RedSeer Consulting Associate Consultant Interview Questions and Answers

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: 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

Round: HR Interview
Experience: The first interviewer asked me some questions about myself, Mood Indigo and my experience at ITC. He then asked me to estimate the beer consumption in India and specified that he wants a number at the end and not just an approach. He also seemed interested in the assumptions I had to make along the way. The second interviewer asked me to analyze the profitability of an IT firm in India. After giving a few details he asked me to immediately tell him what I thought was the crux of the case and helped me arrive at the fact that using fixed inputs more is economically more feasible. This particular interviewer made no attempt to make it a &l feel-good one, he was very stern and curt.

College Name: IIT BOMBAY

Round: HR Interview
Experience: They short listed about 22 students. They had 2 rounds of interviews. I was not able to make to the second round. In the first round I had 2 interviews. In both interviews a case study was given and some HR questions were asked. In my first interview the interviewer gave me a case of a steel industry. It was like that my industry had 2 places from where I can procure my raw material and I had to decide which place is better. I did pretty well in this interview. HR questions included about my academic achievements, why not research, my experience as Mess secretary etc. You will always enjoy giving interview to a consultancy firm because this people make you very comfortable. Though it was my first interview but I was not nervous at all. In my second interview I screwed up my case. The case was about a company which is earning lots of profit and is now looking for new fronts to invest the money. I started talking about vertical integration and horizontal integration in the same field in which company was operating. But in the end interviewer told me that he expected me too look into different new ventures like real estate etc. Though I was not shortlisted further but I enjoyed a lot my first interview.

College Name: IIT BOMBAY

Round: Case Study Interview
Experience: Probably made some errors in numerical calculations, but the approach was very clear. Also I was asked some HS 101 stuff, like degree of control over pricing in perfect competition, monopoly, and duopoly situations.

Round: Case Study Interview
Experience: Now basically in the case books very few org. cases are discussed and I hadn’t come across a single one. So, I just tried to think really logically and gave him very high level answers like ( labour union issues, faith in senior mgmt, compare org structure with competition etc ) Theinterviewer was very supportive and kept probing for more possibilities. Finally I was exhausted and could offer him nothing more.

Round: HR Interview
Experience: It had been a very tiring day and this was to be my 7th interview. But the good part was that I had started enjoying the interviews by now.After the usual warm-up questions, I was asked to name something that I felt really
passionately about and the remaining 30 minutes were spent just probing this passion of mine so deep, that even I came out surprised that I had indeed thought so much to answer that issue. This interview proved to me that one should never underestimate the interviewer’s intelligence. These are very, very smart people and are very good
at cracking your thought process. I was made an offer after this interview, so the 4th one was more of an informal chat about past BAs their experiences.

General Tips: If you are one of the lucky ones short listed for more than 1 company, you must decide beforehand what your preferences are and tell the placement body so.
There is no reason to succumb to strong arm tactics from companies. Ideally you
should be in a position to make a decision after you have all the offers in hand. But
the placement body’s rules will have a major role to play in this.
Skill Tips: Each individual has his own take on this. Personally, I read most of the theory from the casebooks floating around on campus and came out with my own framework to solve a problem. Practicing case interviews with a friend helps a lot. But finding a good interviewer is usually tough. I requested a couple of friends and tried out 2-3 cases with each. Totally, I solved not more than 10 cases , which I think was optimal. Too little and you don’t have enough experience and too many will take the fun out of the interview
College Name: IIT BOMBAY
Funny Moments: In case study, the interviewer talked about even higher level issues like mission statement and vision
documents and that the organization was not able to THINK global etc. Came out of this interview assuming my rendezvous with McK was done.

