The Interview Guide

Behavioral Questions

Behavioral questions are used in virtually every interview — consulting, banking, tech, PE, corporate strategy. They ask you to describe specific past experiences to predict how you'll perform in the future.

The premise is simple: past behavior predicts future behavior. An interviewer asking "tell me about a time you led a team through a difficult situation" isn't looking for a hypothetical answer. They want a real story with real stakes, real actions you took, and a real outcome.

Behavioral questions typically start with phrases like "Tell me about a time…", "Describe a situation where…", or "Give me an example of…" McKinsey calls their version the Personal Experience Interview (PEI), same concept, but they'll drill one story for 20–30 minutes rather than collecting several shorter ones.

Most candidates use STAR — Situation, Task, Action, Result — to structure their answers. It works well when applied correctly. The most common mistake is spending too much time on Situation and not enough on Action.

• Personal impact. Did you actually drive the outcome, or were you a bystander in your own story? Interviewers are listening for "I" not "we."
• Judgment under pressure. When the situation was hard and you didn't have all the answers, how did you think through it? What tradeoffs did you make?
• Self-awareness. Can you assess your own performance honestly, including what went wrong? Generic success stories are less compelling than stories with real tension and reflection.
• Communication clarity. Is the story easy to follow? Do you get to the point? At consulting and banking firms especially, how you tell the story signals how you'll communicate with clients.
• Fit signals. Does the story reveal the traits the firm values? McKinsey looks for leadership through ambiguity. Bain looks for results-orientation and collaborative instinct. Tech firms often look for ownership and first-principles thinking.

Case Interviews

A case interview is a business problem-solving exercise conducted in real time with the interviewer. You're given a scenario — a company facing a problem — and asked to analyze it, ask questions, structure your thinking, and arrive at a recommendation.

Cases are used primarily in consulting (MBB, Big 4 strategy, boutiques) and increasingly in PE, IB, and corporate strategy roles. They're designed to simulate the work you'd actually do — taking ambiguous business problems, structuring them into solvable pieces, analyzing data, and communicating a clear recommendation.

Unlike behavioral questions, there is rarely a single "correct" answer. Interviewers are evaluating your process as much as your conclusion. A candidate who reaches the wrong answer with clear, structured thinking often scores higher than one who guesses the right answer and can't explain why.

• Structured thinking. Can you break a big, ambiguous problem into a clear, logical structure? Do your buckets make sense and cover the problem space?
• Hypothesis-driven approach. Top performers form an initial hypothesis early and update it as they learn more. Interviewers want to see you driving toward a view, not collecting data until an answer appears.
• Quantitative comfort. You don't need to be a mathematician, but you need to move through numbers quickly and accurately. Mental math errors under pressure are a signal interviewers notice.
• Communication. Are you thinking out loud in a way that's easy to follow? Do you pause to synthesize what you've found before moving on? Can you give a clean recommendation at the end?
• Business intuition. Do your conclusions make common sense? Does your recommendation account for real-world constraints? Technically correct analysis paired with a nonsensical recommendation is still a miss.
• Composure and coachability. When the interviewer redirects you or offers new information, do you adapt gracefully? Defensiveness or rigidity is a red flag.

This is the sequence most strong candidates follow. The exact steps vary by firm style (see the next section), but the underlying approach is consistent.

When you ask for 60 seconds to structure, this is what you're building — and what you say when you present it back.

Candidate-Led vs. Interviewer-Led Cases

Not all case interviews work the same way. The two main formats reward different skills, and candidates who've only practiced one often struggle with the other.

You drive the case. After the interviewer presents the problem, you decide what to analyze, what questions to ask, and in what order. You're expected to build the structure, request the data you need, and navigate the problem with minimal direction.

This format rewards proactive thinking and comfort with ambiguity. You won't be told if you're on the right track. You have to trust your structure and update as you learn more.

* BCG varies by office. Some BCG offices run interviewer-led formats. Confirm the style with your recruiter or recent interviewees before assuming candidate-led.

The interviewer guides you through the case with a series of targeted questions — "Let's look at the revenue side. What do you think is driving the decline?" You're responding to prompts rather than steering the analysis.

This format tests precision and directness. You're not expected to build the full structure upfront, but your answers to each prompt need to be crisp and well-reasoned. Candidates who're used to candidate-led cases sometimes feel like they're being "interrogated." That's normal. The format is just different, not harder.

Some firms use a written or digital case exercise as a screening tool before live interviews. You're given data — charts, tables, written materials — and asked to answer questions or prepare a short recommendation. BCG's Online Case is an interactive simulation used in some European offices (format and duration vary by cycle). Bain's written case is a document analysis exercise used in select offices (typically 30 minutes, but confirm with your recruiter).

The skills tested are the same as a live case, but the format is different. Speed, prioritization, and the ability to pull key insights from dense materials matter more in written formats than they do in a conversation.

* Format varies by office and recruiting cycle. Confirm directly with your recruiter before assuming a written case applies to your process.

Where to Practice

Reading about interviews only gets you so far. The gap between knowing the framework and performing it under pressure closes with practice.