How to Crush Consulting Recruiting as a Veteran

This post was written by a veteran student at a Top 10 MBA program who landed an offer from one of the MBB consulting firms (more on this later) after completing a summer internship with them. It’s meant to offer you a small view of the consulting world, albeit from someone who hasn’t spent a career there.

Estimated reading time: 17 minutes

There are consultants for everything. My brother-in-law recently hired a garden consultant to help him with his backyard garden (which is pretty legit, can’t lie). But when most veterans think of “consulting” they are usually thinking of management consulting. So for the purposes of this article, that will be our main focus.

What is consulting?

There’s a lot of variety, but generally consulting involves temporarily working with a team of consultants to help an outside client solve a problem, answer a question, or implement something. Clients typically hire consultants for their firms’ expertise, to augment their personnel, or to bring an outsider perspective to a problem.

Let me explain just a bit more:

Expertise

Consulting firms aren’t just filled with MBAs. They have lots of REALLY smart people who are subject matter experts on any variety of technical problems. A firm that doesn’t have that knowledge resident in their company may hire a consulting firm to get access to it. Consulting firms also have extensive databases of all the projects that they have worked on. Odds are, a client’s problems are not entirely unique and there can be lessons learned from how a previous business handled that situation. Hiring consultants gets a company access to that information.

Augment their personnel

Firms may not have enough people to research a problem and develop solutions, while also trying to run the company. Hiring a consulting firm can give them the people they need to make this happen.

Outside perspective

There’s a sweet spot in problem-solving. If you are too close to the problem, you may be emotionally involved or blind to what’s happening. You may also be the problem. But if you are too far away, you don’t have enough skin in the game to be effective at solving that problem.

Consultants provide the middle ground. They are from outside the company, so likely aren’t part of the problem. But in working with the company, they get close enough to the problem to understand and troubleshoot it.

Working in consulting

Early in their career, most consultants will work for a variety of clients in multiple different industries — this makes consulting a great fit for people who are seeking variety or who enjoy problem-solving more than “steady-state” work. The length of projects and the variety of clients depends largely on your firm and your office. If you work at the Dallas office, for example, you can expect a lot more work in the oil and gas industry than the same consulting firm’s office in Boston.

Most consulting jobs require frequent travel, although this may change post-COVID (and it’s definitely possible to find roles that don’t require that). It also entirely depends on the client. Many times however, consultants travel to the client’s destination or HQ and work from there.

The manager of a consulting team will split the overall problem into smaller chunks called “workstreams.” Some workstreams belong to just one person, others are run by multiple people — this depends mostly on the size of the problem (called the “scope” of the project). No matter what workstream you’re on, you can expect to do research, analyze data, communicate with clients, and present your ideas clearly and logically (usually in the form of a PowerPoint deck).

You’ll constantly share information with your team and may have to flex to other workstreams without much warning. My summer internship in consulting reminded me of working on a field problem with a strong team — it was demanding, but the team aspect and variety of the work made it worth it.

Overview of the consulting firms

There are many different types of firms under the consulting umbrella, but here’ how to think about the main players in industry:

MBB

McKinsey and Company, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and Bain and Company

These three firms are generally considered to be the most prestigious consulting firms because they focus mostly on high-profile strategy-focused work. Special capabilities include McKinsey’s high-profile government work and Bain’s Private Equity Group (PE due diligence).

Work-life balance at these firms is a challenge. Prior to COVID, the usual schedule for most consultants involved flying to their client on a Sunday or early Monday, with a return trip on Thursday or Friday.

These are known for delivering results and that means a lot of work. These firms are also VERY expensive, so there can be a dynamic of not wanting to waste the client’s time and money. But these firms know these challenges for the employees and have a lot of workplace perks to keep attracting the best talent.

Most people going into MBB consulting after getting an MBA don’t plan to stay at the firm for more than 2–3 years. The lifestyle can be difficult to maintain and the promotion opportunities are extremely competitive. But these firms are known for having strong exit opportunities for their alumni.

Big Four

Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Ernst & Young (EY), and KPMG

These four companies offer a variety of professional services to businesses and part of their business is management consulting.

The Big 4 are much larger than the MBB firms, so they do a large variety of work. They typically require that consultants specialize relatively quickly. Their major focus areas include implementation, mergers & acquisition, and performance improvement

Implementation

Accenture, Deloitte (I know… I listed them twice…get off my case)

These firms are especially known for working with technology implementation.

Let’s say your company needs a software solution to a common problem you face, say billing, for example. You may hire one of these firms to help determine what exactly is the scope of the software you need and then they would also work on implementing it. That means everything from IT professionals working on hardware at the firm on the back end to people developing solutions to how the client experience changes on the front end.

These consulting firms typically focus on longer-term implementation projects, typically work very closely with clients. They do less strategy work as a percentage of their overall work, but are trying to expand “upstream” to that area.

Turnaround and restructuring (TRS)

AlixPartners, Alvarez and Marsal

These firms work primarily with distressed companies to turn around failing business units or companies. They are known for high-pressure work with high ethical standards. For the majority of MBA students, these firms will not be major players in on-campus recruiting.

