Got Logic? What to Expect from a Consulting Firm Interview
Aaron Carlock
Wednesday 26th of April 2006 @ 3:47 AM
If you are one of the few intelligent enough to land an interview with a consulting firm, we have some tips on what to expect. Consulting requires quick thinking, people skills, project management skills, creativity, a love for travel, and an abundance of brain power. A consulting interview is no exception. The primary things the interviewers will be looking for is how well you will fit in with employees at the firm, how likeable you are, your professional polish, and your logic. Learning some of these traits overnight is not realistic, so let’s take a look at a few examples of some types of logic questions that may come up.
I have experienced a multitude of logic questions in my time interviewing for various consulting jobs, but a couple stand out in my mind. The first…How many leaves are there in the city of Chicago? I know what you are thinking, how can anyone know the answer to that question? Well, the answer is that it doesn’t really matter. The interviewer wants to see how your mind thinks, and how you arrive at your answer. The key is to be detail oriented, have a logical flow to your thinking, start small and slowly expand your scope. The easiest way to buy some time to gather your thoughts is to counter with some clarification questions. I would start by asking what season? In Chicago there will be no leaves in the winter and very little in early spring. After the interviewer clears up the confusion you will be able to start answering the question.
It is typically easiest to start small and work towards the final number. You could start small by estimating how many leaves are in an ounce, then a pound, then in a bag of leaves. When you establish your unit of measurement you need to figure out an estimated average per yard, and slowly expand the scope…pounds per bag, bags per yard, yards per capita, etc. There are a million ways to come to an estimate for this problem and that’s why it is particularly difficult. Designed to test your logic, a question like this gauges your ability to take a seemingly impossible question and formulate an answer. Always appear confident with your answer and never let them see you frazzled.
The other question that I remember is how many hair dressers are there in the U.S.? This is a much easier question than the leaves one because the answer is known and not nearly as large. My immediate thoughts were, “Oh this is easy, I will just take the number of hair dressers in my home town and get a percentage of them for the population of the town.” After calculating the percent I multiplied it by the population of the U.S. to get my answer. Easy enough, right? Wrong, while I came very close to the real answer in a very short amount of time, the interviewer wasn’t able to evaluate my logic and math abilities very well because I didn’t use much of either.
After failing in the interviewer’s mind, she went through the correct way to get to the answer. She said, “First you should start smaller and figure out how long a hair cut takes for the average person (30 minutes). Then you should estimate how many haircuts an average person has per month, then per year (she came up with 12 per year). Assuming the average hair dresser works 40 hours a week, that’s 2080 hours per year. Let’s say there are 275 million people in the U.S. That is 1,650,000,000 hours of haircuts a year. If we divide that number by the number of hours we get that there are 793,000 hair dressers in the U.S.” I thought to myself wow, that seemed like a lot of work, especially since my answer was closer and it took me 10 less minutes to compute. However, the point of the interview is to showcase your brain power. If you break down the problem, start small, and take a reasonable amount of time you will have a better chance of being “right” regardless of your final answer.
Remember, consulting interviews are very challenging. Don’t get too scared though, they are interviewing you because they think you are worth the time and effort. If you look good, feel good, and are personable, you will have better odds of landing the job.
