Each year, around 185,000 MBA students graduate in the U.S. alone. A significant portion of these students spend more than 100 hours each preparing for so-called case interviews — the favored evaluation method of elite consulting firms such as McKinsey, in which candidates are presented with a business problem and asked to talk through how they would solve the problem. This is a colossal waste of time. Case interviews are a terrible evaluation method; it’s time to end their use in hiring.
What Top Consulting Firms Get Wrong About Hiring
Each year, around 185,000 MBA students graduate in the U.S. alone. A significant portion of these students spend over 100 hours each preparing for so-called case interviews — the favored evaluation method of elite consulting firms such as McKinsey, in which candidates are presented cold with a business problem and asked to talk through how they would solve the problem. This is a colossal waste of time. Case interviews are a terrible evaluation method; it’s time end their use in hiring. Case interviews are designed so there is no right or wrong answer. Unfortunately, research has shown that excess information reduces the prediction accuracy of job interviewers. Further, not having a clear and structured way of evaluating candidates makes it more likely that interviewers will be influenced by their biases when evaluating candidates. Fortunately, more than a century of research shows that there are better, more rigorous ways to screen for general problem-solving skills. To start, General Mental Ability (GMA) is by far the best predictor of fluid intelligence, or the ability to solve problems in a variety of topics. GMA has been a well-established and tested construct for decades with thousands of peer reviewed papers published on topic.