EY Case Interview 2026: The Three Criteria It Prints

The three criteria, and the one that fails

EY states its method first: it leans heavily on behavioral interviewing, on the premise that past behavior predicts future behavior. Questions open with "Give an example of" or "Describe a situation when." Then it prints the grid.

The third row is where prepared candidates lose marks. A story about a project that was hard, rescued and delivered often ends at delivery. EY asks what your action led to, so the last sentence has to carry a result and attach it to something you did.

Two further instructions come from the same page. Prepare 10 to 15 examples you can adjust on the fly, which is a volume, and EY publishes it. And do not memorize or read your responses from a script, which is EY's own words about the video round.

The application windows, printed with closing dates

EY's early careers page publishes its US campus windows with both dates. Most firms publish neither.

Two readings matter. The consulting window is fourteen days long, which is short enough that a candidate who starts preparing when they see the posting has already lost most of it. And Consulting and EY-Parthenon share one window rather than running two, so the choice between the broad consulting practice and the strategy and transactions arm is made inside a single fortnight. Our EY-Parthenon guide covers the interview on that side, and what EY-Parthenon is covers the practice itself.

The same page attaches a hard rule to applying at all. EY asks candidates to apply to no more than two jobs within a six month period. That turns a volume strategy into a decision, and it is stated twice across EY's pages.

The assessment that lands in a day

The line is precise. After applying, you will receive an email invitation within one business day to complete an EY skills assessment, and EY says to complete and submit it within the stated time frame to complete your application. Your application is incomplete until then.

EY does describe it, on a dedicated page we failed to find the first time. That page answers eighteen questions: three sections with one of them timed, 45 to 60 minutes in total, a 48-hour window to finish, one attempt only, and no score returned to you. We take it apart in the EY online assessment guide. What EY still withholds is narrower than we claimed: the section names, the question count and any threshold.

The how we hire page mentions a different thing again: a written assessment, online or at a testing center, whose "exact structure and content will depend on the country, service line and role to which you apply". Nothing on EY's site connects that written assessment to the skills assessment, and we will not connect them for you.

Three practical consequences follow from that gap:

1. Clear the evening you apply. The invitation arrives within a business day and carries its own deadline.
2. Apply when you can sit it, rather than at the end of a long day, because you cannot see what it is until it opens.
3. Use the practice questions inside the platform. EY says you may attempt practice items for the timed portion before starting it, and says preparation is unnecessary for the two untimed sections because they report your own history.

Where an EY case interview actually appears

EY names the case in one sentence, on the early careers page, among three formats: the style, format and number of rounds are based on business needs and may include prerecorded video, live video and case study interviews. Every clause there is conditional.

EY Canada's student page is the only other place we found it, and it is conditional again. Its preparation list says to practice case interviews, followed by the words "(if applicable)". EY's Indian interview page never mentions a case at all.

So the honest statement is narrow. EY runs case interviews for some roles in some countries and publishes no rule for which. Your invitation is the document that decides, and it is worth reading twice for the word "case".

That Canadian page carries two other things worth having. The student application there includes a video application as part of the file rather than as an interview, and EY asks you to combine your resume, cover letter and transcript into one PDF. It also tells you not to pay for an official transcript, since a print to PDF from the school portal is accepted.

The video round, and what EY says it forgives

EY describes two video formats: prerecorded, where you record answers to questions sent in advance, and live. Its rules are unusually concrete, and its list of things it will not hold against you is more useful than its list of things to do.

EY says not to worry if you sneeze, if your dog barks in the background, or if an ambulance goes by, and it says the same about a blip in your audio or video. It also tells students two things that change behavior: do not wait until the deadline to record, and do not assume you have to use all of your allotted time for each question.

On the mechanics, EY recommends keeping your browser up to date and names Chrome. It asks for earbuds or a headset, a quiet room, and the same dress as an in-person interview. And it tells you to look directly into the camera rather than at yourself, suggesting you cover your own image on screen if it distracts you.

