The first round includes two in-person interviews, very standard fit/behaviour questions for warm-up, followed by a case study. Cases are okay; one of them is a written case. The written case interviewer was friendly and engaged, while the other was 20 minutes late and seemed quite lethargic throughout the interview. They sent a travel reimbursement form for me to fill in, but I never received my travel costs, lol. Also, no feedback (even though they make it clear before the interview).

While meeting the team from Marakon was pleasant, the process was far from pleasant. Two main points: 1. Awfully self-centred process: Upon completion of the final round, if you do not make it through, you receive a sweetly drafted email that ends with ”Please note that due to the high number of applications we receive, we are unable to provide feedback to individual candidates.”, which is mind-boggling! To think that you spend over 5 hours to interview with a firm and they do not bother to give feedback to even those candidates that were dinged after the final rounds? Very telling about the culture one can expect within the firm. I myself ignored all the other reviews on GlassDoor; it turns out they were all more or less correct. Ironically, a boutique such as Marakon says they cannot provide feedback to Candidates. At the same time, every other MBB I have interviewed (which certainly has WAYY more applicants) takes the time to share feedback on interview performance. One suggestion to the team – maybe invite only those many candidates to who you can provide feedback for the interviews? Quite ironic that you, on your website, encourage candidates to take feedback from other companies they are interviewing with when you deny candidates the VERY same feedback. 2. Terribly vague guidelines about the interview: In advance of the final round of interviews with Marakon, you are told that you will have two ‘Fit Interviews’ and one Case interview. And this could not be further from the truth. They are all case interviews, only with varying levels of structure. With the ”Case Interview” being the most structured, one of the two ”Fit Interviews” features a brief fit component and an extensive deep dive into a business or industry that you find interesting, with the other featuring a minute or two of small talk about your profile spending the rest of the hour on generic brainstorming questions such as ”what should a company consider while entering a new market.” Overall, they are either trying to mislead the candidates so they aren’t fully prepared, or the recruitment team doesn’t know the contents of the final interview – either of which cannot be a good look for any firm.