Landing a job as a consultant at FTI Consulting requires impeccable communication skills strategic thinking and the ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment. With competition fierce for these coveted roles, you must enter each interview ready to showcase your qualifications and fit.
In this comprehensive guide, I’ll share the most common FTI Consulting consultant interview questions and provide tips to help you craft winning responses.
FTI Consulting’s interview process aims to assess critical thinking, interpersonal abilities, and core competencies needed to advise clients and drive results. While specific questions vary, certain key themes tend to emerge. Here are some top questions to expect and how to tackle them:
Getting to Know You
These questions evaluate your background, interests, and motivation:
Q: Why FTI Consulting?
Tips: Show your enthusiasm for their mission, services, and culture. Discuss aspects that appeal to you such as diverse practices, global footprint, career growth opportunities. Demonstrate knowledge of their business.
Q: Why consulting?
Tips: Share your passion for solving complex business problems and driving strategic change. Discuss skills like analytics, critical thinking, communication that make you a strong fit. Highlight your intellectual curiosity and eagerness to take on new challenges.
Q: Walk me through your resume.
Tips: Focus on experiences most relevant to the role. Provide concise yet compelling overviews of key projects, quantifying achievements. Emphasize transferable skills versus just duties. Discuss why you made pivotal career choices.
Q: What accomplishment are you most proud of?
Tips: Pick an example that showcases skills needed for consulting like leadership, analytics, relationship building. Discuss the situation, actions you took, and results achieved. Quantify the impact you made.
Q: Tell me about something not on your resume.
Tips: Share meaningful experiences that provide additional context, like academics, leadership roles, internships. Tie it back to a strength or skill that translates to consulting work. Keep it professional.
Core Consulting Competencies
These assess skills critical for success in the role:
Q: Tell me about a time you had to lead a team.
Tips: Outline a situation where you brought alignment, motivated, and delegated effectively. Share how you managed diverse personalities to deliver collective results. Emphasize collaboration and conflict resolution skills.
Q: Describe a time you faced conflict or disagreement.
Tips: Illustrate mature conflict management and negotiations skills. Share how you approached the situation level-headedly, heard others out, and found consensus. Discuss the outcome and learnings gained about working through differences.
Q: How would you go about building consensus amongst a group with differing opinions?
Tips: Discuss techniques like active listening, finding common ground, and spotlighting shared goals. Share how you would foster open dialogue, synthesize perspectives, and guide the group toward alignment.
Q: Tell me about a complex problem you solved.
Tips: Choose an example showcasing analytical abilities, creative thinking, and structuring ambiguous problems. Discuss your systematic process, weighing alternatives, and arriving at data-backed recommendations. Share results achieved.
Q: How would you convince a client to move forward with your proposed solution?
Tips: Highlight tailoring messaging to the client’s priorities and concerns. Discuss quantifying the ROI, outlining implementation plans, and gaining buy-in across stakeholders. Demonstrate expertise and confidence balanced with listening.
Case Interview Questions
These assess analytical skills and problem-solving under pressure:
Q: Our client is a pharmaceutical company whose revenue has declined over the past few years. What factors could be driving this trend, and what would you recommend?
Tips: Demonstrate structured thinking by clearly outlining an issue analysis framework. Highlight exhaustive thinking by brainstorming multiple hypotheses – competitive forces, regulations, R&D costs etc. Then discuss prioritizing what to investigate first.
Q: A retail bank is experiencing higher customer attrition rates compared to competitors. How would you approach identifying the root causes?
Tips: Propose steps like analyzing customer data to find patterns, surveying former customers on why they left, mystery shopping competitors to identify differentiation gaps. Outline analysis principles like avoiding assumptions and validating hypotheses with data.
Q: Our client is looking to break into a new market but is concerned about risks. How would you advise them on evaluating potential entry strategies?
Tips: Suggest a risk mitigation framework analyzing factors like market size, competition, regulatory climate, and customer needs in the new market. Discuss market entry options from licensing models to partnerships and M&As. Share how you would quantify costs, risks, and strategic fit to aid decision-making.
Q: Imagine you are developing a pricing strategy for a new product our client is launching. Walk me through your approach.
Tips: Demonstrate a systematic process covering aspects like customer willingness-to-pay, competitor benchmarking, product positioning, volume forecasts, and cost structure analysis. Share how you’d synthesize these inputs to devise pricing scenarios for evaluation.
Thought Leadership
These assess business knowledge and strategic perspective:
Q: In your opinion, what emerging technologies or trends will most impact the consulting industry in the next 5 years?
Tips: exhibit strategic thinking and market awareness by discussing gamechangers like AI/automation, blockchain, digital transformation. Share both opportunities to leverage these trends as well as risks to mitigate – emphasize balanced perspective.
Q: If you could transform one aspect of FTI Consulting, what would it be and why?
