Have you recently looked at your LinkedIn profile and updated it? LinkedIn is very well suited to provide you with new job opportunities, regardless your career path. The Management Consulting industry uses LinkedIn a lot, so this might be a good opportunity to start networking with management consultants. Read more…

LinkedIn is one of the biggest and most popular online professional networks. It offers free access to professional opportunities, the ability to stay in touch, build your network, find a new career and put yourself out in the open market. Over 80% of companies are online using LinkedIn to fill job openings, and LinkedIn is an online home for serious hiring decision makers. LinkedIn gives you access to channels that will help you make inroads to meeting your career goals, even in these challenging economic times.

Given LinkedIn’s growth, you want to find ways to differentiate yourself and maximize your professional presence online. Here are five key ways to make this happen.

1. Keep Your Profile Updated

You would be surprised how many people forget to update their LinkedIn profile. Update yours to reflect changing jobs, roles and responsibilities. Make it completely searchable. Just like in a high-quality resume, you want to provide a solid intro to you and a more searchable, keyword-friendly outlet. Balance quality keywords with content that will pique a reader’s interest.

2. Complete Your Profile

Use your profile as a tool to differentiate yourself. Use recommendations – give readers a more objective outlook on who you are as an employee, employer or individual. Branch out into lesser-used LinkedIn tools, such as video, for a more multimedia experience. Also, remember a catchy summary.

3. Update Your Status Regularly

Tell the community what you are working on, what interesting news or industry events you are related to. Your active participation on LinkedIn helps to show that you are active in your profession, field and its developments. Top tier consulting firms are looking for passionate management consultants, and this is a great way to show your passion.

4. Increase Your Visibility

This has a twofold meaning. First, literally – include a professional-looking photograph to create the visual impression for your reader and include links to your websites, whether of your company, your blog or another personal site that is relevant and may augment your profile. Second, figuratively – make more connections to build your trusted network.

5. Build Your Brand

Create an attention-getting headline/tagline, a message that serves as a personal pitch. What impression do you want to leave with the reader? Your profile is a one-stop shop where you can present yourself your own way.

Leverage the potential of LinkedIn by working on your profile today! If you need more advice on how to land a job in management consulting, then have a look at our guide. ConsultingFact.com offers guides for resumes, cover letters, case interviews, case frameworks, and other material that will help you land a consulting job.

Doing your research on the top management consulting firms is essential to deciding how and where you want to apply. In this article we will take a look at top 10 management consulting firms. Read more…

Research Behind the Top Ten

Vault.com, an industry-leading career intelligence site, recently published its 2012 rankings of the world’s top management consulting firms. The list offers few surprises, as the usual industry front-runners make a strong showing. Bain & Company, McKinsey & Company and The Boston Consulting Group dominate the top three, as they did in 2011. Booz & Company rejoins the top ten this year after placing 16th last year. That said, the only substantial surprise is the presence of the Monitor Group, ranked at number five, up from 25th place last year.

Coming Trends in Management Consulting

As 2011 comes to a close and the new year begins, a handful of trends are emerging in the management consulting field:

• A resurgence of corporate profitability in certain fields may see a spike in private-sector corporate demand for consulting services.
• As this demand for consulting services increases, hiring possibilities may also improve. While staff retention/attrition is worsening, the recruitment picture seems to be rosier than in recent, leaner years, with much of the hiring emphasis being on experienced consultants.
• Sustainability is having its day in the sun. All major consulting firms are taking sustainability seriously and are either already there or going there in the near-term.

The Top Ten

1. Bain & Company

For the second year running, Bain & Company is Vault.com’s pick for the top management consulting firm in the world. While not the largest and not the oldest firm, Bain is among the most prestigious global consulting firms because of the standards it set early in its existence. From the beginning, Bain chose innovative approaches, did not actively market themselves and often took no fees until they had proven themselves. Later, Bain aligned its incentives with client performance, sometimes taking equity in its clients’ companies instead of consulting fees. Having a stake in the client’s success was seen as an innovative business model.

Differentiating Bain from its major competitors are these kinds of innovative approaches as well as its pioneering position in private equity consulting and its specialization in M&A and organizational restructuring. To accomplish these kinds of aims, Bain hires consultants who have the ability to think conceptually and translate concepts into action. Flexibility is highly valued, as the opportunity for cross-training across industries is prevalent (even if at the expense of being able to specialize in a specific field).

Learn more about Bain & Company in ConsultingFact’s in-depth profile.