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: 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 started off saying that the problem statement looks like it’s a Go/NoGo decision we have to help make, so first we should establish the exact objective against which we would measure our decision. Once the objective is clear, we would need to establish our current performance against the objective, what is the target level we wish to achieve on that particular objective and then evaluate if the new terminal would help us achieve that or not. But before that I would like to clarify about exactly what is meant by a terminal here.
JC: Heathrow is one of the busiest airports and already has 4 different passenger terminals, now they want to add a 5th. A terminal provides the usual services like Bays for Boarding & disembarking, Check-In, Security, Lounges & shopping areas etc.
Me: Great, do we also have to look at the financial and operational viability of the terminal or that is not a concern.
JC: for the purpose of discussion let’s ignore that, those would not be the constraints.
Me: Ok, so maybe we should the start looking at what the administrations core objective is for the new terminal. Why does it want to come up with a 5th terminal?
JC: Why don’t you tell me what those objectives could be?
Me: Well there could be many (started jotting down options in parallel as I spoke): 1) increase the #Passengers served per year, 2) Reduce Flight Congestion if any, 3) Reduce the Time spent by flights on the airport, 4) Increase the airports revenue sources. Am I missing any other?
JC: No I think you have mentioned the major ones, let’s briefly talk about each of these. What do you mean by the revenue sources?
Me: Then we had a brief discussion about revenues from shopping areas etc. Then we came to Flight congestion – primary metric there was time spent in air waiting for permission to land etc. Then we came to #Passengers served per year which is more of a demand metric and effectively dependent on the number of flights we can serve per day. We also discussed Time spent by flights on the airport and split that into further two types – flight landing and takeoff time and turnaround at the gates. At the end of this brief digression it emerged that if Time spent by Flights on airport can go down, #Flights can go up and so can #passengers, at the same time congestion can go down as well. Me: (summarizing) So is it fair to say that the objective of building the 5thterminal is to achieve a higher capacity at the airport and our problem definition is to evaluate that claim?
JC: Yes, if you wish to frame it so - effectively our problem definition is if the 5th terminal adds to the capacity of the System? Me: Good just give me a minute to put my thoughts in place as to how we can go about evaluating this?
JC: Sure..
Me: Ok as I mentioned, what we need to decide what is the exact metric used for measuring Capacity? Then what is the current value of airport for that metric? Then what impact would the new terminal on the level of the metric? That should lead us to an answer.
JC: Ok, so what do you want to know
Me: How do airports measure their capacity?
JC: Two commonly used metrics are ATM – Air Traffic Movements, and MPPA – Million Passengers Per Annum. For our discussion lets focus on ATM.
Me: So just to clarify ATM refers to a single air traffic movement, therefore the turnaround of one flight i.e. landing and take off would count as one or two ATMs?
JC: Two Me: Ok, so do we know what is the current ATM?
JC: How would you find that out?
Me: well the annual ATM would be average Flights per day * 365 * 2 JC: Right lets keep the analysis to per day Me: Ok so what’s the current #daily flights?
JC: Am not sure why that is relevant here for answering our question but lets say 100.
Me: No, this would help us by how much will the Terminal increase the capacity. Ok so how many Bays would there be in the new terminal?
JC: 50
Me: And do we know on average one flight spends how much time at a Bay?
JC: 60 minutes
Me: Is that number in line with international standards or is there scope to impact that by way of terminal design or operations?
JC: No that’s about the best you can get ☺
Me: Fair is the distribution of traffic the same through out the day, or in other words is the demand pattern similar through out the day or is it varying with time? JC: Let’s assume that a bay is utilized effectively only for 12 hours in a day. Me: Ok so that means a given bay has the capacity of 2 ATMs per hour or 50 bays together would add 50 * 2 *12 or 1200 ATMs
JC: So should we add Terminal 5?
Me: Well yes from our analysis so far it does appear that adding the 5 Terminal could add upto 1200 ATMs per day and therefore one should go ahead.
JC: But what was our problem definition?
Me: (a little flustered) will the new terminal add to the capacity of the airport?
JC: yes of the entire system. So will it?
Me: (suddenly a light bulb strikes ☺, smiling) Ok I possibly get the drift of what you are trying to hint at, while the terminal has the potential to add so many ATMs, it is not necessary that the capacity of the entire system will be incremented by that number.
JC: Correct, and why that may be so? Me: Because the bottleneck in the system may be some where else.
JC: Right and so what defined a bottleneck Me: In any system the resource which has the lowest capacity and for which the implied demand is higher than its capacity constitutes a bottleneck, and also limits the throughput of the entire system.
JC: So what else could be a bottleneck in the system? Me: Runway JC: Ok and how can we find that out?
Me: We need to evaluate the utilization of the runway. How long does it typically take for a successive takeoff or landing on a given runway?
JC: How can we find that out?
Me: A mathematical way to do that would be to find the typical distance an aircraft travels while landing/takeoff and at what speed to find the time for which it uses the runway, another could be that there would be some minimum time set by the ATC/guidelines as the minimum inter flight time that would limit the number of planes that can use a runway.
JC: Right, let’s leave the mathematical way, what do you think the other number is?
Me: I don’t know for sure, but from my observation the time in India is something like 5-6 minutes between flight landings/takeoffs
JC: Ok those might be t he numbers in India, but Heathrow is a very busy airport and there the minimum time is 90 seconds.
Me: (quickly doing the numbers) 90 seconds implies 1 ATM every 1.5 minutes or a max of 40 ATMs per hour or a max of 40*24 = 960 ATMs per day per runway.
JC: Correct, so assuming there are 2 runways already what would now be the impact of adding the terminal 5 on the capacity of the system?
Me: Let’s assume that the current capacity of the terminals is X, then the current capacity of the system is min(960*2, X), and after the new terminal comes online the capacity of the system would become min(960*2, X + 1200). (I actually clearly wrote down the mathematical form) So depending on the value of X we will know how much the capacity of the system can improve by, and our decision should be driven by if that new number is enough to achieve our goal or not? For any positive value of X > 720 it seems we will only be able to go up to a max 1920 ATMs per day, without adding a new runway or decreasing inter ATM time for runway usage.
JC: Good I think we are done with the case. Do you have any quick questions for me?
Me: Sure why don’t you tell me a bit about the nature of work you have been doing and the kind of work BTO London does?
Tips: Listen carefully, especially the case question/problem framing Maintain a pleasant disposition, Do Smile Be ready to admit your mistakes and over sights Speak slowly (Especially when dealing with international interviewers) Write down stuff in your pad - write legibly Steps should be Think, Write, Read out & Discuss. Do revise the core concepts – just helps you with the right terminology in he interviews. On the interview day take each interview on by one – Never think about any that you have already given, and nor about any to come.

