Landing an offer without a background in business is difficult, but it’s not impossible. Here are a couple of success stories from readers who managed to land offers:
Success Story:
Thank you so much for all of your friendly advice in the videos! I came into the recruiting process with absolutely no background in business. After watching your videos, I felt much more confident about the process.
Thank you again for your generosity in making these videos available to students! I am so grateful to have received five offers – I could not have done this without you! I used your framework in every case interview and constantly reminded myself of the things you taught me!
Success Story:
I wanted to let you know that I received McKinsey offer as a non-MBA candidate. Thank you so much for all of your help throughout the process. There’s no way I would have been as confident as I was in the final round interview, if I had not used your Look Over My Shoulder® Program.
I specifically remember answering a question by saying, “My hypothesis is that this is a costs problem, if revenues are rising while profits are dropping, so I want to look at X, Y, and Z.
“That being said, because I don’t know the rate of the drop, this could still be a revenue problem, so I would also like to examine A, B, and C.” (Asking for the rate itself would have been more efficient, but it wasn’t an option in this context.)
This was the language that you recommended in Look Over My Shoulder®, and the interviewer cut me off and said, “perfect structure and excellent work on explaining your hypothesis.”
That was the best 200 some dollars that I have ever spent, and I HIGHLY recommend that candidates download the audio files and listen to them over and over. I loaded them in my car, and listened to them almost every day for a month before the interview, and they became second nature.
One thing that I realized after getting an offer – you don’t have to have a perfect performance to still pass. in fact, I would say that I did poorly in one of the cases, and made small math errors in each one.
Still, I think that my structure and ability to convince the interviewers that I was thinking in a problem-solving mindset was enough to overcome these mistakes.
If you could please add me to the mailing list of starting consultants, I would be very grateful.
2 thoughts on “Multiple Consulting Job Offers without any Business Background”
Hi Victor,
I am a post-doctoral fellow in Life Sciences from a target school about to start the application process for management consulting again this Autumn. I have had terrible experiences with rejections without interviews in the past and wonder if there is anything I am doing wrong. I completely restructured my resume and cover letter to fit a management consulting format but to no avail. I am still practising cases and refining my skill-set ‘just in case ‘ but I have to say… I am rather discouraged… Any advise would be greatly appreciated.
Best wishes,
PK
PK,
It’s hard to tell based on the limited info you provided. If you haven’t already, I would encourage you to score your own resume using the scoring calculator in my Consulting Resume Toolkit (note there is a fee)
https://www.caseinterview.com/consulting-resume-toolkit
I highly recommend is resource. I will take you about 10 hours to really grasp what the resume screener is specifically looking for, why they are looking for it, and how to rewrite your resume to bring out the best of what you have to offer. You’ll see a dozen or so post doc / PhD level CV’s and resumes, their scores, and my verbal commentary on why they were scored the way they were scored.
If you’ve already done that, and would like more personal feedback, we do offer a consulting resume critique service. However it is only available for purchase to those who have already used the toolkit.
Given the post doc and target school status, you are either emphasizing the wrong things in your resume or you have a profile that doesn’t qualify (e.g.., low test scores, undergrad university prestige level substantially lower than your post doc institution, GPA across entire academic history too low, no evidence of people skills in your resume). It’s hard to say with such limited information, but the reasons for an application getting rejected are finite. The toolkit can help you get more specific, actionable feedback.
Victor