Horváth Interview: Two Stages, and Two Entry Titles

Two stages, and where the case interview sits

The graduates page is the only page on the site that describes the process, and it does it in four sentences: "Our selection process usually consists of two stages. We get to know each other personally and professionally in the first interview. If this meeting is positive for both sides, a second interview takes place where you will get to know more colleagues. You will also work on a case study."

Read the word usually. It is the firm's own hedge and it means your invitation can differ.

What is useful here is the sequencing. The case is not a screen. It arrives after a conversation that has already gone well, which means the first interview is decided on motivation and fit alone. A candidate who spends every free hour on cases and arrives unable to say clearly why this firm and why this work has optimized the wrong stage.

The firm is explicit about what it expects you to bring to that first conversation: "The best way to prepare for this is to engage intensively with the position's requirements as well as with your goals and wishes." It then asks a question worth rehearsing an answer to, which is why you want a new direction.

For scale, that is a short published process. BCG publishes twelve named behaviors on its case interview preparation page, along with the line that there "isn't always a single 'right' answer". Horváth publishes two stages and one instruction. Less to read means more to ask your recruiter.

The title you enter on is decided by your degree

This is the clearest published rule of any firm in this section, and it saves a negotiation.

With a bachelor's degree you join as a Junior Consultant. With a master's, a graduate diploma or a doctorate you join as a Consultant. The firm states the condition for moving up in one sentence: "A completed master's degree or corresponding professional experience is a prerequisite for progressing to Consultant."

The entry prospects page puts the same thing at the door: "You can join us with an excellent bachelor's or master's degree or based on your specific work experience."

Two practical consequences.

If you are weighing a master's, the firm has attached money to the decision. It writes that it offers financial support to strong performers who take one, and the option of returning straight after graduation.

If you arrive with a bachelor's, the Consultant title is reachable through professional experience rather than only through a second degree. That is worth asking about explicitly, because the page names the route without naming a timeline.

Two administrative facts complete the picture. New joiners usually start at the beginning of a month, and the firm recommends applying "about three months before your desired start date". Three months is a long lead time by consulting standards, and applications that arrive six weeks before a graduation date are late by the firm's own measure.

The student routes, country by country

The students page publishes four routes and, unusually, publishes different rules by country.

An internship is described as a fellow consultant position on real projects. The expectation is stated: "To be an intern, you should ideally be in at least your second semester of studies and aim to spend at least two to three months with us."

Start dates then split. "In Germany, we offer internships on an ongoing basis without standardized entry dates. In Switzerland, internships typically start in January or July, each lasting six months. In Austria, internships can begin at the start of each quarter."

A working student position runs alongside your studies with hours fitted to your schedule. A thesis is possible, and the firm says it is "typically offered on the basis of a previous internship", which makes the internship the entrance to two of the four routes.

The fourth is the Horváth Student Club, which the firm describes as a group it accepts students into after an internship where performance was excellent. Members get events, knowledge sharing, and a route back as a working student or for a thesis.

The application rule on that page is worth obeying literally: "only complete applications including a cover letter, resume and references can be processed."

What a controlling case interview asks for

Horváth's published work sits around enterprise steering, planning, cost and profitability management, and the CFO agenda. That is a narrower world than strategy, and it changes the question a case opens with.

A strategy case asks where the profit is. A controlling case asks why the number moved and who owns the movement. Those need different structures. Market share and competitive position are rarely the answer. Cost drivers, planning assumptions, standard costs and variances usually are.

The practical version: when a cost line moves, split the movement into price and quantity before you say anything about causes. A price change is usually owned by procurement or by a hedging policy. A quantity change is usually owned by the plant. Until the split is made, a conversation about accountability is guesswork, and the firm's clients are paying for the split.

That habit also protects you from the most common wrong answer, which is to attribute a whole variance to the most visible cause. The visible cause is often the smaller half.

A cost variance case, worked in dollars

A US plant belonging to an industrial group used 62 million kilowatthours of electricity last year and 66 million this year. The US Energy Information Administration puts the average industrial price at 8.13 cents per kilowatthour in 2024 and 8.62 cents in 2025. The CFO wants to know why the energy line rose and who should answer for it.

1. Last year's cost. 62 million kilowatthours at the 2024 average of 8.13 cents is $5,040,600.
2. This year's cost. 66 million kilowatthours at 8.62 cents is $5,689,200. The total variance is $648,600.
3. Split it three ways. Price variance is the price move on last year's volume: 0.49 cents on 62 million kilowatthours, so $303,800. Volume variance is the extra volume at last year's price: 4 million kilowatthours at 8.13 cents, so $325,200. The joint effect, extra volume at the higher price, is $19,600.
4. Check that the parts rebuild the whole. $303,800 plus $325,200 plus $19,600 is $648,600. If the three pieces do not sum to the total variance, one of them is wrong.
5. Assign each piece. "Roughly half the increase is volume and roughly half is price. The plant owns the 4 million kilowatthours. Procurement owns the tariff. The $19,600 joint term needs a convention, and I would attach it to volume, because the extra consumption was bought at this year's price."

Step five is what a controlling firm is paid for. Two halves of one number belong to two different people, and an answer that reports the $648,600 without splitting it has told the CFO something already visible in the ledger.

Watch the units through the chain. Kilowatthours are in millions, prices are in cents, and the answer is in dollars. Converting cents to dollars once, at the start, is how you avoid arriving two orders of magnitude out.

How we mark a structure built on cost

No firm publishes a marking scheme, Horváth 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 sits on how an answer is assessed.

What Horváth does not publish

What the case study contains. No subject, no length, no format, no indication of whether it carries numbers.

How many interviewers you meet. The phrase is more colleagues, and it stops there.

Whether an online test exists. No page we read mentions one, which is different from a page saying there is none.

The response time after applying. Not published, although the three-month lead time is.

Anything about hiring outside the German-speaking countries. The site lists offices from Atlanta to Riyadh and publishes process detail for none of them.

Any threshold or weighting. None, anywhere.

A note on access, because it affects how much weight to put on these dates. The firm's site refuses our connections and presents a bot check to an automated browser, so every Horváth page here was read through a text reading proxy on 29 September 2026. That gives the words on the page rather than a summary of them, which is the standard this site holds itself to. The scoring weights are ours, and the page says so where they appear.