Tips: This shows strategic vision coupled with sensibility. Resist the urge to ‘fix’ things. Instead, share ideas to help take them to the next level based on your research, like tapping new capabilities or enhancing collaboration. Demonstrate strategic thinking.
Q: What major challenges do you foresee our client’s industry facing over the next few years? How could we help address this?
Tips: Tailor your response to the client’s specific industry. Use your business knowledge to highlight upcoming challenges whether economic, political, or technology disruptions. Then discuss FTI’s capabilities and experience that could help clients proactively prepare and adapt.
Q: How do you stay current on business, economic, and technology trends?
Tips: Discuss reading respected publications, industry research, attending conferences, and subscribing to thought leader insights. Share how you apply these learnings to provide more strategic counsel to clients dealing with uncertainty.
Q: How would you convince a prospect to select FTI versus another consulting firm?
Tips: Avoid bashing competitors. Instead, focus on FTI’s strengths like their deep bench of experts, experience across many industries and practices, and track record of delivering results. Share differentiators like tech-forward approach balanced with hands-on experience.
The consulting interview aims to gain a holistic view into your thinking process, strategic perspective, communication ability, and motivations. Preparation is key across all question types – from technical prowess to business knowledge:
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Research FTI Consulting thoroughly, aligning your skills, values, and goals with their organization.
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Brush up on current events, emerging trends, and business best practices to demonstrate strategic acumen.
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Be ready to draw on past experiences and academic projects that showcase your analytical, leadership, and problem-solving abilities. Quantify your impact.
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Practice case interviews aloud to improve your structured thinking and ability to communicate your approach clearly.
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Prepare stories and examples that highlight your strengths, achievements, and fit for the consulting role.
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Review your resume and be prepared to discuss it confidently. Address any gaps positively.
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Prepare thoughtful questions to ask that demonstrate your engagement and interest.
The competition is intense for consulting roles at top firms like FTI. With diligent preparation, you can stand out by articulating your value, thought leadership, and motivation. Showcase how consulting aligns with your long-term aspirations. With a strategic approach, you can convey your ability to succeed in this challenging yet rewarding career.
FTI Consulting Interview Questions
Based on the Interview Insights at this company, the Interview Experience is a score between 1 star (very bad) and 5 stars (very good).
The number in the middle of the doughnut pie chart is the mean of all these scores. If you move your mouse over the different parts of the doughnut, you’ll see exactly how each score was calculated.
The title percentile score is based on an adjusted score based on Bayesian Estimates that is applied to the whole Company Database. This is done to account for companies that don’t have many interview insights. The confidence in a “true score” rises as more reviews are given about a business. This causes the score to move closer to its simple average and away from the average of the whole dataset. 3. 9.
Based on the Interview Insights at this company, the Interview Difficulty is a score that goes from “very difficult” (red) to “very easy” (green).
The number in the middle of the doughnut pie chart is the mean of all these scores. The higher the number, the more difficult the interviews on average. This doughnut has different parts that, when you move your mouse over them, show you the 20% breakdown of each score given.
The title percentile score is based on an adjusted score based on Bayesian Estimates that is applied to the whole Company Database. This is done to account for companies that don’t have many interview insights. That is, as a business learns more, it becomes more sure of a “true score,” which moves it closer to its own simple average and away from the overall average of the data set. 2. 7.
Based on reviews at this company, the 20% of interns getting full-time offers chart is meant to give you a good idea of how the company hires people.
The number in the middle of the doughnut pie chart is the mean of all these scores. This doughnut has different parts that, when you move your mouse over them, show you the 20% breakdown of each score given.
It uses an adjusted score based on Bayesian Estimates to account for companies that don’t have many reviews, which is how the percentile score in the title is found. To put it simply, when a business gets more reviews, the “true score” becomes more likely to be accurate. This makes it move closer to the simple company average and away from the average of all the data points. 77%.
15 Consulting Interview Questions You WILL Get Asked
How do I get a job at FTI Consulting?
You will need to ace every single case interview in order to land a FTI Consulting job offer. FTI Consulting case study interviews are candidate-led. You will be in the driver’s seat of the case interview and will be expected to ask the right questions, perform the right analyses, and steer the overall direction of the case.
How many interview questions are there at FTI Consulting?
Work at FTI Consulting? Share Your Experiences FTI Consulting interview details: 993 interview questions and 924 interview reviews posted anonymously by FTI Consulting interview candidates.
What is the interview process like at FTI Consulting?
The first round for the consulting analyst position is a HireVue (online one way interview) The prompts are basic questions like why FTI Consulting, why consulting, tell me about yourself, etc. The recruitment process was very efficient, the interviewers were very kind. The interview had a conversational style. Highly recommend the company.
What skills do FTIs look for in their consultants?
Before your interview, review the job description to see what skills FTIs look for in their consultants. In your answer, explain which of these skills you possess and how they benefit you as an employee. Example: “The most important skill I believe a consultant needs is communication.