Industry specialists

Chartis, ZS Associates, Oliver Wyman

These firms focus on a specific industry rather than capability. Major industries they work in include healthcare, life sciences, and financial services.

Before recruiting kicks off (pre-MBA and your first few weeks)

You may have heard about pre-MBA events that these firms put on. These could be mini-internships or just one-off recruiting events which take place in the summer prior to starting an MBA.

It literally does not matter at all if you attend those pre-MBA summer events that consulting firms put on. The vast majority of people who get consulting offers didn’t attend one of those events. It might be a nice data point to have in your application, but it’s probably #50 on the list of important things for consulting recruiting. Apply, enjoy it if you get selected, but don’t stress it at all.

Also, you likely need a serious wardrobe upgrade. Those off-the-rack suits from Jos. A. Bank aren’t going to cut it. That’s why I want you to know about a friend of mine, Rachel who runs Style By Rachel. She’s known for being an absolute fashionista here at Darden and can make you look like you actually belong in that boardroom. Let her know Mark from The Veteran Professional sent you and she will take 20% off her services for you. That’s HUGE. She works with both men and women and is totally awesome.

Case prep…don’t sweat it before school starts

First of all, what is case prep?

To get into management consulting at one of the top firms, you’ll have to do a case interview. These are different than what you may think of as a normal interview.

In a case interview, you will be given a hypothetical business situation to determine how you think about a particular problem and how you would solve it.

The interviewer is seeking to understand HOW you think and how you interact with a problem.

What’s important to know about a case interview is that it is designed to simulate life on the job as a management consultant. The idea is to replicate all of the stages of a three- to six-month engagement in approximately thirty or forty minutes.

The process of getting ready for case interviews is called “casing”. This involves going through dozens of practice cases before you get to the case interview so that you feel comfortable with the process and can nail the interview when you get to it.

This was the case prep book I found on Amazon with the most ratings and highest review. Buy it here.

Prior to starting at school, there’s no need to even think about casing. You don’t need to read the case prep books or practice frameworks or anything crazy. Maybe practice your math, but that’s it.

What you DO need to start thinking about (at least somewhat) is what you want to do within consulting. It’s good to at least have an idea of where you want to live or certain industries you may want to explore. Like I said earlier, different offices will have different areas of expertise.

While you don’t need to have your interests within consulting figured out when recruiting starts, you do need to be ready to hit the ground with consulting in general. This should be your primary task during the dead period before recruiting starts — if you do that you’ll be ready to hit the ground running when consulting recruiting starts.

Here are the things you should be prepared for:

Know what you did in the military and be able to describe it in a somewhat-understandable way. People have no idea what “infantry” or “MP” or “S-6” mean, so practice describing those jobs in civilian terms. I recommend that you do not translate into actual civilian positions (like COO or whatever) since that’s not what you did. Use the correct terminology, then explain what that means. E.g. “I was a distribution platoon leader, so I led 15 people to supply my 600-person unit with fuel, water, ammunition, and transportation.” You get the idea.
Know why you left the military, and be able to tie that into why you want to go into consulting. It’s OK to say that you were bored, didn’t like the work, found some aspect of consulting more appealing, etc. Probably don’t say that the work-life balance was bad in the military — it’s not amazing in consulting either.
Know why you want to go into consulting. This doesn’t have to be super incredible at this point, general stuff like “I really enjoy variety” or “I want to build my business skills” are totally fine.
Know what city you want to go to, or at least have an idea of 3 or less cities that you’d be happy in. Consulting recruiting is largely “per office”, so recruiting for more offices means more work. Don’t try to game the system by trying to pick an “easy” office, interviews are hard for every office.

Networking phase

The early start of the recruiting process is usually a shock to most people at MBA programs, especially veterans who are also trying to figure out how to use Excel or understand what discounted cash flow is.

Recruiting at most schools will start within the first 2 months of the start of classes, usually even sooner. At first, the events will be generic informational briefs.

Note: These rules don’t apply just for consulting, but to whatever industry you are looking to get into.

This is where it’s good to know where you want to go before you start. While going to these briefs by no means guarantees a job, they are a good signal to the company that you are interested and have done your homework prior to starting. Yes, they will check the names of who shows up.

To be totally honest, most of the company briefs are super boring. The number one thing I hear from first-year students is that all the company briefs sound the exact same. While there are significant differences between the firms, you likely won’t be able to pick them out this early in the process. But, do what you can to pick out whatever small differences you can and ask about them during the networking portion afterward.

Networking needs to be self-driven — I often see FYs wait for events to drop in their laps, falling behind other FYs in the process. As a veteran you have an automatic in: ask the firm recruiter to connect you with a veteran at your target office (or a veteran on the recruiting team). This is an instant network that will serve you for life. The Vet Net is real, y’all.

When you get into conversations with veterans at these firms, ask them the hard questions:

When do you go home every day?
How does your family like your job?
What’s the most annoying part of consulting?

