Community Forum
Ask anything about cases, applications and recruiting. Members and coaches answer.
What tech setup do you need for a virtual case interview?
- Interview/Tech Issues
For virtual MBB interviews, what setup is actually worth having? Laptop only? External webcam? Headset? Second monitor? I want to avoid tech problems without turning my desk into a streaming studio.
You need reliability more than fancy equipment. A stable laptop, working camera and microphone, strong internet, charger, quiet room, and a simple backup connection are enough for most candidates.
Camera or audio stops working during an MBB interview. What do you do?
- Interview/Tech Issues
If your camera freezes or microphone suddenly stops working during a virtual case interview, should you keep troubleshooting live, leave and rejoin, or ask to reschedule? I do not want a small tech problem to turn into ten minutes of awkwardness.
Start with the simplest fix and communicate what is happening. If the interviewer can still hear you, say that your video appears to have frozen and ask whether they would like you to reconnect.
No calculator in a BCG case interview? How much scratch math should I expect?
- Interview/Tech Issues
I heard BCG Boston may not allow calculators for some upcoming interviews, and that honestly threw me because a lot of my practice has been with clean numbers or calculator-style online assessments. For an actual live case, how much arithmetic should I expect to do by hand, and is it worth changing my prep if the office says no calculator?
A no-calculator live case is not unusual. The math is generally designed to be solvable with structured arithmetic, estimation, percentages, ratios, and clean division rather than long technical calculations.
What happens if your internet dies during a virtual MBB interview?
- Interview/Tech Issues
Worst-case question: if your internet drops in the middle of a virtual McKinsey/BCG/Bain interview, does that count against you? What should you do immediately so it does not look like you just disappeared?
Technical failures happen, and a short connectivity problem is not the same as a performance failure. The important thing is how quickly and professionally you recover.