Typically you’ll find that Top and Mid Tier Management Consulting firms look to take in hires early to mid March every year, about a month ahead of other Professional Services firms. In order to be prepared for this recruitment period, keen applicants will typically prepare during the summer vacation leading up to recruitment, normally around December to January (Yes, you heard right. During the holidays!).

So what can you do to battle these competitors? GradTips offers you 5 key qualities a management consultant needs in order to be successful.

An Australian Association of Graduate Employers survey found more than 80 per cent of employers use “behavioural interviewing” when selecting graduates. As such, most business and professional services employers tend to focus on finding out who you are, what you do, what you like/dislike - rather than focusing on your academic results, although it would be nice to have both.

What does this translate to in an interview? This means candidates will be asked how they’ have handled a situation rather than how they would handle it.

Lined up for a case study interview?

These interviews are there to test your analytical capability, listening skills, presentation skills, quantitative skills, and your ability to make reasonable assumptions among ambiguous sets of data.

Here are a few examples to help you thinking:

1. How many metres have you travelled to get to this interview office?
2. How many cars are on the Sydney Harbour Bridge right now?
3. How many golf balls can you fit into a standard sized olympic swimming pool?

So you have just arrived at the interview. You believe you have researched the company, the position you are applying for, and you have also prepared quite a few practice questions and answers beforehand. You have also made sure you look and smell good.

However, there are many more things to consider apart from all this preparation. All the preparation in the world will not matter, if you do not succeed in creating a lasting impression in an interview. The following is 7 step guide to building the right image for your interviewer:

Whether it be standing in front of 10 people or 1000 people, or even just sitting across the table at a job interview, we’ve all been nervous at one stage or another. Don’t worry this is normal. We aren’t all born great speakers.

The following article summarises 5 key things to keep in mind while you are in a presentation, or when you are simply in front of someone that you need to create some rapport with.

So you’ve got passed the cover letter and Resume screening, and now you are on to the interview - well done. There’s more work to be done however! If you have researched correctly during recruitment periods, and made sure you have spent more time on your cover letter and CV, you should have a plethora of interviews to attend to. To celebrate, the following is a list of things the interviewer DOESN’T want to hear.

A Cover Letter is a list of reasons why you are the best suited candidate for a job. Thus, the first step to getting that interview is to make a cover letter stand out from the rest of the crowd. The average student won’t spend enough time to perfect it, often resulting in a long, drabby, and unenthusiastic passage of arduous text. While it is largely difficult to summarise your offerings within a one page summary, the following is an article which provides 5 key tips and considerations to assist in writing a cover letter from scratch.

Having spoken to the national recruit managers of top management and strategy consulting firms, I guarantee you that they come across the same common mistakes year by year when receiving resumes and cover letters; and for these applicants, they will issue an automatic red cross of disapproval.

This article addresses a checklist that you should perform all the time before you hit your submit button: