FTI Consulting Interview: The Assessment Day, Quoted

What FTI Consulting sells, and who is in the room

What FTI Consulting does is a list the firm publishes itself. The careers section lists the service lines, and that list is the reason its interviews differ from a strategy firm's. Turnaround and restructuring sits alongside dispute advisory and international arbitration, forensic work, economic and financial consulting, valuation and damages, investigations, and strategic communications.

That list is also where an answer to why FTI Consulting comes from, because it lets you name a practice, a kind of client and the room you want to be in. Work of that kind is frequently commissioned by a law firm, a creditor committee or a regulator rather than by a chief executive. That changes what a good recommendation looks like. It has to survive being written down, handed to opposing counsel, and questioned line by line months later.

So the qualities being read in an FTI interview lean toward the defensible. Can you state the assumption you made, name the data that would change it, and keep your number stable under pressure. A strategy case rewards a confident recommendation under time pressure. A disputes case rewards a recommendation you can still stand behind when the person asking is paid to break it. An economic consulting case interview is marked on that durability, which is why the worked example further down ends by subtracting what the other side would subtract.

The global page also publishes the shape of the career: "For most consulting positions at FTI Consulting, there are six levels of career progression." The levels themselves are drawn in a graphic and we do not read them here, because we have no reliable text for it.

The three stages FTI Consulting publishes globally

The early careers page hedges first and then commits. It says the process "may vary depending on the country, region, or hiring team", that a recruiter will guide you once you are through, and then it offers what it calls a general outline.

The four formats are defined on the page, and the definitions are the useful part.

• Technical interview. "Evaluates specific skills related to the role."
• Behavioral interview. "Focuses on past experiences and how they align with our values."
• Case study. "Presents a model or real-world problem to solve, demonstrating your analytical and problem-solving abilities."
• Group exercise. "This assesses how well you collaborate with others. The task is designed to observe your teamwork and communication skills."

Read the case study definition twice. A model or a real-world problem is a wider brief than a business case. At a firm with a valuation practice, a model can mean a spreadsheet.

The FTI Consulting video interview questions themselves are described no further than that. The Australian picture adds two adjectives, motivational and competency-based, and no firm page we read prints a single example question.

One administrative line on the same page saves time: to find the right roles, "Use the location filter and select 'Early Talent' under hire type".

Australia publishes the whole pipeline, inside a picture

The Australian how to apply page writes one sentence of introduction, "During the recruitment process, you'll be taken through the following steps:", and then hands the steps to an image. We downloaded that image and read it. Here is what it carries, in the firm's own wording.

Step three is the whole difference, and it is a large one. An Australian graduate faces an assessment day built from three exercises, one of which is an individual case study. An Australian intern faces a technical conversation with senior management and no case.

Two consequences for a candidate. If you are applying for an internship in that market, hours spent on case frameworks are hours spent on the wrong exercise, and hours spent on the technical ground of the practice you applied to are the ones that pay. If you are applying as a graduate, the group assessment is half of the day and it is the part nobody rehearses.

The page also sets the rhythm: "Each year, we start to recruit for the following year's Graduate Program." That is a cycle, so the deadline in your market is the one on the posting.

What the firm tells you to do

The global page publishes preparation advice, split between the assessments and the interviews. Four lines are specific enough to act on.

1. Triage the test. "Be mindful of the time allotted for each section. If you find yourself stuck on a question, move on and return to it if time allows. Prioritizing easier questions first can help you maximize your score."
2. Warm up before the numerical. The firm suggests practicing mental math before a numerical reasoning test, which tells you the arithmetic is timed.
3. Bring examples, deliberately chosen. "Reflect on key skills that are relevant to the role you're applying for. Think of specific examples from your past experiences that demonstrate these skills."
4. Take the pause. "Don't feel pressured to answer immediately. It's okay to take a moment to gather your thoughts before responding to questions. Thoughtful answers are often better than quick ones."

That last one is permission, printed by the employer, and in a pre-recorded video interview it is worth more than it sounds. Recording yourself answering too fast is the single most common way that stage goes wrong.

One safety note the firm puts in writing, because recruitment fraud targets this market: "FTI Consulting's recruiting process never involves interviewing via text or web chat, and we only contact candidates from official fticonsulting.com email addresses."

A damages case, worked in dollars

Disputes work has its own arithmetic, and this is the shape of it.

A components maker had a four-year supply contract for 180,000 units a year at $62. Variable cost was $41 a unit. The buyer walked away at the start of year one. What are the lost profits?

1. Contribution, never revenue. The margin is $62 minus $41, so $21 a unit. Revenue is the wrong number here and claiming it is the fastest way to lose credibility.
2. Annual loss. 180,000 units at $21 is $3.78m a year, so $15.12m across four years on a headline basis.
3. Subtract mitigation. The claimant resold 55% of the volume elsewhere, at a thinner $8 of contribution. That is 99,000 units at $8, or $792,000 a year recovered. Net annual loss falls to about $2.99m.
4. Discount to present value. At 8%, a four-year annuity factor is about 3.31. $2.99m times 3.31 is roughly $9.9m.
5. Say what the two adjustments did. "The defensible figure is about $9.9m against a headline of $15.1m. Mitigation and discounting remove about a third of the claim, and both will be raised by the other side whether or not we raise them first."

Step five is the sentence that matters, and it is the one candidates skip. The number is not the finding. The finding is that a third of the headline claim evaporates under two adjustments that any competent opponent will make, which is why you make them yourself, in writing, before anyone asks.

Watch the units in step three as well. Fifty-five percent of volume was resold, and the recovery is 55% of units at the lower margin rather than 55% of the lost contribution. Those give different answers, and only one of them is right.

The dimensions a defensible recommendation is marked on

No firm publishes a marking scheme, FTI 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 FTI Consulting does not publish

The entry title. The global page speaks of an entry-level consultant and six levels of progression. The graphic that names them is an image we did not read, so we do not name them either.

Who supplies the online assessments, or how long they run.

The platform behind the pre-recorded video interview.

What the assessment day case contains. Sector, length, format: none of it appears.

Whether a case is used outside Australia, and at which stage. The global page lists it among four possible formats and stops.

Any threshold or weighting, at any stage.

Any pay figure. No band, no range and no starting salary appears on the firm pages read for this guide, so FTI Consulting compensation is not something this page can tell you. The offer letter is the document that carries it.

A note on method. The global page hides its text in panels that only exist once opened, and the Australian page publishes its process as a picture. Both were read the hard way for this guide, which is why we quote them rather than summarizing someone else's summary. If you are also weighing restructuring firms, our AlixPartners guide covers a process built on very different steps. The scoring weights above are ours, and the page says so where they appear.