A&A Business Consulting Interview Questions, Process, and Tips

Round: HR Interview
Experience: There were 3 groups formed when the A&M team arrived on campus. A&M conducted 3 rounds of interviews for each candidate and after all the 3 groups had interviewed the candidate, they used to meet and decide on the candidate. Thus the procedure was elaborate but slow. All the interviews were personal interviews.

After waiting outside for almost 7 hours, the interviews were conducted in a very professional manner and the interviewers focus in knowing your past was crystal clear.

Each of the interviewer asked me to go through my resume in a detailed fashion. Each and every bullet point in my resume was questioned and cross questioned. But the interview was not stressful at any point in time. The key reason was that there were no lies in the resume and hence I was very sure about the background of every point (situation, what action I took, why I took that action, what I did, who helped me, how things eventually worked out and what was the result). There were some usual questions as well on strengths, etc. Such questions were few and were randomly thrown at you. Since A&M is mainly a client oriented company who as a part of turnaround would want to “get things done”, I kept all my answers focused towards this theme. Be aware that the interviewers may try to derail you in case you have very well rehearsed answers. So in between questions, there will be some side talk. That can put you off. So being relaxed would help you just laugh/smile that their comments and then continue where you left off. This interview was a walk-in interview for me on day 6, but I had planned on applying here before and hence had some overview of the firm and what it does. That helped me in asking several questions throughout the day. My questions were mainly on switching my focus from IT to operation and finance. At the end of the day, I was told to contact Amit Laud who would be conducting my interview from his base location. This interview was also a personal interview. I googled him and found some details on him. He was an MBA from Wharton, done a stint in Mckinsey, GE and now was the acting CIO for some client company so some questions on IT implementation would be due. I knew that if I get through then I might end up working for him.
Tips: Keep your cool. It is not important to know how to fix laptop or how to fix account statements (if you are CA). But it was more about how you handle such deliberate distracting situations (as if they were your clients) and make the atmosphere friendly.

Skills: HR Skills
College Name: Indian School Of Business (ISB)

Round: Case Study Interview
Experience: I was calm throughout the process, had practiced more difficult case studies for other consulting interviews, so the one asked in this interview seemed simple.

General Tips: Understand the work profile well before interviewing. Have basic financial concepts in place (basic FRA knowledge form the 1st term would suffice), read a little about M&As.
Skills:
College Name: IIM Lucknow

Round: Case Study Interview
Experience: In the first round of the interview these questions were discussed in detail and various other scenarios were also taken into consideration

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: I think I was able to justify my interest in finance which added to my cause.

Skills:
College Name: IIM Lucknow

Interview preparation tips for other job seekers - Your communication skills are very important. Be very clear why do you want to join a consulting firm, if you are already not working in consulting. Brush up your basic statistics and analytics concepts if you are looking to join the analytics team.

Interview preparation tips for other job seekers - Please go through the websites and prepare questions for the interviewers