AlixPartners Interview: Five Steps, One Psychologist

Five published steps, and a conditional case interview

The how we hire page opens with a caveat worth keeping: "While it varies depending on the role or team, an example interview process at AlixPartners looks like this..." Example, and it varies. Then five numbered steps.

Two readings follow from that table, and both are useful.

The case is conditional. The firm writes "and/or", and it writes that your recruiter "will share information about required assessments at the outset of the process." So the question of whether you face a case has an answer, and the answer arrives early if you ask for it.

The assessment comes before the case. Most firms put ability tests first and personality last. Here the psychometric step sits at position three, after two conversations, which means a human has already decided you are worth measuring.

The same page names four qualities and defines each: entrepreneurial, self-starter, analytical, collaborative. The definitions are more specific than the labels. Analytical is written as "Faced with challenging and fast-paced situations, we rely on sound reasoning, backed by data, to solve problems." Self-starter is written as navigating ambiguity with minimal direction.

The assessment, and the psychologist in it

The assessment page is unusual enough to quote at length, because nothing about it is standard practice.

It describes "a series of self-administered online exercises, often in combination with an interview with an organizational psychologist, designed to capture insights into your work preferences, natural motivations and inclinations, and problem-solving capabilities." It says "Candidates across all levels take our assessment", so this is not a graduate screen.

Three facts from that page change how you plan the week.

It takes around two to three hours, cumulatively. The firm's own words. Block the time rather than squeezing it between two other things.

A person may be involved. Often, in the firm's wording, an organizational psychologist interviews you as part of it. That conversation is not a case, and preparing case frameworks for it is wasted effort. Answering it honestly is the only strategy available, which the firm effectively confirms by saying the exercises measure preferences and motivations.

You can hear your results. After a hiring decision, the page says you can "schedule an Assessment Insights session with a member of our Organizational Development team to learn about your results." Almost no firm offers that. It is worth taking whichever way the decision goes, because it is a free read on how you come across, delivered by someone qualified to explain it.

The firm also states why it does this: assessments help it understand people "in a more consistent, balanced, and objective manner rather than relying on human judgment and intuition alone." It names no vendor and no instrument.

The London route publishes a case interview of its own

The students and recent graduates page publishes four routes: a careers development page, an MBA summer internship, internships, and the Business Analyst Accelerated Consulting Programme, described there as the core consulting development programme for London-based master's graduates.

The programme page is specific in ways the general hiring page is not. It runs "Over 15-24 months". It publishes the arc in month bands: onboarding in months 0 to 3, pitch support in 4 to 6, an introduction to client engagement in 7 to 9, client engagements from 10 to 18, and a transition into consulting from 19 to 24.

It names the training. Candidates take the Consulting Acceleration Program to learn "cash management, insolvency and due diligence, as well as modules in basic programming (Python, SQL and PowerBI)". Read that list as a description of the job. Cash management and insolvency are first because they are what the work is.

It sets the bar plainly: the firm looks to recruit "those who have a Master's degree (in any subject) and can demonstrate practical experience in a professional background."

And it publishes its own three-part process: interviews, assessment, case study. On the assessment it says "This isn't a test, and there is no pass or fail." On the case it says the point is "to give you a true sense of what it is like to work on an AlixPartners engagement, showcase your approach to problem solving and how you interact with clients." So for this route the case is not conditional at all.

Four published qualities, and the questions they imply

Steps one and two of the published process are conversations, and the firm publishes no question for either. What it does publish is the four qualities, each with a definition, and a definition is enough to work backwards from. The question forms below are ours. The quality names and the quoted definitions are the firm's.

The Analytical definition is the one to prepare hardest, because the firm wrote the conditions into it: "Faced with challenging and fast-paced situations, we rely on sound reasoning, backed by data, to solve problems." Three conditions in one sentence. Fast-paced, reasoned, data-backed. A story with the data and no time pressure answers two of the three, and the interviewer can see which one is missing.

