Tips for Phone Consulting Interviews

Keep in the mind the following tips for doing case interviews by phone.

• Describe your case structure in detail. Suppose your main topics were market size, competition, and products, with two or three bullet points beneath each main topic. You might explain your structure as follows: "There are three topics I'd like to address: market size, competition, and products. Under market size, I'd like to discuss X and Y. Under competition, I'd like to discuss Z. So, to recap, market size, competition, and products seem to be the key areas to focus on." You are essentially telling your interviewer how to replicate your structure over the phone; that is the level of detail you will likely need in order for the interviewer to follow your thinking.
• Be very straightforward with communication. Try to avoid highly nuanced comments that would be more effective in person. Good-natured sarcasm might work face-to-face but not in a phone interview.
• Overexplain your calculations. To be safe, you need to be extremely explicit about what you're calculating. Here is an example: "I'm going to shift to calculation mode for a second. I want thirty percent of 800 people, which is 240 people. So we'll use 240 people as our market size." This is probably one level of detail greater than you might have in person.
• Prepare your interviewer for pauses in the action. What if you need to take a few seconds to ponder a question? Say so. "That's a good question. Let me take ten seconds to process that." In person, you would prep your interviewer for your thinking time but you might not need to set the light expectation of how long he has to wait.