem. In some cases that might be 320 million. Sometimes it's more like 350 million. So you want to think through that. But be able to split out your age increments well. We say it's about 10 million people for every 5-year increment up until the age of 70. And then at 71 plus, it's more like 20 million people in that group. But you'll get used to it as you do more of these, which is why we recommend that you do at least 10.
How to Learn to Case Interview
All right, so for most people — if you're like me — the case interview is really like nothing I'd ever seen before and I had no idea how to even start preparing. So I'll go through a little bit now on how to approach learning how to do a case interview.
I will say the best performing candidates are those who can practice for 4 to 8 weeks. Some people practice a little bit longer, some people maybe need a little bit less time if they have a lot of business experience for some reason. But knowing that you're applying for the internship, I'm going to say 4 to 8 weeks is probably the sweet spot here.
We, as I said, recommend starting with these market sizing questions. Once you do that, we recommend that you read, watch, and maybe follow along and try doing it yourself as a video is playing — try to actually do the case so that you can see what it's like to do it live. But we recommend watching 5 full cases. Just so you can see different case styles. There are interviewer-led versus interviewee-led. There are also different case types — market sizing versus profitability versus M&A, et cetera. So just watch 5 so that you actually know how the process works and what types of things you will see in a case. Because all cases are different, obviously, but there are some common things like doing a structure, looking at a chart, doing some brainstorming exercises, et cetera.
Then after you've done that, we recommend doing a diagnostic interview with an expert. Ideally this is somebody who's actually successfully landed a position at one of these firms, because those people obviously know what successful case prepping looks like. So obviously that could be with a coach like myself, or it could be an alumnus or somebody else at a firm. But try to do a diagnostic early so you know what your strengths are and what the development areas are, especially.
And then move on to doing 10 cases across different case types, which I'll get into in a minute — but this is a good way to just practice the different case types. And then once you've completed a case out loud, it's best if you can go back a week or so after you do the case and try to do the case again yourself, just to see if you've improved in the way that you did your framework or the speed of your calculations.
And then finally, we obviously recommend doing drills to fill in those development areas, as well as additional mock cases.
I will say a lot of people have this tendency to just do a bunch of cases in a row — like they schedule 3 a day for a whole week. And that typically does not yield great results. You can think about this kind of like sports, if you're a sports person. With most sports — maybe with the exception of baseball — you're not doing a competition every single day. You do drills, you train, you give yourself a little bit of a break, and then you keep going, right? And so similarly here, you want to do cases, but you also want to interchange that with some drills. So do mental math drills, do some framework drills, do some brainstorming drills, et cetera. But also make sure that you're obviously doing mocks so you can get that experience of talking live with somebody else.
Anyway, there's a QR code here. You can download our full case prep plans. You do have to be logged into an MC account to access this, but we do have recommended plans for 4 weeks and beyond there.
Case Type Progression Plan
Okay, now in terms of planning — we think this is a helpful structure in case you're not sure what to do. This aligns with our case library. So we have market sizing, then level 1, level 2, and then creative and advanced cases. But as I said, 10 market sizing problems, then we move on to profitability, which is our most common case type that we see in interviews. So you do level 1 profitability — do 4 cases there. Move on to market study, level 1, 4 cases. Then M&A — just do 2 cases there at level 1. Those are pretty honestly straightforward. And then you can move on to level 2. And the amount of cases that you do in level 2 kind of depends on where you're at and how comfortable you are.
I find that people need to do about 10 at least. Some people do a lot more — up to 30. If you have no business experience and you really feel like you need more practice, that's fine. But I wouldn't just do a ton of cases just to do them. Make sure that they're quality.
And then step 5 is just when you get to the point where you feel like you've handled the more straightforward cases, even if they're a little bit harder at level 2 — you can do some creative and advanced ones. Occasionally, firms will throw out a nonprofit case or public sector case or something really futuristic. So just do a few there so that you're not freaked out when the interview comes.
Timeline and Milestones
Okay, and then here are some milestones to just stay on track, given the deadline coming up. So we are just suggesting this as a guideline.
By March 6th, we think you should finalize your resume. So make sure the bullets are reviewed, formatting is great, et cetera. We also think you should be reaching out to people and doing really heavy networking throughout March. Again, the reason is you can do all this wonderful case prep, but if you don't have an interview, then you don't have the chance to show off your skills. So the networking is really important for you to land that interview. So make sure you're doing that throughout March, and then do those 10 market sizing problems.
By March 13th, we recommend 5 full cases out loud with a case partner, and then also some preparation for digital assessments, as well as doing some math drills — just so you can get used to doing that mental math and doing that math out loud.
And then by April 1st, we recommend that you have a good sense with structures. So with framework drills, we say at least 10 — I think a lot of people need more than 10, quite frankly. That's often an area that people really struggle with. And then you should be actually doing level 1 cases at that point, so about 10 level 1 cases. And then finally, this is a good time to ensure that you have your fit prepared.
You will need to actually develop stories that you can talk about in the interview. You'll need a leadership example, so like telling about a time when you had to persuade somebody to do something, or telling about a time when you failed. So you'll have to have those stories ready, and you'll have to make sure that you're explaining it in a way that's easy to follow, and that you're spending most of your time with the actions so that I know what it is that you actually did and how it applies to this role.
And then by interviews, obviously, as I said — exposure to the different case types. Make sure that you're really structured with brainstorming. That's an area that people often struggle with as well. And then comfort with charts and graphs, et cetera, because you can be thrown a table that you have to interpret, or a bar chart, or even something more complex. So make sure that you're comfortable with all different types of exhibits that you can see.
Outro
That's a wrap on another episode of Strategy Simplified. If recruiting timelines feel fast and furious and scary right now, remember that you don't need to do everything and you don't need to do everything all at the same time. You just need to focus on the right steps in the right order. If you're preparing for case interviews or applications, work with us. Black Belt is our premier prep program that covers every single aspect of recruiting and we'd love to work with you.