Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting Paperback – April 20, 2012

This author should be getting paid by the firms who hire users of this book. The reader will indeed hit the ground running on day one as an consultant.Before you even begin to read - the author offers bonus tools that will assist the reader with achieving their objectives. Additionally, current informative feedback from former readers of the book are inspirational for the consultant job hunter.This book is a great tool for anyone who wants to get over the hurdles. It is alarming how many minutes it takes to actually knock yourself out of a job opportunity. The author states that " the interview is essentially over even before it has begun"; this reveals how critical it is to answer case questions.The best quote for a job seeker " the candidate who stands out the most in an interview is the one who acts like a consultant already." This book will get you there. He will show you a core problem solving tool that can be used during an interview as well as on the job.This book has ample examples that will get you through the interview process. You can't put a price on the value of information that you will learn to enhance your own career.The author emphasis is that "if you hate case interviews then you likely will hate the job."Other items worth mentioning"Chp 6 - (A Gem) What every interviewer looks for and why. . .Chp 11 - synthesis has a powerhouse of information that gets you closer to the offer letter.CHP 24 - leads you to How to get multiple Job offers - The Benchmark of hours practice for success.

After trying to prepare with Case In Point and various other materials, I still didn't know what I was doing; practice cases with current and former consultants were average at best, and I somehow never seemed to really understand most of the feedback.I found Victor's site via a google research, and immediately spent hours perusing the many free articles and watching his 6hour video; next step was purchasing his LOMS (Look Over My Shoulder) product, about 20 hours worth of audio cases + comments where you hear Victor grill and dissect CIB (Case Interview Beginners)'s performance. Listening to this about 5 times (i.e., about 100 hours worth of work right there) really took my performance to the next level; a couple more practice cases just before my interviews convinced me that I was ready.I have the kindle version of this book, and could see immediately it was the same high quality stuff that Victor has gotten me used to; I am actually buying the paper version as well just to be able to put my hands on it at all times.What is Victor's secret? He explains what to do, then shows us why that's working AND shows us why not doing it leads to failure (e.g., start with a hypothesis, explain the structure & why you each piece will help confirm the hypothesis (or not); do regular interim conclusions as you move from one part of the case to another; start the final conclusion with the answer before the rationale... all things that really make sense but typical applicants don't do. I know I didn't! Oh - and how do I know it works? I've successfully passed all 6 case interviews I've taken since then :)

I have read Cosentino's "Bible" on my Kindle app and, maybe partly because of the way it was formatted, i found it horribly repetitive, driven by sound bites and incomplete. (In one case I recall i had to discover how Cosentino was truly structuring his one framework way late in the exercise section, instead of the part of where he was introducing his basic four frameworks.)While Cosentino's technique is that of a brutal and opportunistic mercenary, Victor Cheng is much more of an artist. He teaches you here some basic techniques, after which he basically tells you to toss it all to the wind and allow the "feel" of the information you dig out of your interviewer to guide your solution of the case. This is very good advice once you are truly good at this game, but i have somehow felt that his simplification comes a little bit too early. True beginners need a bit more than the two main frameworks that Cheng mainly relies on, which are a mechanic profitability framework and a very loose business case framework. It feels a bit as if Cheng has reckoned that truly masterful candidates will be able to figure things out for themselves and therefore decided to skip some case structuring formats that may have been helpful in bridging the gap between beginner and advanced.That being said, Cheng is REALLY good at coaching you how to deal with interviewers, who, let's face it, are out to get us all. Maybe it's because I am subscribing to his free mailing list, but he does a very good job of explaining how to understand their psychology and avoid getting mauled.All in all, a very recommended read, but do take his insistence that you need to familiarize yourself with only a small amount of frameworks with a grain of salt. You need not learn frameworks by heart, but I'm having trouble seeing why it would be a bad thing to have a glance at the ways one could go about solving more finnicky kinds of problems in a structured manner. Buy this, but supplement it with something else. And, no, not necessarily Cosentino.