2. McKinsey & Company

Touting its ability and drive to do things differently, McKinsey sits nearly atop the heap of the world’s top-ten management consulting firms. Despite its big-name recognition, McKinsey operates at a fairly low profile, perhaps due to its controversial practice of non-exclusivity with clients. Emphasizing ideas as the most important engine of McKinsey’s operations, McKinsey offers a good starting place for new consultants but does not appear to offer an environment conducive to collaboration and teamwork because consultants are bound to secrecy about their projects (due to the non-exclusivity/possible conflicts of interest issues).

Similarly, the firm employs an “up and out” policy, whereby consultants need to advance upward in their career or leave the firm within a specific amount of time. This ensures a built-in turn-over rate that renews the firm’s staff at regular intervals (which may contribute to the constant stream of new ideas on which McKinsey runs), but which may foster an environment of “horizontal stagnation”, that is, consultants may be “promoted” by adding additional duties to their existing job. Essentially, a heftier workload without progressive responsibility or upward momentum but also not an invitation to leave the company.

Read on for ConsultingFact’s in-depth profile of McKinsey & Company.

3. The Boston Consulting Group, Inc. (BCG)

BCG still made it to the top 10 strategy consulting firms. Beyond its prestigious name and reputation, BCG is behind many of the industry’s best-known concepts, such as the “experience curve” and “growth-share matrix”. With these principles as its backbone, BCG values conceptual thinking and reasoning and places emphasis on continued growth and learning for consultants. As a Big Four consultancy firm, BCG competes head-to-head with much larger firms with greater name recognition but differentiates itself by focusing on, for example, fields like branding and marketing (in addition to more traditional disciplines).

Based in Boston with a global reach, BCG is widely praised as a solid place to work, offering among the most competitive compensation packages for consultants.

Read more in the ConsultingFact in-depth profile of Boston Consulting Group.

4. Deloitte Consulting LLP

One of the “Big Four” accountancy firms and the second-largest professional services firms globally, Deloitte is well-respected and a massive name, major player in the management consultancy field. Its depth of expertise among its over 40,000 employees is virtually unparalleled. Focused primarily on human capital, strategy and operations and technology across multiple industries, Deloitte leads its competition in terms of aggregate revenue, growth and market share.

In short, Deloitte is a giant, and as such, can offer an expansive career trajectory to consultants, who will have the opportunity to take advantage of Deloitte’s global presence and its sheer size and scale. The downside is that an organization of this scope can be hampered by layers of bureaucracy and unneeded complexity that develop naturally when a firm reaches these proportions.

5. Monitor Group

Monitor Group has leapt into Vault.com’s top-ten firms this year. Its smaller size versus other, bigger firms against which Monitor competes head-on coupled with its global footprint makes it an agile and dynamic firm. A flexible consultant can join what is undoubtedly an innovative organization that is not saddled by too much legacy structure, in part because of its size and in part because it, like many firms, was affected by the economic crisis and has adapted to current economic conditions. Though based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Monitor Group has a presence in every corner of the world – again, much like larger, better-known consulting firms.

As Monitor Group places a premium on getting sustainable results for its international array of clients, having a presence in key locations is key to capitalizing on its expertise and information. The firm has been lauded for its pro bono service and for its collaborative, feedback-oriented, lessons-learned corporate culture, which is one of its strongest distinguishing factors. Monitor Group itself characterizes its placement in the Vault rankings as being due to “morale and momentum”.

6. A.T. Kearney

Headquartered in Chicago with more than 50 offices worldwide, A.T. Kearney has a storied history that is tied up in the history of one of the industry’s oldest and best-known consultancies, McKinsey, from which Kearney split off in the 1930s. In the early days, Kearney focused on manufacturing and operations, which has expanded across industries and practices. This history imbues Kearney with a sense of long-standing tradition and culture, which has been cited as a bonus in terms of being a good place to start out as a management consultant.

History could also be seen as a handicap in terms of innovation. Like most large consultancy firms, Kearney has broad cross-functional, cross-industry focus areas in which consultants can expect to work. Its distinguishing offering is The Global Business Policy Council, which Kearney created as a strategic service designed to cater to the world’s top CEOs and business-minded thought leaders. The Council brings together leaders from the corporate, government and academic disciplines to foster discussion about issues relating to all these groups, such as globalization, foreign direct investment and offshoring. Kearney offers three separate strategic services to these leaders as a part of this council.

