How You Actually Get Graded

Landing a consulting offer is four steps: make the firms aware of you, get them interested, get the interview, secure the offer. This is about the last one. Securing the offer happens in rooms you never see, by people working from a form you never read. I spent five years interviewing at BCG and ran recruiting for my office, so I sat in those rooms. Here's how it actually works.

The form

Within hours of your interview, every interviewer fills out a feedback form. At my firm it was a series of drop-downs and multiple-choice scores, then an open-response box. Other firms' forms look different. They're all answering the same four questions.

Would I staff this person? Can they say who they are and establish credibility, the way they'd have to with a client? That takes succinct, structured answers. This is where your behavioral interview gets scored, and where communication gets scored.

Would they fit on a team? Do they show humility? Do they have a real example of working hard, and a real example of driving an outcome? This largely comes out in the behavioral interview again.

Do they know what they're getting into? This is "why consulting, why this firm." Interviewers do not want the canned answer about working across the globe on the toughest problems. They want someone who knows the job: hard work, fast development through tough feedback, teams. If you don't have a predetermined industry, say so (most don't) and say why an MBB firm is the place to figure it out.

Can they handle the rigor? This is the case. Can you do the math quickly and get it right? Can you build a structure and walk through it conversationally? Are you providing insight that connects back to the client's problem? Structure, analysis, insight. You need to be able to show that you can think under pressure, structure insights from complex charts, and perform math in a timely and accurate matter. These skills matter on the job and matter in the case.

Then a confidence level: definitely yes, maybe, definitely no. And the open-response box, which matters more than candidates would guess. In the debrief, interviewers have to defend what they wrote, and recruiting pushes for consistency between the scores and the comments. A "maybe" with a glowing paragraph gets questioned. So does a "yes" with a thin one.

That's the form. The rest is process.

The process

Before the interview. You applied to an office. That matters more than most people realize, because you're ranked against the pool in that office, not the whole firm. Pick where you want to live and where the opportunities will be, during and after consulting. If you have no idea, pick the office with the people you've met and liked.

Recruiting pulls your data: school, major, GPA, test scores if you gave them, referral name, scores on any pre-interview screen. For getting the interview, school, major and GPA matter most. Referrals and test scores matter some. The rest is noise.

Slots. Each office has a number of slots for the year, split across undergrad, grad, and career-transition hires, based on forecasted capacity. The number is set before you walk in. Offices rarely go over it because the class happened to be strong.

First round. Usually manager-level interviewers, usually from the office. Case plus behavioral. Forms are filled out the same day. Recruiting triages the list and sets the final round.

Final round. Partner-level interviewers and the recruiting director. The full day is blocked: interviews in the morning, decisions the same day.

The debrief

Everyone who interviewed that day gets in a room. Clear yeses and clear nos are separated out fast. There isn't much to say about either.

The middle of the pack is where the time goes. Recruiting talks through four things: how the person did on the case, how they'd fit with the office and on project teams, how they carried themselves over the recruiting season, and the shape of the class (mix of schools, backgrounds, majors, home locations). First-round notes get pulled here, to break ties or sort the middle. If it's still tied after all of that, there's a vote.

Two things follow from this that candidates get wrong.

Your GPA doesn't decide your offer. Your interview does. If you distinguish yourself in the room, nobody opens the file. If you do a good-but-not-great job, the file comes up, and then it depends on the interviewer: some are sticklers, some don't care above a 3.2, and it matters more for undergrad hires than for MBAs, many of whom don't disclose it. A great GPA won't save a bad interview. An unimpressive one means you have to distinguish yourself. Either way, the lever is the same.

Part of the middle-of-the-pack conversation isn't about you at all. Class shape is real. You can't control it, so stop trying. The only lever you hold is getting out of the middle: being a clear yes on the form, from two interviewers, so your name is settled before the hard part of the meeting starts.

What this means for prep

The form is scoring behaviors. Did you restate the problem. Did your structure fit the case. Was the math right. Did you say where you'd start and why. Did the synthesis answer the client's question. Those are observable, which means they're practicable, and they're measurable before you ever sit down in the real room.

That's what we built CaseReady to do: every practice session, case or behavioral, scored against the same questions that form asks, so you know whether you're a clear yes or in the middle before an interviewer does.

The pool is set, the slots are set, and the middle is crowded. Get out of it.