First, the outreach at BCG was great (phone chats, mock cases), and the great majority of my interactions with BCGers were what I would expect of such an exceptional firm.
However, my second interviewer in Miami did not put BCG’s best foot forward. Had the position not been one in which I might not expect to report to this person, I would have withdrawn my candidacy on my way out. Though I admit my performance in this interview was not passable, the interview was not conducted in line with BCG’s interests or standards. I will explain here to give future applicants an idea of the worst case scenario they might expect.
During my first interview my second interviewer was visibly irritated on a call in the adjacent conference room. The second interview began with the interviewer unironically spending a long time mocking me for the length of my answer to "why consulting and why BCG?", condescendingly telling me they wanted no more than 5-10 words in my next answer, that this would be hard for me and they did not expect me to be capable of it. This answer has passed many interviews with consultants, and no answer is worthy of derision in a collaborative environment. This response was indicative of the tone with which the entire interview was conducted.
As a second and final anecdote, after I presented my structure for the case, the interviewer said they didn’t understand and had me explain two more times before directing me away from it as if it was wrong. After leading me to believe I was initially wrong for 15 minutes, they exasperatedly presented me with a table that mirrored the initial structure I laid out, nearly verbatim. That the interviewer would hear me describe the exact data sheet they were holding in their hands and then try to convince me I didn’t “get it” for the remainder of the interview made it clear I was not being interviewed in good faith.
If this were a good-faith attempt at the interview, I'd conclude the interviewer displayed a complete lack of interpersonal, communication and reasoning skills. However, given I can’t imagine someone so lacking in key consulting skills would be promoted to Project Leader at BCG, my hypothesis is that they came into the interview with a strong bias based on things outside of the scope of the interview and a predetermined result, and then engineered an environment in which a reason to give this result would be obtained.
Despite years of positioning myself for this job and great deal of time and expense preparing for the interview, I would have struggled to accept an offer after this experience. Needless to say, this was not a burden I had to bear! Overall, still a great firm.