CASE INTERVIEW WITH FORMER MCKINSEY INTERVIEWER: CANADIAN WILDLIFE FEDERATION

Watch how a successful candidate performs in this case interview example featuring ex-McKinsey Interviewer Mike Ross, and Scott, who later joined McKinsey.
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Table of contents:
00:40 - Case brief
03:20 - Case structuring
09:10 - Exhibit analysis
13:28 - Maths question
14:28 - Creativity question
26:11 - Synthesis
27:35 - Case feedback
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#caseinterview #casestudy #structuring #creativity #synthesis #McKinsey #BCG #Bain #interview #consulting #managementconsulting #casecoach

[@7nova]

Quite an impressive career this Mike Ross guy has had. Going from a lawyer to an investment banker, and now a consultant. And all this without a university degree?!

[@SoundHashiraX]

Dude right!!!? Hope know one finds out he is a fraud lol

[@kss4652]

Privilege to a system that supports ambitious and hard work.

[@powerhouseinco9664]

how did he become a lawyer without the degree though?

[@boucleself]

Exactly my thought!

[@spamaddress8976]

@@powerhouseinco9664 watch suits to figure that out

[@nowfeleusuf2294]

I have seen some of the staged assessments and this is what I can conclude: 1. Don't dive into the problem solving right away 2. Set the context. Clearly define the problem and reinforce that to the interviewer to make sure that he/she knows you got it. 3. Feel free to ask for relevant figures which will facilitate the thinking process and note them down. 4. Find the avenues that may lead to the problem (or find avenues which can solve a problem if that is what the case wants) 5. Explore each avenues and extract sub points to trigger discussions with the interviewer. 6. Again ask for numbers and try to make sure that numbers from different part of the exhibits talk to each other. 7. If numbers do not make sense in regards to your initial thought. Just go back to the avenues and pick the next one. 8. Analyze again and then confirm your findings. 9. Prepare a recommendation summary for your betterment even if they do not ask for it. These are what I could think of.

[@Klompe2003]

Wow! John Malkovich really knows how to analyze the candidate.

[@rishirajsengupta52]

Awesome video ! Great professionalism and clear communication along with a very well edited video that would help candidates to understand , think, rethink and recommend !

[@juanchom9]

Thanks for the video. Great structure!

[@Eric-ow8nn]

Hello! Thank you very much for your video, it's very different case, cool and with a lot of good insights! Really appreciate it. Doubts: Anyone could clarify why didnt he use the disease in population to calculate births/year? Should he needed to consider this to calculate it? because pairs would live shorter, so would have less cubs

[@kevgits]

This was different in a nice way and very well executed. Thank you.

[@sarthakgautam8035]

He did an amazing job. loved it❤️

[@vedangapte1258]

Amazing video CaseCoach!

[@JS-od5tv]

great video- very insightful. thank you!

[@abduljalilmahama5682]

I have learnt more from this case..I would like to see more similar videos

[@georgevssonic]

Great case, made me realize how far off I am from this guy though haha

[@leonardovelasquezmagino9671]

Same here :D !

[@Flowerlifts111]

Practice makes perfect. Remember, this is a staged interview. They had a very good idea of what to expect before they did this interview and have done similar staged interviews like this in the past. Plus they're friends/colleagues, so for them, it could feel like a chat in the pub almost.

[@sisonkemgwebi5830]

I Felt This.

[@user-vw7bx9ll8n]

me too. i paused right after the question and wrote down my framework, and could barely get anywhere!!!

[@abduljalilmahama5682]

You are here the longest name in the world

[@BenoitRL]

A very interesting case which I think although the topic is original can be thought with consumer population technics to structure the thinking approach. I was surprised however by the lack of questions around qualifying the roads and migration possibilities, or improvements (as this leads to mating). Considerations about isolating diseased animals, and try to regroup healthy ones in the least contaminated areas to encourage healthy mating, etc. Just some thoughts about enriching recommendation options. Well done.

[@hsgue]

My structure looked as followed: 1. Predators 1.1. Humans 1.2. Other animals 2. Environment 2.1. Environmental change 2.2. Other reasons for foxes to move 3. Food 3.1. food availability 3.2. changes is consumption

[@shreyasdeo3801]

Just wanted to say, I got job offer from Deloitte 🥰🥰 Your channel helped me a lot in widening my horizons of thought process. Hope to get into the Big 3 soon

[@aoxuanhung8025]

Very useful and informative video. Thanks a lot 🥰

[@alanmandel9380]

A good presentation. I would have wanted to relate the imbalance of gender and disease figures on the map for a possible study of environmental changes due to the road ( and when was the road built )

[@sebastiankoper7974]

Life expectancy number should be based on the steady state population from 10 years earlier (6k not 5k).