The great thing about veterans is you can expect real answers. We typically aren’t known for sugar-coating things.

Networking is about quality, not quantity, but that doesn’t mean you can talk to two people and call it a day. You can usually ask to be connected to someone who does specific work, or to a veteran, or to someone who can talk about having a family. It’s a bit contrived, but it really helps you build a good base of contacts in your target office. They’re taking notes in some form, so even if you aren’t speaking with a partner, that input will end up helping you when application decision time rolls around.

To make it worthwhile for you and the person you are speaking with, here’s some pro tips:

Don’t waste people’s time. They can tell when you don’t have any good questions or when you’re just trying to bag a phone call with a partner. Do the prep work and come up with good questions to ask.
Networking feels weird as a veteran. I definitely wasn’t used to just talking to people about their work. Try to be natural and make a connection with the person. It’s OK if it feels a bit weird, that won’t sink you.
Pace yourself. You WILL run out of questions and people to talk to. Don’t go all in for October and then feel awkward when you have no one to talk to in November.
Always send a thank-you note. A short email is fine. Your career center may even have a recommendation on the wording.
Know what companies are looking for: Don’t hit people over the head with this stuff, but if you can come across this way then you’ll be in good shape.

The Airport Test

This is always an important question in the job search process.:

Could the person you’re talking to imagine being stuck at an airport with you for three hours and not losing their mind?

If so, then you’re in good shape.

It’s really hard to gauge progress at this point. Like I genuinely had no idea which firms would interview me beyond a few sure bets. Just keep at it, you don’t really have any other choice. Stay process-focused.

There will be a tendency to think that a certain kind of person goes to one firm or another. It’s total BS. They’re all recruiting from the same pool of people so their people will be fairly similar. The difference between an Accenture consultant and a McKinsey consultant will not be anywhere near as large as people think.

Mark’s note: Based on my observations from my classmates who are recruiting for consulting, this is very true. I know people who got offers at MBB firms (even multiple) and then didn’t get offers from less prestigious firms. And why did they get one MBB and not another? Hard to know always. So much is dependent on the culture and work of that particular office.

Here are some actual differentiators between firms:

Staffing model (regional, national, home-office)
Mentorship/professional development models
Specific things the companies do to create the culture they want.
Specific subsets of the work they do (e.g. federal work at McKinsey or Private Equity Group at Bain)

Casing phase

Somewhere in late fall of your first year, networking starts to transition and case prep starts to enter the picture.

You still have to network, even while you start practicing casing. Sorry. You can take a break from networking after you drop your application though.

This is also where you’ll start getting invite events or closed-list events. Getting invited is always a good sign, not getting invited is usually (but not always) a bad sign. You can definitely still turn things around, so keep networking. These events are a fun opportunity to get wined and dined by these companies while having more fun networking conversations

Pro tip: Learn how to eat like a civilized person. This isn’t an MRE in the field.

Figure out where the forks go, how to use a napkin at a nice restaurant, whether to send your silverware back, etc. I didn’t and it was super awkward.

There are generally two types of people with casing:

People who start off pretty good at it and don’t improve much throughout the casing process. They’ll need to do fewer cases and avoid getting burned out. The mark here is to do (about) 40 cases.
People who start off bad and get better with practice. They’ll need to do a lot of cases — keep going until you don’t see improvement.

Be a normal person. Seriously, let your personality shine through. Cases aren’t behavioral interviews (these come later), but that doesn’t mean the interviewer isn’t assessing your likeability and team skills.

The basics win the day. You know the saying: slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Practice excelling at the basics, even if it takes you too long. That means do a great framework even if it takes you 5 minutes. Practicing being fast will teach you to do a shitty job quickly, practicing being good will help you get faster at doing a good job.

Have a math system. You do not need to do it in your head. It’s 100x better to take extra time and get the right answer than to spout off with some made-up wrong answer that you did in your head.

Practice with people who make you nervous, especially with second years. You will be scared in your interview, so practice for it.

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Interviews

Everything that applied to casing also applies here.

Interviews are 50% skill and 50% luck. I crushed cases and didn’t get offers. I thought I did poorly and still got offers at other places. It’s pretty all over the place. The only thing you can control is your preparation (that first 50%) and your attitude. Sometimes the dice just don’t roll your way.

First-round interviews are meant for a wide audience, so don’t expect lots of “gotchas” or esoteric skill requirements. Remember: do the basics well and form a connection with your interviewer.

Your second-round interviews will feel like a mess. Partners are kind of intimidating and do really weird things in interviews. It’ll feel like some O-6 you’ve never met before is giving you a case, and she’s just making the numbers up as she goes along. Don’t read too much into it.

Pro tips:

In post-COVID world, you may actually travel for interviews. In this case, don’t be afraid to actually expense stuff. They’re not going to not give you a job because you spent $50 on dinner. Consulting firms are welllll aware of expenses.
Send thank-you notes even if you don’t get an offer. Again, your career center may have a protocol for this.
Ask for feedback if you don’t get passed to the second round or don’t get an offer. It’ll help with your other interviews and re-recruiting.