Deloitte Functional Consultant Interview Questions and Answers for Freshers

Interview preparation tips for other job seekers - You need to be honest and engage the interviewer with your optimism.

Interview preparation tips for other job seekers - Interviews with CG will be as-usual if we compare with other consulting organisation.

Interview preparation tips for other job seekers - Prepare well and use your implementation knowledge to explain in easy way.

Interview preparation tips for other job seekers - Please go through with all the current topics in trend related to your field prior to go for interview.

Interview preparation tips for other job seekers - It was a great experience.

General Tips: Just be yourself. They mostly see in a candidate behavioural instincts required for consulting. How much pressure and travel you can do ?
Skills: Communication, Body Language, Problem Solving, Leadership, Decision Making Skills
Duration: >3 Months

Round: Case Study Interview
Experience: The case write up was well written and quite comprehensive so he asked me start with my gut feeling of what was going wrong with the hospital chain. As all of the information was already given to me in the case, I did following things before moving into the interview room: Broke the case analysis in four standard parts: Defined the Problem: A hospital chain which provides treatment to the lower end diseases (non lifestyle diseases such as diabetes, heart related diseases etc.) is experiencing a decline in sales/revenues over the period of last four years. (All the information was given in the write up). Structure: The structure I applied was: Sales are defined: ∑ PI * Qi where Q = number of patients*average patient days and price was price charged per patient. And I stand for different diseases which the hospital serves. I told him that we would we analysing these three components for the client, the completion and the customer preferences. Before proceeding to using the structure, I asked him whether the proposed structure covered everything or there was any critical piece which he thought might be important for the discussion but I missed out, He appreciated my structure and complimented me for coming with such a nice structure☺. Then, he told me that, before I move on to apply the structure, what are the different ways we can break up the revenue so I told him the following ways:
1. By diseases the client serves.
2. By types of customers: demographic, psychological, economic parameters based segmentation.
3. By referral and non-referral patients. (this point came out after he directed me towards this but once I mentioned this he seemed quite happy ☺).
Then we moved on to third part, issue analysis and based on whatever notes I had made from the case write-up, We came to the conclusion that
1. The healthcare market was booming in the life style related diseases which generates higher revenues. The other two competitors had already moved to treating theses diseases.
2. The client was focusing only on the local customers which were quite price sensitive while there was a huge opportunity in the global and medical tourism market where the competitors had already moved in.
3. Insurance companies were playing a significant role in the decision making process of the patients and the client lacked strong partnership with the top firms in this market. All this information was given in the case and I did a good thing of making notes of all these points which came very handy during our discussion.
Finally I recommended the client to:
1. Enter into the life style disease treatment market.
2. Focus on global brand building and attracting pan India and foreign customers.
3. Get into strategic partnership with insurance companies to attract more new and high potential customers.
Tips: Do prepare for such case write up based interviews. As a group, we made cases from our work experiences which actually helped a lot in knowing industries well.

Skills: Case Solving Ability, Case Analysis
College Name: Indian School Of Business (ISB)

Round: Case Study Interview
Experience: I asked a couple of clarifying questions: Does P&G manufacture/market shaving products? Answer: No. Is the integration complete (I got a vague response for this)? Are we defining a strategy for short term or long term? Answer: Both I then classified 3 areas of cost reduction: Sourcing, Manufacturing & Distribution. I also mentioned that we need to take 2 perspectives on each cost reduction measure: Operations View: Operationally how feasible is achieving cost reduction and a Strategic View: What are the strategic implications of the cost cutting measure Once I got affirmation of my structure I proceeded to identify the various broad level levers we could adopt. Sourcing: Rationalize the supplier portfolio, renegotiate contracts and allocate more to those who provide better rates Manufacturing; Consolidate manufacturing if P&G plants can produce Gillette goods. It turned out that only packaging could be consolidated as Gillette goods need specialized machinery that P&G does not have. Also P&G due to its larger size can have economies of scale in maintenance Distribution: I was asked to get deep into details regarding a couple of items and this is where I stumbled a bit. I believe the normal case preparation only lets you get a 30,000 foot overview of the situation. Since EnY also does implementation one must depart from a strategic view and address how these measures can be actually implemented. After all this, I ended the case by suggesting the use of a matrix to plot all measures. The X-axis would be amount of cost reduction that can be achieved and Y-axis would be ease of implementation.
Tips: Firms like EnY, Deloitte hire you as consultants for a specific vertical so you need to demonstrate fit in the resume, EoI and interview. It may be good to inquire about specific projects/expertise they have in the vertical of your choice and coming up with examples to demonstrate how your experience will be helpful.

Round: Case Study Interview
Experience: 1) I said we can leverage our domain expertise to recommend innovative business models to telecom companies that involve triple-play, quadruple-play of services. We can see which model provides greatest benefits and suggest that our client use that. Our implementation focus can also help us
2) For this question, I took the conservative approach and was not very creative. I said that the 2 key areas are: driving innovation and controlling attrition.

Tips: When the interview is with people at the partner level, they become more like conversations. In my experience, in such cases the interviewer is looking for cut and dry responses and not the traditional rehearsed answers. Also, they look for a practical approach to problem solving and a passion for consulting.

Skills: Case Solving Ability, Case Analysis
College Name: Indian School Of Business (ISB)