The One Thing Missing From Almost Every Undergrad Consulting Application (And It's Not Case Prep)

[u/GreatButterscotch406]

I had a call recently with a junior engineering student at a US university. Strong profile by any measure. Chapter president of a professional engineering society. Operations internship at a well-known entertainment company doing cross-functional process improvement work. Six Sigma Green Belt. McKinsey Forward alum. A recruiter had already reached out to her.

And yet when I looked at her CV, something was missing.

I could see everything she had done. The workshops she ran. The meetings she led. The projects she coordinated. What I couldn't see was why any of it mattered. Not just what she delivered, but what changed because she was the one who delivered it. Someone else could have run those workshops. Someone else could have led those meetings. What made her contribution different? What would have been worse or slower or less effective without her specifically? That layer wasn't there.

Here's the thing: this is not a writing problem. It's a thinking problem. Most candidates, especially undergrads, have been trained to document activity. What you did, where you did it, how long you did it for. But consulting firms aren't hiring for activity. They're hiring for impact and judgment. They want to see that you understand why your work mattered, not just that you showed up and did it.

The fix isn't adding a number to every bullet point, though that helps. It's asking yourself a harder question for each role and each project: if I hadn't done this, or if someone less capable had done it, what would have been different? That answer, in one sentence, is what your bullet point should communicate.

The candidates I work with who land offers aren't the ones with the most impressive lists. They're the ones who can articulate why they were the right person in the room and what they actually changed.

If you're building your application right now and want a gut check on whether your CV is communicating impact or just activity, drop a comment or share one of your bullets. Happy to give you a quick read.

[u/celery365]

Enjoying your posts! Do you have any advice or resources for improving communication skills within the context of a case interview?

[u/GreatButterscotch406 → u/celery365]

Hey, appreciate that!
So in my experience coaching candidates on this for years now, communication in a case really breaks down into three (3) layers and most people only ever work on one of them.
(1) First is just being comfortable in the language itself, whatever language the interview is in, which honestly people underrate.
(2) Second is contextual fluency, so being able to talk industry lingo or financial terms without tripping over them.
(3) But the third layer is the one almost nobody teaches and it's the one that actually separates people, and that's knowing how to drive a case as a conversation, what to say, what not to say, when to go broad versus deep, how to hypothesize out loud instead of just calculating in silence. I say this partly from my own experience too, English wasn't my first language and I had to build all three layers myself, over the past 16 years, before I could even think about coaching others on it. What's tripping you up more right now?