[@xxidiot_juliaxx9581]

Great Case Structuring. One Point I could not reconcile, at about 17 minutes in the Video, while calculating No. of Pairs it's assumed that 100% of x % male pop will be eligible to mate ... I thought that was miss, not sure if a 2-month-old male puppy can mate ... maybe we could have further narrowed # of pairs by factoring min age required for mating...

[@szetoyk2607]

im at 13:33 right after the analysis of the graph given. does it make sense to ask if the foxes move between the 4 zones and add traffic incidents to the list of root cause (under the unnatural death category)

[@michaelmay4297]

The issue I have with his structuring approach is that it assumes that the client has data on historic birth and death rates. If they have this then the whole problem is a lot easier to solve, but intuitively I'd say if they had this data then we should have clarified this at the beginning. If the client says that they have no historical data for deaths and births then this structure would be useless.

[@gmk2127]

I wonder how that structure is exhaustive and deep enough? Should we aim at more points and more levels?

[@indianz6315]

Very helpful, keep going 👍🏻

[@anonymoususer7119]

I'm five minutes in so far and even though he did well with categorizing and taking things into factor, he didn't take environmental change into factor. what does the swift fox eat and has there been environmental change in the passed year (ie. fires, global warming etc.) that is caused a decline in their food source? Has there been a departure of their food source? Or just food related issues that may cause them to birth less or die more. to be continued...

[@CaseCoach]

Yes, these are good insights that could have added to the mortality bucket.

[@jinwoolee7089]

Does anyone know what's the recommended time a interviewee can take to construct their framework at the beginning? is it up to 2 minutes typically?

[@CaseCoach]

There is no hard rule. But 60-90s is a rough average.

[@a_country_boy]

I want the list of the books in the background :P

[@GunsolGaming]

wow this video is interesting

[@alethiaarreola1847]

Do you get to see the written problem with McKinsey or is it merely a discussion where the interviewer tells the interviewee about the problem?

[@sunnysoul5259]

How could one train to calculate mentally so quickly? Any advice?

[@fistus1976]

Practice. There are a few tricks he uses: 10% of something is just moving the dot by one. Other decadic percentages can be calculated by multiplying the previous number. 50% is half etc. The other trick is to ask to round the numbers as conveniently as he does. It feels like speed and the right magnitude and interpretation of the numbers are more important than decimal precision here.

[@fistus1976]

Another trick is that he first calculates the quarter of the whole population=1250 (easy) in the first row and is then asked to do the same for 1/8, which is half of the quarter. The next row is 3/8 which means you multiply the previous row by 3. The last line is the same as the first line. If you have trouble calculating on the fly, skip the 3/8 line, fill in the last line and you know that the remainder of the 5000 -1250x2 -625 =1875

[@Md.RomanCwhoduri]

❤❤❤❤

[@md.rizwanqureshi3306]

Your pause and play symbol is reversed. 😉 Jokes apart, btw this is very interesting approach.

[@jonathanwitt864]

One question popped into my mind: If we had a population decline of a 1000 last year and we see that the decline by natural death + diseases is exceeding birth by 695 we are still missing 300 foxes or am I wrong? If not the reason why we lost ⅓ of the population is still not looked at.

[@hlibborysov3655]

It seems to me that such consulting brings a little of value. I don't want someone's immediate thoughts and guesswork, I want to have a real research & some domain expertise. I want previous experience of dealing with such or similar problems.

[@tomekstec981]

What if it turned out they built the highway last year?

[@fistus1976]

Well good for the foxes. Without the movement restrictions imposed by the highway, the foxes would have died faster. Calculate the perfect breeding rate in a homogenous distribution with perfect mating. It is the same amount as foxes dying due to the disease w. Movement restriction. So even if all fixes mated perfectly, the disease would negate that. If you removed the movement restriction of the highway by digging tunnels for the foxes to cross, the infection would have spread and would have killed more foxes than the increase gained by perfect matching. The candidate seems to have avoided this trap. The order of the solutions applied matters critically. 1 vaccinate foxes to kill disease 2 remove movement restriction to improve mating rate The alternative order results in extinction.

[@tomekstec981]

@@fistus1976 I strongly disagree, because you assumed that the disease caused the deaths. They could've all died suddenly because of a highway being built recently, but that was completely overlooked because he assumed it was caused by disease (which was the whole point of my original comment).

[@siddhantdeshmukh7120]

@@tomekstec981 Exactly same as my point, he did not consider the number of deaths caused due to the highway traffic, construction etc. He could have include that into his calculations.

