The overall process is: HR Telephone Screen, Technical Case Interview (Homework) with Presentation - 1st round, Consulting Case Interview - 1st round and Final round in the Office.
In this case I will focus more on my personal experiences coming from a tech background.
HR is nice and they are responsive during the process, however they seem to be flying high with applicants using the BCG brand name so there’s a pipeline of candidates. (It took them 4 months to schedule/reschedule the 1st round so I guess HR rocks!)
Cons:
1. The BCG brand name comes with the ego and attitude from its people. This is quite evident in the interview process. One of the interviewers was quite arrogant, egoistic and racially biased, when confronted - unapologetic.
In general, interviewers are meant to push you to work harder and test your logical thinking to gauge your true ability. However, this interviewer was a perfect example of those with big titles but no manners. 2 minutes into the interview process, he asked about myself and motivations on applying, after handling that well, he picked up on certain answers to dig deeper into my prior experience. He rudely interrupted every single sentence I said during the fit questions. The tip off point was when he insulted me for my prior technical experience questioning the choice of technology stack. He did not trust a single word I said, and since he was rudely interrupting he missed half of my answers. For example, when I asked what you do at BCG Gamma “We work on cases just like the homework case and charge high fees for that” or when he decided to probe my prior experience by asking “Why would you use this framework, it should only be used for xyz (because I’m saying so!)”
10 minutes into the interview and I am appalled at how rude this interviewer is, so I decide to confront his actions. He dodged that twice and insisted we move on. The arrogance shown by the interviewer led me to disconnecting the phone call without presenting my homework case and withdrawing from the interview process. There’s similar reviews on this forum of such behaviour, I wonder if the interviewer reflects a similar behaviour to clients or has a split personality. 40 hours of hard work without any appreciation or acknowledgement in the bin. This was raised to HR but they seem ignorant as they have a pipeline of candidates willing to work in such conditions, they claim the interviewer was just “trying to have a conversation” and they have no recordings of the conversation so they trust what the interviewer says.
2. The work they do is mostly PoC’s, there’s no tangible end-to-end transformation work as GAMMA is a practice set up primarily to lure clients into signing off data analytics projects. If you are really good at it, the tech firms are the best place to be. GAMMA is way below the top tier tech firms and hot startups list in terms of standards.
Suggestions to BCG:
Take action on interviewers regardless of their titles or academic credentials, this person should have been let go a while ago for the horrendous behaviour and the countless interviewees who have suffered because of his actions. You might end up becoming the next Uber, it only takes one scandal!
Hope this helps someone avoid a trap