Set against the three criteria above, the prerecorded round is the easiest place to lose the third mark. There is no interviewer to prompt you for the outcome, so the result has to be in the answer you planned.

A margin case interview, worked in dollars

EY Consulting runs supply chain and operations work alongside finance and technology, so here is a case in that currency. Every figure is invented for the exercise. Work it before reading on.

A packaged snacks maker sells 40 million units a year at an average price of $3.20. Cost of goods is $2.24 a unit. Input costs have risen by $0.16 a unit. The client asks whether to pass it through.

1. Size today. 40 million units at $3.20 is $128m of revenue. Cost of goods is 40 million at $2.24, or $89.6m. Gross profit is $38.4m, a 30% margin.
2. Size the shock. Cost of goods per unit becomes $2.40, so total cost of goods is $96m. Gross profit falls to $32m and the margin to 25%.
3. Price to restore it. Holding volume at 40 million, restoring $38.4m of gross profit needs $0.96 of margin a unit, so the price must be $3.36. That is a rise of $0.16, or 5%.
4. Test the volume. If a 5% price rise costs 6% of volume, the client sells 37.6 million units. At $0.96 a unit that is $36.096m of gross profit.
5. Read the gap. $36.096m against $38.4m leaves the client $2.304m short, which is 6% below where it started.

Step five is the point of the case. Because the price rise restores unit margin exactly, gross profit now moves one for one with volume, so a 6% volume loss costs 6% of gross profit. The recommendation writes itself from there: pass the cost through, and the case turns on the elasticity estimate rather than on the pricing arithmetic.

Where our weights land on an EY answer

EY publishes three criteria for behavioral answers and no marking scheme for a case. No firm we have read publishes one. The weights below are ours, read from the code that runs our grader, each out of a hundred, and the reasoning behind them sits on how an answer is assessed.

What EY does not publish

The content of the skills assessment. The vendor is unnamed. So are the length and the sections. EY says only that it arrives within a business day and must come back inside the stated window.

Which service lines run a case interview. Named as possible in the US, named as conditional in Canada, absent from the Indian page.

The number of rounds. EY writes that style, format and number of rounds are based on business needs.

Any threshold, on the assessment or on the interview.

Whether the dated windows apply outside the US. We read them on the US early careers page and found no equivalent elsewhere.

Pay. No EY page we read publishes a range for a consulting seat.

Everything above that is attributed to EY was read on the page it is credited to, and each of those six pages sits in the ledger with the date we read it. The worked case is invented and says so, and the scoring weights are ours, as the section that carries them says.

What changed on this EY guide

Each entry carries the date of the change.

7 October 2026. We said EY has no dedicated assessment page. It has one. This page previously told readers that no such page existed and that any description of the assessment's contents was guesswork. EY publishes an eighteen-answer FAQ giving the section count, the duration, the completion window and the single-attempt rule. Our error was checking only EY's US careers pages and never its assessment page or any other market. The paragraph and the third practical step have been rewritten, and the detail now lives in the EY online assessment guide.

29 September 2026. A claim that the steps could not be verified. The earlier version said it would not describe EY's screening steps because there was no way to check them. EY publishes an application timeline with closing dates, an assessment rule, three interview formats and a marking standard for behavioral answers. The sentence has gone.

29 September 2026. No sources whatsoever. The page carried 290 words and no ledger. It now carries six EY pages, each with the date it was read.

29 September 2026. A single EY process. The old page treated EY Consulting as one pipeline. EY's own national pages describe different files, different formats and a case that appears in some markets and not others. The page now names the country each statement comes from.

29 September 2026. A rubric borrowed from another page. The earlier version pointed every reader at the exhibit drill and its weights, which was the same paragraph we had placed on nine other firm pages. EY publishes a standard for the ending of an answer, so the synthesis weights are the ones that belong here, and the synthesis drill is the drill that matches them. The structuring drill is the one to open first if your branches are the problem rather than your close.