Where these land matters too. Step two is the hiring team interview, and the firm writes that it encourages you to "ask probing questions at this stage". So the second conversation is two-directional by the firm's own description, and the questions you bring are part of what it measures. Prepare two about the work of a restructuring engagement, since that is what the training list on the graduate programme page says the job actually is.

What a restructuring case asks that a strategy case does not

The firm's own training list is the tell. Cash management and insolvency come before anything resembling strategy, and the case follows the work.

In a strategy case, profit is the scoreboard and the horizon is years. In a distressed case, the scoreboard is cash and the horizon is weeks. A company can be profitable on an income statement and still fail to make payroll, and the exercise is built around exactly that gap. So the questions change shape.

What is the cash position today, and what is it in thirteen weeks. Which outflows are contractual and which are discretionary. What can be moved inside one quarter without a negotiation, and what requires a counterparty to agree. Who has security over which assets. What happens at the next covenant test.

A candidate who opens with market share and competitive positioning in that room has answered a question the client stopped asking months ago. The useful opening is a runway calculation, and everything else is prioritized against it. If you want the contrast in one sitting, work a profitability case from our structuring drill and then the cash case below, and notice how little of the first one survives. Alvarez & Marsal sells the same distressed work across thirteen named practices, where tax carried 41 of the 89 campus roles open on 29 September 2026 and restructuring carried two.

Thirteen weeks of cash, and the wall that comes back

A specialty retailer with $840m of revenue and thin margins has asked for help. Cash on hand is $22m. Weekly operating receipts run $15.4m and weekly operating payments run $16.2m.

1. Get to the burn. Payments minus receipts is $0.8m a week of net burn. On that alone, $22m lasts 27.5 weeks.
2. Find the lumps. A semi-annual interest payment of $12m falls in week 8. That is the number the weekly average hides.
3. Redo the runway with the lump in it. Eight weeks of burn is $6.4m, leaving $15.6m. The interest payment takes it to $3.6m. At $0.8m a week, that lasts 4.5 more weeks. The wall is week 12.5, not week 27.5.
4. Price one lever. Stretching payables by 10 days on $400m of annual supplier spend releases about $11m of cash once, because $400m a year is roughly $1.1m a day. That moves the wall out by about 13.75 weeks, to roughly week 26.
5. Say what it is and what it is not. "Ten days of payables buys about thirteen weeks. The burn is unchanged at $0.8m a week, so the wall returns in the same place unless the cost base moves. I would use the thirteen weeks to renegotiate the store leases, because rent is the largest contractual outflow we can still influence."

Step five is where restructuring cases are won. Working capital is a one-time release, and calling it an improvement is the error the interviewer is waiting for. The burn rate is the run rate. The payables stretch is a loan from your suppliers, repayable in reputation.

Notice the unit trap in step four as well. Supplier spend is annual, the stretch is in days, and the answer is in weeks. Three units, one chain. Say each one out loud as you convert it.

The dimensions we mark a close on

No firm publishes a marking scheme, AlixPartners included. The weights below are ours, applied by our own grader, each out of a hundred and read from the code that scores. The reasoning behind them sits on how an answer is assessed.

What AlixPartners does not publish

Which assessment vendor it uses. The firm calls it the AlixPartners assessment and names no instrument, so any list of its sections you read elsewhere is a guess.

Whether the psychologist interview is standard. The word is "often", which means sometimes it is not.

The entry title outside London. The Business Analyst programme is published as a London master's route. No other entry title appears on the pages we read.

The case length, the case sector, or how many cases. Nothing, on either page that mentions the case.

What the assessment counts for. The firm says there is no pass or fail on it, without saying what it changes.

Any threshold or scoring scheme. None published, as at every firm we have read.

Everything above about AlixPartners was read on the page it is credited to, on 29 September 2026. The cash case is ours, and the arithmetic in it was recalculated by hand before this page went up. The scoring weights are ours too, and the page says so where they appear.