Centre For Railway Information Systems Senior Consultant Interview Questions, Process, and Tips

Round: Case Study Interview
Experience: The trick was here to recognize that even though the firm had several hundred client in each city, it was a few big clients who contributed to most of it's revenue and a distributed network targeting these few clients was the expected recommendation.

Round: Case Study Interview
Experience: The task was to explore possibilities of synergy in this acquisition. The case was based entirely on common sense and elementary mathematics. The interviewer wanted me to write equation showing how costs would reduce if the two companies merge.
HR questions were about strengths, weaknesses, MI etc

General Tips: 1.Pre placement preparation:
Work on your communication skills! It's absolutely necessary to be able to speak fluently with good  diction

2.Resume:
Consultancies look for spikes in your career. Spikes are the areas in the resume where you have shown outshining performance.

3.Case Studies:
Practice them in groups. Avoid technical jargon and frameworks.
College Name: IIT BOMBAY

Round: Resume Shortlist
Experience: The rule of thumb I used while writing and formatting my resume is that the most important things should be clear at a cursory glance. Your resume must be extremely well organized and should read like a “story”. (The definition of most important here is “what the company is looking for”, not what you feel is important. I read a couple of resumes (those of people who had been recruited by the companies I was sitting for) and then made my own. It improved a lot due to the feedback I gained from iitian and non-iitian friends & family. It is advisable to make your resume early for this very purpose. I talked to many people and asked them why they had chosen to work for their particular firm and whether it was living up to their expectations. I also found about what future options each firm/job provides.

Round: HR Interview
Experience: 2 levels with 2 interviews each. Out of the 28 people short-listed for level 1, 8 made it to level 2. Final offers were made to 3.I had 4 interviews. Each one was supposed to be 30 minutes long only, but usually went on for longer. When my turn came to ask a question, I asked the same one to everyone – Whatn has been your highest moment and your lowest moment in Consulting? It was very interesting to note the variety and the personal nature of the answers I got.The quintessential something-about-yourself. I had a story planned but I didn't want to start off with it. So I just talked about some of my recent work in the department and my future plans. He commented on the technical strength of my resume, noticed the initiatives I had taken and asked why I hadn't been a part of Mood Indigo. He asked me a lot of questions about its structure to check my general awareness. (And maybe to see if I get flustered when asked questions I am not prepared for) He asked me whether I knew what EBIDTA was (he worked with fin co.s mainly). I talked about EBIDTA for a couple of minutes

Round: Case Study Interview
Experience: The Case. It was based on a IT firm. He commented that being an iitian, I must be well aware of issues in the IT sector. The case itself was on profit maximization. The key issue was that of difference in labor costs (offsite and onsite) and how the IT sector uses this difference to make supernormal profits. Case was done in a hurry (we ran out of time) but completed well. Session II (Extremely friendly interviewer, ate Pizza while asking Case) The two most fulfilling moments in my life as a leader The two most memorable moments in my life of personal success Note: Justification is important. For the first, its advisable to choose something which reflects your qualities as a leader, and the trust that people put in you. The achievement itself need not be big. For the second, bigger the better :) A company manufactures tankers and wants to go global. What are the issues confronting them? This interview went extremely well for me.

Round: Behavioural Interview
Experience: Session III Talked about some of my resume points. He commented on being impressed with some aspects (including fluency in English) . One event which you consider your life's biggest success

Round: Guesstimate Interview
Experience: The number of cricket balls in Mumbai. I made some calculation errors but incorporated very good structure. Ended up doing integration also. (To include continuously changing rate of population) Ended very well.

Round: Other Interview
Experience: This was with an extremely senior guy, reputed (in McKinsey) to be a ball-buster. He looked at my file (including all the interviewer comments from my previous 3 interviews) and said that he would not be asking me any case studies. This was either VERY good news or very bad! We talked about every HR aspect in the world. It was a long interview. He encouraged me to ask a lot of questions and finally talked about the kind of projects he is proud of and why. Why consulting? Your resume reads technocrat. (He was a PhD in Chem. from Stanford) What's your dream? What happens 10 years from now? 20 years from now? What do you think about academics in IITB. What has been your best performance and why? What kind of companies do you want to work with? Why?

General Tips: I. Cases – Focus on your presentation. The most important things are:
a) Ask the right questions (and lots of them). LISTEN to the interviewer
b) Ensure that they know WHY you are asking each question as soon as you do.
c) Build a mental tree of possibilities and take time off to think wherever necessary
d) Practice your style of summary and conclusion – this can make or break the case.
II. HR questions – Not even one single answer should be immature or unnecessarily cliched. This is your chance to be poised and eloquent.
College Name: IIT BOMBAY

Round: Resume Shortlist
Experience: I went through a few templates & took help from some seniors. I prepared a few drafts and then later made improvements. IT might be a good idea to prepare well in advance and get your resumes reviewed from seniors in the companies you are applying. As probably you'll get to hear a lot, focus more on what you have achieved rather than just stating what all you have done. Keep it simple and short. And don't add anything you are not comfortable talking about in an interview. I know many capable people who didn't get short listed for Mck/BCG just because they didn't think resume was a big deal.

Round: Case Study Interview
Experience: The case was simple. The interviewer said that imagine that he and I were flying together, he being an entrepreneur and I being the consultant. He tells me that he has motorcycle manufacturing business. His revenue has been steadily increasing but he is making losses. As he was not an accountant, he did not have any figures with him at the moment. After some discussion he told me that the sales were up and the costs had stayed the same. I figured that he was probably selling a couple of products and the sales of products which he was selling at a loss were increasing faster than those on which he was making a profit. That came out to be true. He was also selling auto parts apart from motorcycles but was making losses at the sale of motorcycles and sales of motorcycles has almost doubled last year while those of auto parts had stayed the same. That was all and we went back to HR questions. Another case was again pretty straight forward. The interviewer told me that his friend owned a multiplex in some suburb of Mumbai. His friend was making huge losses and had left him a frantic voice mail and wanted to meet him over the weekend. So I had to first give few ideas as to how to generate revenue, to make his friend feel better and then how to find the root of the problem. I think I tossed around a lot of ideas but I don't remember most of them. We planned to decrease cost of tickets but increase charges for advertisements and increase canteen rates. We planned to show soccer, cricket and tennis matches whenever it looked profitable and feasible. We also discussed coming under an Adlabs or PVR umbrella which will offer better bargaining power with producers. Then we also decided that it will be a good idea to conduct a survey in the locality and find the right mix of regional, bollywood and hollywood movies.

Round: HR Interview
Experience: A lot of HR questions interspersed with small cases like consider a factory on one side of a river and a town on the opposite side. There is only one bridge to cross that river and there is always a traffic jam on the bridge in the mornings and evenings. Give a few ideas to improve the situation. He also gave me a guess estimate to guess the number of white boards in use in India. And then he asked me to give arguments for an average educational institute to shift from black boards to white boards.

Round: Other Interview
Experience: This interview had no case. In-fact it wasn't exactly an interview and we just talked about his time at Mckinsey, their work in India, role of BAs etc.

College Name: IIT BOMBAY