Gupta Strategists: Six Case Interviews, One Rehearsal

Six interviews, and a case interview in each one

The application process page describes the shape in two sentences: "It consists of two rounds, of three one-hour interviews each. Every hour, you will speak to a different colleague, allowing you to learn about us as well. Each interview consists of a 'fit interview' and a 'case interview'."

Six colleagues, six cases. That volume changes preparation in a way a single mock does not. Stamina becomes a real variable, and so does consistency, because six people compare notes afterwards.

On the case itself the firm says: "The cases usually do not have a right or wrong answer; we pay more attention to how you come to an answer than to the answer itself. Our cases are about various subjects, both within and outside the healthcare sector. Knowledge of healthcare is not required." BCG writes the same thing about the answer on its case interview preparation page, which is a useful cross-check that the sentiment is real rather than a kindness.

What it says it assesses is specific: "a strategy consultant is analytically sharp, performs well in a group and is eager to learn. In the case interviews, we also test your mathematical and communication skills, judgement and creativity."

The last published step is the offer, and the timing is unusually relaxed: "You can start whenever you like: the very next day, or after a few months if that is more convenient."

The practice case interview nobody else offers

Here is the line worth acting on the day your first round is confirmed: "We offer every candidate who is invited for a first round the opportunity to schedule a practice case with one of our colleagues. This conversation does not count as part of the assessment of your first interview and you will receive useful tips."

An unassessed case with a working consultant at the firm you are applying to is better feedback than any paid mock, and it is free. Three things to do with it.

Take it late rather than early. Its value is diagnostic, so use it after you have run a few cases on your own and have a habit to correct.

Ask for the dimension rather than the verdict. A consultant who tells you the answer was fine has told you nothing. Ask which part was weakest: the structure, the arithmetic, the communication, or the conclusion.

Treat the tips as house style. What this colleague corrects is what six colleagues will notice.

The firm also runs a Business Course, which it publishes as a dated event. The November 2026 edition runs on a Friday in Rotterdam, from 9.30 until around 21.30, with teams working a realistic business case and presenting to a jury. Registration closed at the start of that month, and it states that fluent Dutch is required.

The case Gupta Strategists gives away, and its arithmetic

Gupta publishes a full practice case with model answers. Very few firms do. McKinsey publishes four cases with suggested answers on its interviewing page, and most firms publish none.

The case asks for the public return on investment of a chlorine filtered water system funded by a Dutch foundation, and it runs in six steps: structure the question, name the risks, count the disease episodes prevented, convert those into disability adjusted life years, approximate the return, then recap and advise.

We recalculated every published figure by hand. All of it holds.

• Episodes prevented: 10,000,000 people times 1.05 episodes a year times a 30% success rate is 3,150,000. Correct.
• Mortality: 500,000 deaths against a billion episodes is 0.05%. Correct.
• Years of life lost: 0.05% of 3,150,000 is 1,575 deaths, times 60 years of life each, giving 94,500. Correct.
• Years lived with disability: two weeks is 0.0385 of a year, which the page rounds to 4% and says so, times 3,150,000 episodes times a 0.2 disability weight, giving 25,200. Correct, and the rounding is declared.
• Total investment: 196,000 plus 44,000 plus 60,000 is 300,000 euros. Correct.
• Return: 119,700 disability adjusted life years divided by 300,000 euros is 0.399, which the page calls 0.4, and one divided by 0.4 is the 2.5 euros per life year it quotes. Correct.

That is the first published firm case we have audited where every line survives. The method inside it is the thing to copy: convert a population into events, events into a health measure, then the health measure into a rate per euro. Three conversions, each stated out loud.

One instruction on that page is worth taping to your desk: "First answer for yourself what it is you exactly want to calculate and how you will get to this answer before you start working with any numbers."

Who this process is for

The open strategy consultant role sets the bar in three lines, and one of them ends most international applications.

On background: "You are in the final stage of your MSc or PhD or have recently completed it. It is not important which type of study you have done; the combination of different backgrounds makes us strong as a team."

On sector: "It is therefore a must that you are interested in the healthcare sector, although experience or background in healthcare is not required."

On language: "Level of Dutch (written and spoken): minimum C1." That is the real gate. Interest in health can be acquired in a month of reading, and C1 Dutch cannot.

The clients named on that posting tell you what the six cases will be drawn from: hospitals, health insurers, pharmaceutical companies, elderly care organizations, pharmacists, mental healthcare providers, policymakers, regulators, investors, suppliers and sector organizations. The working week is published too: Monday to Thursday with the project team, Friday with everyone in one office.

An operating room case, worked in dollars

Here is the shape of a capacity question in a hospital, with the arithmetic done.

A hospital runs 8 operating rooms, 250 weekdays a year, staffed 10 hours a day. Utilization is 68%. Contribution is $2,100 per productive operating room hour. The board is asking whether to build a ninth room.

1. Size the capacity. 8 rooms times 250 days times 10 hours is 20,000 room hours a year. At 68% utilization, 13,600 of them produce anything, which is $28.56m of contribution.
2. Price the cheap option first. Raising utilization from 68% to 78% adds 10% of 20,000 hours, so 2,000 hours, worth $4.2m. There is no capital in that number and no new staff.
3. Price the expensive option. A ninth room adds 2,500 staffed hours. At the same 68% utilization it produces 1,700 hours, worth $3.57m, against $900,000 a year of staffing. Net $2.67m, and $3.4m of capital pays back in about 1.3 years.
4. Notice what the comparison says. The scheduling fix is worth more than the new room and costs nothing in capital. The new room is only the better answer if utilization is already near its practical ceiling.
5. Then ask the question that decides it. Both options assume the extra hours can be filled and paid for. If the payer contract caps volume, hours above the cap produce cost and no revenue. "I would confirm the waiting list and the contract ceiling before either option, because both of them are worth zero above a capped volume."

Step four is where hospital cases are won, and step five is where they are decided. Capacity arithmetic is easy. Whether the capacity has a buyer is the strategy question, and it is the one a health system consultant is hired for.

Watch the utilization point in step two. Ten percentage points of utilization is 10% of total capacity rather than 10% of current output. Those differ by about a third here, and taking the wrong one is the classic slip.

The dimensions we mark a sizing answer on

No firm publishes a marking scheme, Gupta 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 Gupta does not publish

The gap between the two rounds, and the time to a decision.

How many candidates reach the second round. No figure of any kind.

What the rehearsal reports back. The firm says it does not count toward the assessment, without saying whether impressions travel.

How many of the six cases sit outside healthcare. The page says cases run both inside and outside the sector and leaves the mix open.

The career ladder. Two titles appear in the postings, strategy consultant and strategy consultant with experience, and nothing above them.

Any threshold or weighting. None, as everywhere else.

One honest note about the published answers page: it closes by recommending outside preparation resources, one of which competes with us. We have left the name out rather than send you there, and the fact that the firm points to a third party is the part worth knowing. Everything else above was read on the page it is credited to, on 29 September 2026, and the scoring weights are ours, as the page says where they appear.