[@sheld29]

Good example, however, as a biologist, I think the answer was really simplistic and doesn't properly tackle the problem.

[@ellaben2497]

Interview cases are "not" about the actual solution per se, but rather more about "the thought process" the interviewee is not a biologist like you though

[@sheld29]

@@ellaben2497 , this thought process it’s totally off!! Terrible example...

[@Flowerlifts111]

The purpose of the interview was not to delve deeply into about the nitty gritty science behind reproduction and disease etc. The goal of the interview is to show you are able to think logically and have discipline in how you explain your reasoning. I think he did an amazing job.

[@yashsiriah21]

I think Scott dismissed the hunting aspect too soon and without any quantitative evidence, since it's possible that males were hunted more possibly for their fur (similar cases do happen e.g. higher hunting of male peacocks as their feathers are more desirable than those of females). Such population skew is unnatural for any species and warrants a closer look. Even if hunting was a smaller contributing factor, he should have given a couple of minutes there just to generate quantitative evidence on whether hunting as a perspective should be considered or not. That would've created a better rounded case for the prime reason for decline

[@vinayabhute2110]

Mike ross* reminds me of someone😅

[@iXCrasherXi]

Suits

[@leonh2242]

i am not quite following the logic by calculating the change in population. What does it help in terms of solving the problem as the problem is how to stop the decline. You either find ways to increase the birth or decrease the death rate. Also 5000 is the figure of this year, even doing the calculation, should we use the 6000 to figure out the root cause

[@Omar-sj7wl]

My concern was the assumption that the foxes need to be in pairs to mate. I felt that the question should have been asked. Couldn't one male fox mate with all the females in the group?

[@JoaoPedroColchete]

He commented that they are generally monogamous, staying with tha same mate for life

[@Omar-sj7wl]

@@JoaoPedroColchete Sorry I must have missed that. When was that?

[@boucleself]

Can we get another case interview with you, but this time Harvey Specter as the interviewer please💀

[@wils5923]

Case one: what strategies will maximize sales of Oxycontin in the US?

[@matteoesposito833]

Why did he completely exclude the human impact on the issue?

[@abbasrizvi60]

this case is very tough lol

[@Dyslexic_Neuron]

Im Mike Ross and this time Im not a Fraud :P

[@matreyles]

The shuffling of paper is killing me

[@user-vm8dc4un8v]

Didn't he miss some things? In the original structure predators or deaths by accidents (e.g. foxes hit by cars when crossing the highways) were not mentioned. And besides, he seems to have made the assumption on foxes' mating habits without double-checking. It might have been possible that foxes are not monogamous and one male could impregnate multiple females. Then the calculation using one-to-one fox pairs as the basis is not valid

[@kaiyuan2893]

One mate per life. They loyal creatures. 15:04

[@NewDave94]

some things i dont get, e.g. why he wants to calculate what the population will develop. That does not help to find the problem, we want to find out whats cousing the population decline and not how the population will develop over time.

[@anonymoususer7119]

I'm 13.5 minutes in now and it seems to me that the client is going from Why is this happening to How Much More should we expect this to happen. Are we still moving towards a solution or a better understanding of what the problem could possibly be? After viewing the exhibits, absolutely nothing was mentioned about the Groups that had the the abnormally high female population of foxes compared to the groups that did not. Also the connection to the fact that the two zones with the higher number of female foxes also had a higher number of disease deaths I believe (without rewatching). That is a connection. So the next quesion is, could it be assumed that these two groups with the corresponding high numbers of females and deaths have an interruption in the vegetation? He did mention possible human interferance. Pipeline? Industrial businesses? Water source?

[@CaseCoach]

In case interviews like in real life, it is a good approach to diagnose the problem before suggesting solutions. That 's what is going on here.

[@mattyspaghetti449]

Why would anyone without a scientific background be asked to "solve" a problem that requires actual biology knowledge. Why would CWF hire fucking McKinsey???

[@user-vw7bx9ll8n]

@@mattyspaghetti449 agree. i hated this question. in a real life scenario these numbers and suggestions are useless . feels like more of a self pat on the back of pulling a random solution out of a hat, than a real scientific approach

[@kavyaphophalia4346]

In deaths couldn't we said instead of just hunting man made movements that hav caused deaths and further bifurcated to poaching, habitat destruction, Food cycle changes

[@ashrafulhoque2068]

Hes..... literally..... MIKE ROSS???

