Transcription – Part I & II:

This time we’ve partnered with Graduate Admission Council to bring you a special three part series on MBA’s in the consulting industry. You’ll hear from a panel of recruiters from three top consulting companies. Today we bring you parts 1 and 2. The first show focuses on employment opportunities in consulting for MBA’s including some of the skills and knowledge that recruiters will be looking for. The second elaborates on the interview process. Part 3 which is available for download on our website covers the employment outlook for the industry. Again, if you are interested in hearing more and want to listen to part three of this special series visit our website mbapodcaster.com.

Hi everyone and welcome to a series of podcasts called the MBA in Consulting about you’ll never guess it, working in the consulting industry for people who either have MBA’s already or are thinking of getting one. And is brought to by the Graduate Admission Council I’m Mark Bisnow of Bisnow on Business in Washington and we are in fact in Washington today, to be precise the suberb of McClain where the council’s offices are located. But the most important thing is we’ve got in our midst three of the great experts on the consulting industry because they represent three of the most illustrious names in consulting Booz Allen Hamilton, Watson Wyatt and Deloitte Consulting. We’ve got three podcasts on this subject and in the first one we’re going to address what kind of jobs are available out there and how to get the skills and credentials to prepare for them. The second podcast will be about how to interview with consulting firms if you are lucky enough if they invite you to come interview and the last podcast in this series is about the actual outlook for jobs in the consulting industry. So three podcasts, you’re listening to the first one in the series, what the jobs are and how to get them. Just so we know the people here on the panel and their companies a little better and to use that as an illustration of what exactly it is that people do in consulting let me introduce the panelists one by one, ask them to tell a little bit about their companies and what people do there.

Let’s start with Rich Schneider who is a partner at Deloitte Consulting and in fact heads their MBA campus recruiting program. Well good afternoon Rich and thanks for joining us. Tell us what is Deloitte Consulting and what do people do there? “Thanks Mark, Deloitte Consulting is a very large multi-national consulting company that has a very broad service footprint. We like to think of ourselves as taking care of client needs from the think, commit, and do stand point. In other words we help them develop approaches to tough business problems, we help them get their organizations actually geared up and aligned to go do stuff. And then we help them implement the solutions that we work with them to develop. So we think of our service footprint as very broad taking into account everything from strategy to human capital and organizational issues right the way to other executional things such as technology.” How many people are you? And what would be an example, I know there could be a million examples of you know, what someone might do, what kind of companies they might go to consult with and what they would advise them on. But let’s start with how many people are you? “Well here in the states, I’ll focus on that just for now, we probably have about 3-4,000 people. As I said we’re a large organization. A typical assignment and one that you probably may have heard of, is the recent or acquisition of sharing plow and buyer we’re working with sharing” That’s in the pharmaceutical industry, “That’s in the pharmaceutical industry we’re working with sharing plow and buyer to basically bring these organizations together into a new organization so that one day one there are you know mis-shipments, no bills not sent, no employees not paid but basically helping them achieve a successful post merger integration.”

Alright our next panelist, Peter Sullivan is US director of people services at Booz Allen Hamilton and oversees MBA recruiting for that firm. “That’s right Mark, thanks very much. Right, I’m Peter Sullivan and I’ve been with the firm for about nine years. The first seven as a consultant, and most recently as a principal in our energy group based down in Dallas and the last couple of years I’ve director of people services. Booz Allen is not dissimilar in a lot of ways from Deloitte, we run into our fine competitors both on campus and in the market place. We have, we are large firm as well. We have about 18,000 employees right now and we do strategy consulting for fortune 500 firms. And we’re very active as well in consulting in the public sector. We’ve done work for about 80% of the fortune 500, which would be 400 companies for those of you scoring at home. And strategic work basically, companies come to us when they have an issue, even if they are not exactly sure what that issue is and we help them define it and work with the client to come to a set of recommendations. Very analytical based, we are. And we’ll get more into that in terms of what we’re looking for in terms of MBA students.” As I understand Booz Allen I mean you’re up there with the big three I shouldn’t give free publicity if people aren’t with us but maybe they are listening Boston Consulting and McKenzie, is that right? “Yeah, you know I would also rope Bain into the conversation as well as really the four big strategy firms but yeah those are the folks that are our prime competitors.”