Round: Case Study Interview
Experience: NFK: McKinsey has done some work in innovation in the BPO and outsourced project management space..
...yes the Process 360 & Project 360 initiatives (brought in the fact that I had gone through the article. This also happens to be Noshir’s research)...
NFK: right.. they are operational excellence frameworks we have come up with to assess the best practices in the BPO and outsourced application domains.. so the question is if you were to develop a similar framework for excellence in the product development or product development outsourcing space what metrics do you think can be used to measure those?
Sure, may I just have a minute to think this over..
NFK: Ok..
(wrote down a few bullet points and then started).. We can think of different parameters/indicators at different levels – Individual/Company/Market/Users. The idea is to measure excellence in product development by not just focusing on the inputs, and the processes, but also by outputs both direct market facing and indirect outputs.We had a 1 minute discussion about each and at the end NFK seemed reasonably satisfied with the suggestions. NFK: Great, so we all know India has been known for outsourcing in the services and process space, what do you think ails the Product development? In particular I would say some companies like Adobe, Intel, TI and MS (only to a very limited extent though) have been successful at doing product development out of India, but not many others. What do these companies do differently? What do you think have been the critical success factors for them? (took a little time to ponder over things and really tried to dig into my experiences at Adobe an TI & what I thought was salient about the senior management there – therefore the lesson – do not ignore the Sr. Management talks & Company vision and strategy meetings that you used to have back in offices ☺) Well I think two overarching factors in the success of companies like Adobe and TI have been Vision of the founder & Execution, and I would want to break down Execution further into 1) Hiring & focus on employee growth, 2) Process & Discipline, 3) Sr. Management Commitment & push back, 4) Clear & continuous communication with the International parent. It might be a coincidence but in the case of both Adobe and TI, their India offices have been led by very strong and committed senior leadership teams who have grown from within the parent companies’ home operations. Therefore, one they knew what were the parent’s best practices, and two they had the ambition to set up something in India and make it succeed. Then once they had the go ahead they focused single mindedly on the execution.... NFK: What do you think are the key strategic challenges for a company like Infosys going forward? (again after a minute of pause and jotting down stuff) I think the three key challenges would be 1) How to remain competitive now that they are in the 4B+ league and starting to compete with the big league of IBMs, Accentures, EDS etc, not just in outsourcing but end to end IT management 2) How to manage such a huge work force and manage their skills 3) How to remain relevant in the face of changing business models specially the move to hosted & cloud computing and software as a service models. NFK: Let’s talk more about the 3rd one! (He immediately latched on to the cloud computing thing.. so this is an example of a hot word for a particular interviewer) We then had a lively discussion on what cloud computing and Software as a service and software on demand is etc., and what impact can it have for IT companies and their business models. NFK: Good. Any questions that you may have for us I asked on what the role definition of BTO was and how was it different from the high-tech practice of McKinsey?
Tips: If possible do read a bit about the interviewer’s background. You wouldn’t get to know your exact interviewers till shortly before the interview so you obviously can’t read about all, but try to read up about the senior people as well as people who will be from similar backgrounds as yourself. Excellent way to do that is to get on to company sites and browse for interview panelists profiles. In the case of McKinsey, try to get to McKinsey Quarterly, and then search for the interviewer and articles written by the person Be prepared to get the broad discussion cases even in the first round. Have a perspective on the industry of your choice and or background – again a good way to do that is to browse articles and industry reports. If you are able to go through even one consulting firms site reasonably you should be in good shape. Try to change the plane of your answers depending on the interviewers interests – when to give thr 50,000 Ft view and when to give the 100 ft view. In hind sight I think the corporate strategy course had a lot of articles about outsourcing and different models of comp advantage for multinational organizations and how to leverage offices in different geographies. Though I myself didn’t recall much of that article but then it just shows you never know which reading might come in handy where ☺Have questions that you want to ask ready

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