7. Oliver Wyman

Based in New York with 55 international office locations, Oliver Wyman operates across industries all over the globe. Oliver Wyman is part of a larger group of professional services companies, which contributes to its cross-functional, multinational presence. This network of affiliated companies deepens the pool from which expertise is drawn, which adds value to the consulting services offered by the Oliver Wyman Group. Known as a firm that values ideas and creativity, this is a place where driven, hungry, internationally-minded consultants will thrive, as they will be expected to travel extensively and put in a lot of extra time.

8. The Cambridge Group

More than anything else, The Cambridge Group aims to help clients attain higher growth rates and profit margins. In large measure, the big factor that differentiates Cambridge from other consultancy firms, particularly those that specialize in economic services, is its insistence that demand supersedes supply in terms of importance. This drives the firm’s focus on identifying profitable demand opportunities and optimizing processes and pricing. The Cambridge Group claims to provide its clients actionable insight and growth blueprints as opposed to more general plans and recommendations. Its size and scope make this attention to detail possible. As a small, Chicago-based firm with just two offices, the firm is small enough in scale that a consultant can expect to work hands-on with analysis and growth strategy from the get-go while being on-board as the firm itself grows.

9. Analysis Group, Inc.

Headquartered in Boston with ten offices in the United States and Canada, Analysis Group is highly regarded for its commitment to delivering economic and financial analysis and strategy across sectors. Employing these specialties, Analysis Group, as a place to work, is reportedly collegial and has a small-firm feel in what is actually a much larger company. Unlike larger, global firms, the primary focus on economic and financial consulting creates room for specialization and carves out a solid reputation in its areas of expertise. Given this emphasis at the Analysis Group, potential consultants with strong analytical and academic skills have an edge.

10. Booz & Company

Widely touted as a great place to get started with a career in management consulting, Booz is a company whose global presence, wide areas of expertise and emphasis on wholesale organizational change (“discontinuities”) will ensure that a new or mid-career consultant never sees a shortage of opportunity. The firm pushes its consultants to learn and contribute and demands a lot (a heavy workload) but supports its hires with its team-oriented structure, training and intelligent staff and subject-matter experts from whom to seek advice.

On the prestige front, Booz is recognized, respected and highly visible with its focus on an exceptionally vast landscape of fields. The firm’s big name will be a draw, as will the chance to work across industries in a global environment. Detractors state that the firm suffers from some internal inertia following the spin-off of one of Booz’s former core businesses – government consulting. The firm still enjoys legacy prestige, despite distancing itself from its biggest differentiator, and has moved more firmly into specializing in business-transition consultancy (the aforementioned discontinuities, when a business moves from one major focus to another).

Learn more about Booz & Company in ConsultingFact’s in-depth profile.

Your Career

For a comprehensive guide to your own career in management consulting, download our guide on how to land a job in management consulting. ConsultingFact.com offers guides for resumes, cover letters, case interviews, case frameworks, and other material that will help you land a consulting job in one of the top 10 strategy consulting firms.

The consulting business “runs a tight ship” so-to-speak. This profession is one that has its’ most critical eye on every single detail. Consulting firms seek specific traits in its consultants, and therefore it’s important that you showcase your skills, your education and your ability to excel, in a creative and impressive way. Read more…

Employers in general usually spend less than one minute on reviewing a resume/cover letter so you want to be among the select few “eye-catching” applicants.

Among the list of areas that can make or break your cover letter and resume are:

• Specific content – Consulting firms seek some very specific skills so your content should make you stand out and display your innovativeness in a strategic way.
• How aesthetically pleasing and professional your format is – This can include the way you use numbers & numbering, bullets, margins, spaces, fonts and more.
• How much content you provide – “Just enough” content should be used in each section. Too much content or too little content can be a deciding factor in your fate.
• The way you address coursework, awards, scholarships, etc..– Be mindful of how much you “list”! Pick the few that will showcase your unique path but don’t overwhelm the reader with every single accomplishment.

Leading Consulting Firm McKinsey & Company state “We look to hire individuals with leadership potential, integrity, a sharp analytical mind, creativity, and the ability to work with people at all levels in an organization.” Notice some of the keywords, “leadership potential”, “sharp analytical mind”, “creativity” – it is massively important to present these skills in the proper way; the key is to display these skills in your document, not just to say that you possess them.”

Another leading Consulting Firm, Bain & Company, has been known to consider applicants based on more than just their educational background. One of their Managers out of San Francisco said, “Bain was open to my non-MBA experience and valued my real world business experience”.

ConsultingFact.com provides a review service that will help you perfect your resume and cover letter so that you can ‘make the grade’ when it comes to those cherished consulting positions. ConsultingFact.com’s Resume and Cover Letter Review Service will review your documents within 48 hours and provide detailed guidance on how you should improve your application to increase your chances in securing that coveted position of Consultant.