Richard Wallen is our third panelist and like Booz Allen, Watson Wyatt Worldwide is actually headquartered, we are particular about, not that we don’t love Deloitte Consulting but Booz Allen and Watson Wyatt are actually based here in Washington. We’re delighted to have you here Richard. “Thank you.” And WWW we used to think that stood for something on the web but it’s in fact Watson Wyatt Worldwide. So what’s it do? “We are primarily an actuarial firm so we help other companies with the present value of future costs but because actuarial work is primarily pensions and other defined contribution benefits the company is perceived to be a HR consulting firm. So we help companies with other benefits, needs, compensation, communications, organizational design, and so forth.” And I should of said and I guess would probably stand to reason like these other guys, you direct MBA consulting for Watson Wyatt Worldwide and maybe to kind of seagway into the conversation we’re talking to Richard Wallen of Watson Wyatt, how many MBA’s do you look for a year? Are you peopled by MBA’s over there at Watson Wyatt? How many do you go after? “We go after exactly what we need. We actually grow as many in house as we hire externally. So there are a number of consultants who are currently pursuing their MBA studies which is something that our tuition reimbursement pays for.”

To get back on the track of what this podcast is all about. What skills and credentials are useful if you want to grow up and be a consultant? Let’s suppose you know you’re getting a MBA right now and so you’re every semester you’re having to kind of figure out what courses to take and what you want your focus to be at the end of the rainbow. What are the skills and knowledge? Let me stick with Richard, that you would recommend getting as business students so you’re going to be in great standing if you apply to one of your famous consulting firms at the end of business school? “Our firm is slightly different than my two colleagues sitting at this table today. So more important for us is the type of experience you had prior to business school, given that business school education is very similar across the board. So we’re looking for really industry specific or practice specific experience. So if you’ve worked in human resources or in compensation or in communication that we’re really looking for now you having the graduate business credentials as well as industry experience.”

And let me to ask Peter Sullivan and Rich Schneider to jump in here; are you in fact, different from his company which he says looks a little more at what practical work experience you’ve had or do you go after some freshly minted MBAs? And if so, you know, what do you advise them to do to put their best foot forward when they talk to you? “Experience is important, it really is.” And this is Peter Sullivan talking, “Very important, but there are lots of people at business school who are in the business of career changing. I think to a large degree if I were a new business school student I would be in the business of filling gaps on my resume. If I have a relatively soft resume where I was perhaps in communications or human resources I would look to get grounded in finance and marketing. If I am heavy in finance then I would look to fill another gap maybe in marketing or organizational behavior it’s about filling those blind spots to a degree and when in doubt over rotate on quantitative courses.”

“You know this is Rich Schneider speaking, I would agree with Peter, we actually look at two things. One is we very much look for prior experience and we believe that the prior experience really does matter. We don’t hire people to fill a specific need in our organization based on their experience. In other words we typically would not hire someone who worked in the financial services industry prior to going back to business school, just to put them into the financial services practice. What we expect them to do is use their prior experience and success and demonstrated advancement to be able to be affective in other client or organizations and to bring that experience to bear across multiple industries. If they decide that they want to go back into financial services over the long term in their career that’s fine. But we’re looking for talent as compared with specific skills and we really do believe the business school opportunity as Peter said, gives you the chance to kind of round some of the edges that you have had and fill some of the gaps that if you’ve had a heavy operating background that we’ve managed lots of people, b school gives you a chance to pick up marketing and b skills but it’s an opportunity to develop a lot of talent and capability.”

When you guys talk about the business school experience do you distinguish between full-time, part-time and executive MBA programs? “Typically we are dealing with the full-time program but I would say in the last couple of years we’ve been increasingly looking at programs that are not full-time just because of the type of people they attract and the kind of skills we find there.”

