So, Bloomberg Businessweek has this nice fancy guide to getting hired by Deloitte Consulting. I'd share it here but it's proprietary and obviously the person who put it together spent a lot of time and effort centering the tables and choosing a sassy neon green highlight.
We will share just a small piece of it — the most important piece — which explains the "airport test." If you look through our many advice columns over the years, one of the points we always hammer home to the young and confused is that no matter how good your GPA, no matter how impressive your resume, no matter how many years you volunteered for VITA or saved baby goats or read to children at the library, NO ONE is going to hire you if you are a toolbag. Personality is everything and, just as this says, if your interviewer wouldn't want to be stuck in an airport with you for 6 minutes let alone 6 hours, you aren't getting the job.
Now, a little scrolling down from the pretty picture and we find this comment.
Everything I needed to know about Deloitte I learned during my Harvard MBA summer internship there. Staff members were treated like dirt by management, and internalized those norms, so treated each other like dirt. Senior managers relished their subordinates' competition for survival, like Nero at the Coliseum on a Saturday night. Knowing that one young junior staff member was a hemophiliac, they assigned him to a sprawling campus rather than a compact one for orientation, where he tripped on steps and had to be rushed to the hospital to avoid dying — and then they discouraged him, for "being a burden". Then, too, there is the superb article BW published years ago on the lawsuits that clients are filing against firms like Deloitte, for a long list of serious abuses well worth referencing that article to explore. Before you approach this kind of firm, decide whether the money being paid is worth the stink of the association.
Bitter, much? Welcome to the club, pal.
