Don’t want to fill out any more application forms or do any more perception tests? Peter Flynn offers some innovative advice.

 

It’s that time of the year again: graduate job-hunt season!

Hooray.

For those of us who can’t get enough of online numerical reasoning tests, verbal reasoning analyses, psychometric exams, e-tray exercises (whatever they are), and assessment centres, this is the most exciting time of the year. Any aspiring management consultants out there will be vibrating with anticipation at the prospect of spending hours crouched in front of a laptop, staring at graphs and pie-charts, trying to work out ratios and percentages. Is it A, B, C, D, or E? Oh!

The good news is, if you pass all these challenges, you’ve got yourself a career in a management consultancy firm.

And if you don’t pass, then, well, you can probably do something else.

Or not, as the case may be.

I think that it is time that we went back to the good old days, when all you had to do to get a job was hand over a CV and shake somebody’s hand. If the interviewer went to your old school, so much the better.

So much the better. But now we live in a meritocracy, don’t we?

So, as well as preparing a CV, and practising your handshaking technique like a monkey or a pig, you have to be good at maths (how vulgar) and tell someone you don’t know about a time when you ‘led a team’, or had to ‘deliver a difficult message’. What? I thought this was a consulting job, not a team-leading and difficult message delivering job?

Rather than going through all of this, why don’t you just follow my advice?

Here it comes: if you’re so desperate to get a job in management consulting, it’s probably easier to set up your own consulting firm, and then hire yourself.

And who’s to say you couldn’t do that? Why, it’s the consulting firms themselves!

These companies are so afraid of talented graduates setting up rival firms – and upsetting their comfortable status quo – that they’ve created a recruitment process more complex than anything even dreamed possible by the most demented bureaucrat in the whole history of the Weimar Republic.

That’s right, I’m talking about the Weimar Republic.

So if you really want a job, make one. Don’t apply for one. Let’s rise up again and form our own consulting firms.

Then, the next time someone asks you about ‘a time when you made a difference’, you can tell them all about it.

 

Peter Flynn

Image Credit  -  oooh.oooh

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