Don’t hesitate to get in touch and see how we can help you!

During your consulting interview, you might get a quite open-ended question such as “tell us something about yourself”. It is very important that you prepare for this, as you have a chance of creating huge impact in the interview. We’ll give you some ideas in this article. Read more…

If you get an opportunity to present yourself then you need to have prepared – and practiced – a two-minute speech about yourself. A good story line for such a presentation is:

• Tell about your career plans and ambitions
• Explain very briefly what your educational background is
• Tell very briefly about any previous jobs you had or membership of relevant organizations
• Tell a few keywords about how you are as a person

This structure is very important and has worked very well for us countless of times. You start and end your presentation with personal statements and this is important. Top tier management consulting firms as McKinsey, Bain, Booz and BCG are all looking for people with leadership personalities. They want to know how you are as a person.

In between the personal parts you tell more boring facts such as your education and professional experience. They already know this, as they have (hopefully) read your resume. They don’t care about listening once again about your major. But you have to mention it, to show professionalism.

Our best advice is for you to practice this speech in front of the mirror very well. Talk slowly and confidently. And you should not spend more than 2 minutes. Let the interviewer ask you the questions that he/she has, instead of him/her waiting for you to finish.

Are you going to apply to a consulting firm or going for an interview soon? Take a look at our free guide on how to land a job in management consulting.

Ever wondering if consulting firm interview questions are harder compared to the ones in others industries? Glassdoor analyzed employee reviews for a large variety of companies to determine which ones had the toughest interview questions. Consulting firms are on top of the list.

The Top 10

Below is the top 10 companies asking the toughest consulting firm interview questions:

1. McKinsey & Co.
2. Jane Street Capital
3. Cree
4. Bain & Co.
5. Boston Consulting Group
6. Palantir Technologies
7. Teach for America
8. A.T. Kearney
9. Red Ventures
10. BP

Consulting firms do dominate the list, along with some technology and venture firms. The key reason is that firms have substantial requirements for both the analytical skills, communication skills and leadership skills. This mix makes it necessary to perform very detailed interviews where consulting firm interview questions require a lot of “thinking on the spot”. In addition, the tough questions are also required to select among the huge amount of applicants for consulting firms.

Teach for America is also on the list, which is interesting and showing that other companies and organizations are increasingly using more sophisticated recruitment methods. We will probably see much more of this in the future, as the battle for talent increases.

Read the whole article at The Street.

Are you going to apply to a firm or going for an interview soon? Take a look at our free guide on how to land a job in management consulting. Reading this will help you manage consulting firm interview questions.

Once you have decided that you want to pursue a consulting career, you also need to decide when to start applying and preparing. Should you spend half a year before interview rounds just to be able to ace everything? Or do you feel prepared already and plan to only spend a week or two before the interview? Read more…

You should as a rule of thumb use three months for applications and preparations. Different persons might be better at some points of the process. But, for the vast majority – if you are serious about obtaining a consulting position – you should be ready to invest the time necessary. Three months is not exaggerated and most consultants have spent lot of time practicing and preparing.

Applying to management consulting is a very demanding process. Here are some of the tasks that you will most likely have to do:

• Write your resume
• Write your cover letter
• Proofread and send your application
• Practice verbal and numerical reasoning tests
• Practice your mental math skills
• Learn the case frameworks
• Practice case solving
• Complete mock interviews

Many aspiring consultants do underestimate the necessary effort, and spend most of their time preparing for case interviews. Although this is crucial, you also should do many other tasks. Do not wait until last few weeks before the interview!

If you want to get a good start on your preparations, then download our free guide on how to land a job in management consulting.

Most people are not thinking about their body language in every day life, and most are also aware that it is probably a good idea to think about body language during a consulting interview. Read more to get some ideas…

This is true, except that this is not only a “good idea”, but this should be one of your KEY PRIORITIES during every interview. Bad body language can destroy your chances of landing the job, regardless of how well you solved your case or did your experience interview. The interviewer has to get a picture of a confident, passionate and energetic person. And you can only communicate this through great body language.

A case interview that goes bad can be saved if you communicate confidence, and that you can handle such situations without being nervous and by still being passionate about the job.

Read an interesting article about body language from Businessweek. Also have a look at our free guide on how to prepare for consulting interviews.

The ironclad way to get into management consulting top firms like Bain, McKinsey or Boston Consulting Group is through a college or post-graduate internship. Each of these companies reports that they give a full-time job offer to the overwhelming majority of their interns. Listed below are the fundamental facts on how to get a consulting internship.