Do you think less or more of one or the other? “This is Peter Sullivan, I don’t, in fact if forced to choose, I kind of think more of the person who is able to hold down a job and get a MBA at the same time. I had the luxury of going to school full-time and a lot of folks don’t and it’s impressive to maintain a job, maintain a series of increasing responsibilities at that job and do well in school. But the trick with for example evening program is they are little tougher to get to. You can’t just as easily show up on campus and have them flock to you, they have other obligations. So it’s logistical is the difficulty not one of not value in that experience.”

And Richard Wallen, how much weight do you put on a school’s reputation? “A great deal of weight but that weight is balanced based on our need, our location, so there might be a small school in you know Portland, Oregon that has much more meaning toward a Portland office than it does on the national scale and we’re not going to undermine the value of that school’s reputation because it’s more local than it is national. Based on what Peter just said though, I would add that especially for those students out there who are now just thinking of going to business school that they might stand to benefit investigating whether or not a company really values a MBA versus the experience. For us we do rely more on experience than just the MBA degree and as a result we have many of our associates who are currently now pursuing their MBA because the value of it would be greater based on the experience they have gotten from us.”

Let me throw a question back to the others. Other things being equal when you get applications for new people, people kind of starting out their consulting career, how valuable is it for a person to have a MBA versus not having a MBA as I say other things being equal let’s assume they have the same work experience in their background do you look at someone with a MBA and say ah this person sort of starts out. I mean we’ll examine the resume and see if there are some other things going on here but this person sort of starts out with an advantage? “This is Rich Schneider speaking, in our environment we have a relatively structured entry path for MBA’s, we start them off as senior consultants in our organization even though they have had many many years of prior experience and they move into consulting and learn how to be a good consultant based on that. And so the MBA is an important mark in our view as kind of the skill set that you bring in the way to begin your career in our organization. That’s not to say that we don’t hire a lot of people with different backgrounds or who have been out in the work environment for several years since they’ve got their MBA but we typically expect people if they are going to be a full-time consulting staff to have a MBA degree.”

Do you have sort of a separate bucket for the MBA’s who come to you kind of like I guess if you go to WestPoint or something, you get to start out as a second lieutenant? I mean Peter, how do you guys at Booz Allen address MBA’s who come to you versus other people? “Yeah we on a strategy consulting side we very much rely on MBAs as our prime channel of entry into the firm.” Really? “Absolutely, yes.” Meaning you pretty much would prefer to just go with MBA’s? “Yeah in some ways, in some ways. Now we go off and bring in experience hires as well we’re growing and we can’t rely on the MBA channel to feed all of our needs for growth. We do hire some undergrads as well but MBA’s are our prime source of new associates for strategy consulting business.”

“And Mark I would say that most consulting firms have entry level positions for undergrads where they will come and work in an environment like Booz or Deloitte or some of the other firms that you mentioned for two or three or four or five years and then go back to school. So that is our true entry position at the most base level but our MBA expectations are what we expect our people to have.”

How many applicants are you guys getting a year? And how many do you accept? And how many of those are MBA’s? “We’re hiring 100’s if not 1,000’s of people, “That’s at Deloitte Consulting, “At Deloitte Consulting we’re in any given year we’re hiring 1,000’s of people. Consulting is a profession which has a lot of turn over. A lot of people go into consulting without the expectation that they are going to be in consulting their whole career.”

How many people do you hear from? I mean what is the ratio of the number of people you hear from versus those you offer jobs to? “I would say probably 10 to 1.” And how many MBA’s are in that mix? “Most of them are MBA’s either as direct applicants or as experienced hires who’ve been out in the workforce but have a MBA.” And Peter and Richard, in terms of how many applicants you get and how many you accept. “I’d say it’s even higher closer to 20 to 1.” Wow. “Yeah, I mean the people we interview to the ones we hire is about 10 to 1.” “That’s really what I meant.” “Okay, yeah okay. ”Keep that layer on applicants on that it’s probably 100 to 1” Yeah wow. But you people listening out there you stick with it anyways even though your chances may be you know, a little challenging, it’s worth it right you guys? You get these jobs it’s amazing. Alright we’ve got some more podcasts in this series coming up but we want to thank Rich Schneider of Deloitte Consulting, Peter Sullivan who’s the US Director of People Services of Booz Allen Hamilton, Richard Wallen who directs MBA recruiting for Watson Wyatt Worldwide. I’m Mark Bisnel of Bisnel on Business for the Graduate Management Admissions Council, thanks for listening and come back for the next couple podcasts on this subject.