[@christopherrussell9349]

This is the worst case interview I've seen on youtube, and here's why. 1. The case itself is atrocious, and it is an exemplar for why real case interviews are based on real cases. The swift fox lives 10 years but produces 1.5 kits every 5 years? So they bear a maximum of two litters producing 3 kits on average in a lifetime, and we're supposed to believe that this species is capable of sustaining itself? Actual swift foxes have 1-4 litters in a lifetime with an average of 4.5 kits per litter. Why wouldn't you do the slightest bit of research on the reality of this situation to construct this case? The sex distribution numbers given by this case make this data debacle even worse, and hilariously enough the interviewer gives the wrong information when asked about it at 9:05. The ratio of females to males is 1.86:1, while in real swift foxes it's about 1:1.There are a maximum of ~1750 mating pairs in the entire population, meaning each pair needs to produce 2 kits to replace themselves and 1.16 more kits on average to replace the 1500 females who don't have breeding partners. That's 3.16, exceeding the maximum of 3 average kits established earlier. The whole case is DOA because the numbers don't make sense. 2. A complete lack of clarifying questions, and a fundamental inability on the part of the interviewee to recognize basic cause and effect. OR, and this is the really fun twist, the *interviewer* gave incorrect data somewhere. By the end of the interview, the interviewee has completely ignored the giant flashing sign that is the fact that we have a PREPARED DATA SET and DIAGRAM in a case made out of whole cloth. The final answers provided by the interviewee use *nothing* from these materials except disease rate. And here's the fun part, starting around 7 min we're told that there is a new disease but we have no data on the impact to the swift fox, only to be told later on that the disease kills any infected animals in one year. We are *also* told that there has been zero change in life expectancy over the 1 year period in the decline of the overall population. In other words, this disease *cannot* be the cause of the decline in population unless it exclusively affects foxes that are at least 9 years old, *and* there were at least 1000 9 year old foxes last year. The interviewee intuitively understands this fact, because he immediately identifies a lack of change in life expectancy as indicative that the decline in population cannot be blamed on premature death, yet his final conclusion is still that disease deaths > births is the cause of the decline. The fact that the -695 estimated decline doesn't match the -1000 figure given initially doesn't seem to matter. All of that is to say, this is a *birthrate* issue, unless incorrect data was given at some point. 3. Zero questions about the accuracy of data collection or population counting methodology. Zero questions about the sex distribution change in each of the four areas or in the population over time. Didn't ask when the road dividing these populations was built. Didn't ask for data on the *actual* measured birthrate in the population for the last year and the current year. Spends several minutes doing pointless math to calculate that deaths > births which is...uh...the reason why we're here in the first place. If it were as simple as pointing out that disease deaths have exceeded the birth rate then why would this organization have hired a consulting firm? Beyond these issues, the interviewee was not charismatic or personable at all. The interviewer prompted him to look at the given data set at least twice and basically got dismissed both times, even going along with the argument the interviewee made which isn't bad in and of itself for the interviewer to do if this were a real case interview, but in the retrospective segments the interviewer isn't pointing out the flaws in the interviewees reasoning. This is of course another problem with poorly crafted made up cases, this case was designed with a correct answer in mind. Compare that with real cases which, even when distilled into a format appropriate for an interview setting, don't have "correct" answers, but do have more or less effective recommendations the candidate can make. Real cases also almost always demand the collection of additional data. You can make a preliminary conclusion, but in order to be sure you need to know what data you're missing and how to go about getting it. The interviewee says nothing about collecting additional data. He also demonstrates a failure to think comprehensively about the overall problem in his response to the comparable population prompt at 25:37. "Look at the US and Europe", "look at other species affected by disease", really? You don't want to maybe look into latitude, altitude, climate, proximity to humans, I mean could you have just a single inkling of creativity? In this case, it seems clear that we can't really determine what the "correct" answer is with the data we're given in the video because the interviewee didn't ask for enough information or relevant information. The extreme sex distribution between the four groups suggests the case intends the correct answer to be a sex-related migration issue involving the roadway causing birth rate decline, maybe due to the surrounding terrain, food and water availability, territorial patterns of males, prevalence of dens, presence of predators, etc. Honestly the interviewee gets so sidetracked with the disease angle that I believe he was provided with the births minus deaths minus migration schema and didn't come up with it himself in that moment. If this is how my case interview went I'd be embarrassed, and I would be sure I wasn't going to get the job.

[@bonnolog]

Is the math done all in their heads?

[@user-vw7bx9ll8n]

yes. no calculators allowed.

[@calebkamenju1042]

Where was the remaining 1/4 of the fox population

[@jocelynhuang7949]

Huge flaw in his logic: that these foxes are monogamous

[@phani8482]

why didnt he consider deaths of the newly born cubs from the disease and mothers which will die before giving birht

[@Flowerlifts111]

He didnt need to

[@GRIM-Horror]

this Scott is creepy. Too bad. Too bad.