Wrapping up the Season and New Site

Hi All,

Sounds like there has been a lot of success this year with those of you looking for jobs...seems like this was a great year for hiring, a trend I'm sure everyone hopes will continue.

Congratulations to those of you who received offers!! To those of you who fell a little short...don't give up, the perfect job is out there!

I recently got an email that offers a new service for those of you still looking for a job...I haven't done any extensive exploration of what they are offering, but it is free!

The site is: http://www.consultingbench.com/

It looks like this service uses your resume/profile to match you to consulting jobs that are in their databases...management consulting, IT consulting, boutique consulting jobs are all included. Additionally, they will send you emails when a consulting opportunity that matches your skills becomes available.

While I can't really endorse a service that I haven't tried, it looks like it might be another way to make sure you aren't missing out on an opportunity. For those of you who give it a try, please post a comment or two with what you think.

Happy Holidays!

Interview Updates

Now that everyone is in the middle over interviewing..I had the suggestion that I should open up a new posting because the discussion was taking up so much space on the previous posts that it was getting a little tough to follow. Truthfully, I hadn't really realized that you had all been posting so often....for the sake of making it easy to follow the discussion, please post comments after this post! Thanks and good luck!

New Job...

Good news all! I recently accepted a new position....I know you will all be disappointed to find out it is in banking and not consulting, but the position is a great fit for me. As a result, I won't be making a lot of personal posts regarding my experiences in the quest for a job in consulting. I will, however, continue to maintain the blog if you all believe that it is helpful....this would mean that I would rely more heavily on requests for content as well as you all sharing your experiences with me so that I can share them with others.

From the emails I'm receiving, it seems like there are a lot of folks with offers and/or moving on to the next rounds in the interview process...seems like we might have a lot of offers handed out this year...GOOOOOOD LUCK!

McKinsey 3rd Round Interviews

Hi all, Just a quick post that won't involve too much brainpower from my end, but might help if some of you can add some of your experience. A reader recently wrote to let me know they have been selected for a 3rd round interview at McK (congratulations to you by the way) and they are looking for some insight from any of you who may have had 3rd round interviews with McK in the past. This also might be a good time for any of you with any general 1st or 2nd round experiences to chime in as well to build a body of knowledge before interviewing for the "Big 3" begins in earnest in the next several months.

Thanks for the help!

Deloitte Consulting

Just went through an interesting experience with some of the folks at Deloitte Consulting. I actually hadn't considered looking at Deloitte before because of the strong association as a Big 4 accounting firm; however, a friend encouraged me to reach out to one of the recruiters there and see what they had to offer. As it turns out, they have a pretty good system in place for those of us with a strong background in the life sciences and healthcare.

Deloitte is a huge firm and self-admittedly this can make it a hard place to navigate and network. What they have done to combat this kind of feeling is to segregate their consulting teams into very specific groups. For example the life sciences group can be farther broken down into a life science strategy and operations group. Then within that group can be broken down into R&D teams, or operations teams, clinical teams, etc... By the end of the day you are working with a highly focused and much more manageable group of individuals, which by definition should make the networking process much more manageable. While this might not provide you the breadth of experience you are looking for, it makes it a great place for those of us who know exactly what we want to do.

I talked with a few managers at Deloitte only to find out that they really love my background, but are only hiring at the manager level and up (equivalent to an engagement manager or project leader level)and that kind of position requires some previous experience as a consultant. I have a feeling that once the economy turns around that hiring at the lower levels will have to pick up to support business, but that will probably be the same industry wide.

Just thought I'd throw another nugget of information out there for those of you who are interested and weighing the pros and cons of the different firms...just another taste of what kind of things you can consider...