Stay with us, coming up is part 2 of this special three part series brought to you by MBA Podcaster and GMAC. In part 2, Mark Bisnel will be leading a discussion about the interview process at consulting companies.

Hi everyone, we are continuing in our series of podcasts called the MBA in Consulting about working in the consulting industry brought to you by the Graduate Management Admissions Council which administers the GMAC. I’m Mark Bisnel of Bisnel on Business in Washington D.C. and we’ve got with us again three of the great firms of the consulting industry represented in three great people; Rich Schneider of Deloitte Consulting, Peter Sullivan of Booz Allen Hamiliton and Richard Wallen of Watson Wyatt Worldwide. If you listened to the first podcast you know that there we talked about what the jobs are and how to get them and now we want to drill down a little more and talk about the famous interview process at these great companies. I’d like by way of both introduction to the panelists and illustration of the consulting jobs that are out there to go through the panel one by one and ask them to tell us about their companies and give us an example of what someone might actually do as a consultant were they lucky enough to work there.

Richard Wallen of Watson Wyatt Worldwide; good afternoon Richard. “Watson Wyatt is a mid sized firm with about 6,000 associates globally; we have offices in all of the major American cities and most of the major metropolitan cities in the world. We are primarily an acturial firm and we are looking for people with HR type experience and compensation, communication, organizational design and a day in the life because we are so well represented by our locations does not involve much traveling to the dismay of many people who join consulting for wracking up miles and points. We work locally with our customers and meet with them face to face, either in their offices or ours. And we do our best to listen to their needs and you know help them reach solutions.” Well their friends are glad that they are not out there wracking up their miles and they can you know kind of stay home.

Peter Sullivan of Booz Allen Hamilton, tell us what Booz does and what an example would be of an actual job that someone might have there. “Thanks Mark. Booz Allen Hamilton is an 18,000 person strong global consulting. We have a large strategy business where we consult with fortune 500 firms as well as a large public sector business where we help most western governments transform themselves. Maybe I will pick up what an associate does from a life style of a project stand point. Most of our projects are on the order of couple of months to maybe eight months so let’s assume one is about three or four months. In the initial piece of the project we will be meeting with the client to understand and agree to the issues. Clearly we’ve been hired for some problem that’s going on or some opportunity that hasn’t been exploited and so what we will come up with alongside the client is a set of what the issues are and some underlying hypothesis on what the answers to those issues might be. We then are in the business of proving or disproving those hypothesis and we ask our associates, our new MBA hires to own one or perhaps two of those issues, they would be in charge of working with the client to get the data, run the analyst, frame that analyst, come up with scenarios and recommendations and eventually propose solutions to the client. And then we will help the client begin to operationalize those recommendations.”

Rich Schneider of Deloitte Consulting, what’s the company do and what’s an example of somebody there? “Thanks Mark. Deloitte Consulting is a very large multi-national general management and technology consulting firm we’re roughly the same size as Booz Allen is globally and work for many of the same clients, the large fortune 500 type companies on typically very large and complex problems that they may have. I think Peter did a great job in terms of describing what typical project might look like, our projects are very similar in the sense that they’re anywhere from four to eight months long, we’ll typically have a project team of anywhere from six to twenty individuals working on those projects. I would just suggest a couple of things to add to what Peter said. One is in our environment quite typically our project teams are relatively non-hierarchal, that is to say that we’ll have partners and senior managers very active involved in the project but we tend not to stand on rank and ceremony. We expect people on the project team to bring their skill set and to actively contribution without regard to rank or experience level in the firm. Obviously people have different levels of responsibility and so forth but we’ very much see the project team as kind of a maneuvering unit in the military sense where we’re working very closely together. I would say another dimension that may be somewhat unique to our practice is that we work very much onsite. We really believe to be effective in consulting you have to be at the client’s site working with the client and teaming with the client to get things done. And in addition to this sort of significant amount of analytics and problem solving that Peter mentioned, we really call upon our consultants to work with our clients to actually begin to get implementation underway and to get things done, working as a client team basically so that’s one of the reason’s we’re onsite so much.”