What Management Consulting Firms Look for in Interns

Internships generally happen at two periods: either following the junior year of undergraduate education, or midway through an MBA program at a top business school. The top four management consulting firms primarily consider recruitment at the top 30 colleges and universities in the United States, and likewise throughout the world, a stellar academic record is critical.

Most firms, including Boston Consulting Group, argue that interns are well-compensated, so they are expected to work on cases painstakingly during their summer program. They must demonstrate the ability to learn quickly, think rationally and apply techniques carefully. More often than not, you will come across this intellectual capability requirement when looking for strategies on how to get a consulting internship.

The Management Consulting Internship Application Process

As mentioned above, management consulting recruiters visit schools for recruitment purposes. After informational sessions, interested students may have up to two interviews on campus before they travel to the office where they could end up spending a summer. Much like entry-level positions, the interviews tend to focus on case studies and tests of applicants’ ability to reason out marketing and business possibilities using mental math and reasonable estimations.

Another thing you must know on how to get a consulting internship is the fact that recruiters also assess your personal characteristics. They ask questions designed to determine your values and habits as a professional. Boston Consulting Group, as an example, generally looks for humble individuals.

What If Your School Isn’t a Target of Consulting Firms?

ConsultingFact.com has an entire article about how things are different for those who graduate from a state school or a non-targeted university. But briefly, if you do not attend a school with on-site recruiting, it’s not impossible to get a management consulting internship that can help you get started on a path to a rewarding career in the field.

What you will need to do is start creating a personal rolodex of any potential contacts that you know, or could make. This means talking to professors in business and management courses at your school, contacting your school’s alumni information for names of people who have worked at the big name firms. Establish these contacts before recruiting events at other schools, and leverage them into a potential contact in the HR department of a potential firm. Keep in mind that you may have to work harder on introductions, but the payoff is very rewarding. You will be able to demonstrate your persistence and determination, two characteristics you must acquire to understand how to get a consulting internship.

For tips on how to ace interviews for an internship or entry-level position, download this free guide. ConsultingFact.com offers guides for resumes, cover letters, case interviews, case frameworks, and other topics that help you land a consulting job.

Vault.com recently released its annual consulting survey on top 25 consulting firms in Europe for 2011. The survey was conducted among 2000 European consultants of all levels based on scales, such as prestige, quality of life, overall diversity, selectivity, business outlook and leadership. Read more about the results…

Top 10 European consulting firms in terms of overall performances all scored beyond 6.5 out of 10. Bain & Company European topped the 2011 rank by 8.579. It is also awarded as the best consulting firm to work for in Europe. Bain has long enjoyed fair reputations in quality of life style where it excelled McKinsey and was the major factor it took the crown. Coming after Bain is BCG and Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, respectively scoring 8.390 and 7.596. Before Vault’s ranking, BCG was also on Fortune’s“100 Best Companies to Work For” which focus on, a cooperative culture, extensive training, employee development, progressive benefits, and a commitment to social-responsibility initiatives.

The Top 10 European Consulting Firms Rankings 2011 winners are: Bain & Company, The Boston Consulting Group, Ronald Berger Strategy Consultants, Booz & Company, Oliver Wyman, OC&C Strategy Consultants, Accenture, A.T. Kearney, Monitor Group, PRTM.

Vault.com also made separate list for each scale. For the prestige scale, McKinsey & Company unsurprisingly championed the rank with a score of 8.780 out of 10 and remained as the most prestigious consulting firm for consulting career seekers. Although today’s candidates lay more emphasis on work-life balance, everyone still wants to have big names brought by McKinsey (and of course McKinsey itself) on resumes. BCG, Bain and Booz closely follow McKinsey ranking from the 2^nd to the 4^th.

Apart from the Big 3 who dominated most of the top positions on Vault’s ranking, it is also important to mention smaller boutique consulting firms who did very well. Candesic, for instance, is a big winner for quality of life scale. Listed on top 25, Candesic took top spots in several fields in term of quality of life. It is considered as the top firm for flexible hours and flexible employment. Its career supervisors are considered extremely amicable, approachable and most helpful for freshmen consultants. It encourages and forms very cooperative and friendly working atmosphere for all employees to grow and develop together. Notably, Candesic employs a phenomenal ratio of women consultants, making male and female employee ratio 1:1.

If you are seeking a career in management consulting yourself, then consider downloading our guide on how to land a job in management consulting. ConsultingFact.com offers guides for resumes, cover letters, case interviews, case frameworks, and other material that will help you land a consulting job.