Well your descriptions have gotten everybody let’s assume salivating over the idea of working in the consulting industry. Let me go back to Richard Wallen of Watson Wyatt Worldwide to ask about the actual interview process. I think we established in the previous podcast that you’re getting gobs of applications and you take relatively few of the people who apply, you like people with previous work experience, you like people with MBAs and best of all maybe somebody combines them. So what’s the interview process like? Suppose somebody gets that fateful call that says ‘guess what you’re invited to an interview.’ What’s that mean? “Well before that I’ll say there are two avenues primarily that we go after MBAs and it’s either directly off of campus with the recruiting or just experienced hires who coincidentally also have a MBA. Both avenues start with job posting. We post all of our jobs on our website and that feeds various websites like monster and career builders and so forth. Even our jobs on campus are posted on the campuses website along with ours and we ask all applicants for purposes of tracking them to apply online. After reviewing someone’s resume basically and so it’s important that all MBAs consider how they put their resume together to best not sell what they’ve done but sell what they’re capable of doing because that’s what we’re looking for. We have a need and we’re looking for someone to fill that need. So hopefully you’ve sold yourself effectively on paper because often times that is the first introduction of yourself to us when we’re reviewing people who’ve applied we’ll conduct phone screens or on site interviews. Invite people back to our offices for face-to-face interviews. During which time we are not only assessing capability to the job but also your fit on our team and we’re hoping that you as a perspective you know associate in our firm is also sizing us up to see if the type of work that we do or how we approach our work or the environment of our work is what you want to do as well. So that’s how we approach it.”

Now Peter Sullivan of Booz Allen he talks about sizing you up psychologically do you do that and if so how the heck do you do that? “It’s tough, I wish it was a science but it’s an art. At Booz Allen for strategy consultants we use the case interviewing methodology what that means for part of the interview and the interview generally lasts about 45 minutes. For about 20 of those minutes we will present you with a business problem and ask you to tell us how you would go about analyzing it. Once you’ve provided a frame work we will work with you over the next kind of 15 minutes or so, in a discussions to actually utilize your frame work and analyze the business problem at hand. That represents an important part of the interview for us. It’s going to help us get to your communication skills, how organized you are, your thought leadership, how creative a thinker you really are and I think the case interview methodology is pretty well understood once folks get to MBA school. In fact, it’s a bit of an urban recruiting legend I would argue such that I think that people over practice on it and to Richard’s point, people over practice their case interviews to the detriment of the fit for behavior portion of the interview. Which for us and I know for my colleagues it’s just hugely important. We need to understand in this 45 minute interview of which you will get up to four. Whether you can do the work, whether we can put you in front of a client and whether we want to work with you. All three of those things are hugely important and the case really only gets to the first one, can you do the work? We really want people that have polish and presence and communication skills that can build a relationship with a client. And like Deloitte we travel, we are onsite with our client generally four days a week. And if that job is outside your city that means travel that means dinners and lunches and we want to have dinner and lunches with people that we want to have dinners and lunches with. So that’s very very important that you let your personality show, that you engage, that you try to relax although I know it’s easy for me to say that, and just let you personality to come through so that we can see that you’re someone that we want to work with.” When you say over practice, you mean people come in kind of wooden or formulaic and it’s just you know, not natural? “Some of that and some times they just don’t allocate their time properly, they allocate their practice time to the case as opposed to the behavioral section and answering more general type questions around what’s deep inside them and why they want or like consulting.”

Now Rich Schneider of Deloitte Consulting, you seem to be nodding in agreement? “Yeah, I would say that I would like to build on both Peter’s and Richard’s points. You can pretty quickly tell if someone is rehearsed in the interview situation, they almost have answers that go past the questions that you ask them because they think that you’re going to ask them a certain question. We absolutely believe that the interview is an important part of the overall recruitment process but frankly we view the interview as almost the culmination of how it is we’ve spent two or three or four months getting to know you. So typically we’re on campus for quite a few months before the actual interview happens and we will have multiple events where we, some are quite social in nature some, are quite content rich where we’re talking about business issues but those are great opportunities for students to come and get to know us and understand the kind of work we do. The kind of people we are the kind of personality and culture that we have. By the time that we get to the interview we ought to know you very well and frankly we on most of the campuses select the people from out of the pool has applied that we want to interview. And frankly a lot of the people that we select those decisions are based on how well do we know this person and how good of a fit we feel they will be. And on the interview itself we use the case method as well and multiple interviews that’s the almost the culminating almost final test in terms of how we see the interview process.”

Do you have some off-hand dos and don’ts for that pre-interview campus conversation phase? My view is that you got to be yourself, I mean you first of all have to demonstrate that you’re interested in consulting, that’s it’s something that you see is a potential, as a real potential career for you. I think that you have to see the candidate demonstrate some interest in our firm. I think most consulting firms do generally very similar work. I think most people who are on MBA campuses are smart enough to be consultants the issue is do we really get the same sense of how the student and we operate, the kind of capabilities we have, the kind of team person that this person would be. And so I would just say the most important thing to be is to be pretty direct and unvarnished. There are firms that you’re going to be good fit for, there are going to be firms where you’re probably not going to be a good fit, be honest about that and don’t try to go into some place just because you think it will build your resume.”

“I would add to that,” this is Richard Wallen of Watson Wyatt, “Students need to be prepared always whether it’s a campus event or an informal interview but know something about our company and it’s amazing how many students approach you with very basic questions that indicate that they have not the slightest understanding of what your company is and why you’re on campus and that’s almost an immediate turn off to know.”

“I absolutely agree.”

Peter Sullivan you mentioned that up to four people I think you said might do a 45 minute interview with someone who is finally called out. Who are those people? “In the first round for us which consists of two interviews it would be Senior Consultant or Principal, basically people who have been with the firm between four and six years. The final round will be done if not exclusively by partners, primarily by partners and those are folks who have been with the firm beyond six probably eight, ten years or so.” Now, now that we know exactly how to ace the interview process, we can go on in a moment to our next podcast that you guys should all listen to out there in podcast land which is going to be about what’s the employment outlook look like for the consulting industry? We are delighted to have shared this time with Rich Schneider who leads Deloitte Consulting’s MBA Campus recruiting program, Peter Sullivan Director of People Services at Booz Allen Hamilton who also oversees MBA recruiting for the firm, Richard Wallen who directs MBA recruiting, what are the chances that three people basically doing the same thing are in the same room, he’s with, Richard Wallen is with Watson Wyatt Worldwide here in Washington D.C. I’m Mark Bisnel of Bisnel on Business, again speaking for GMAC thank you so much for listening and you’re not done, you got to listen to the next podcast too.

If you want to listen to MBA Podcaster on the go but don’t have an ipod well MBA Podcaster is giving away an Ipod nano to one lucky listener. Simply register to win at mbapodcaster.com.

We hope you’ve enjoyed parts one and two of this special three part series brought to you by MBA Podcaster and the Graduate Management Admission Council. If you’re interested in learning more about the industry and want to listen to part three, visit our website mbapodcaster.com to download the episode.

In part three the recruiters will be talking about the future for these consulting companies and be sure to listen next week for our regularly scheduled program. I’m Janet Nakano for MBA Podcaster, thanks for listening.

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Part III of this series can be found here:

MBAs in the Consulting Industry Part 3: Positioning Yourself for a Consulting Career