OC&C Case Interview 2026: Nine Different Processes, One Firm

The London advert, and the four case interviews in it

The Associate Consultant 2027/28 Strategy advert lists the process under a heading of its own.

Four case interviews in total, and the second round is twice as long per case as the first. That is the single most useful line in the advert. A 30 minute case leaves no room for a slow start, and a 45 minute case will go somewhere your opening structure did not anticipate.

Two other details deserve attention. The firm asks you to strip your name and contact details from your CV before you submit it. And it discloses that an internally developed AI tool helps screen CVs, adding that some screening decisions may be made using the tool without prior individual human review, with people making the final hiring decision.

That combination tells you what the CV has to do. It cannot lean on a recognizable name or school signal in the header, and it has to survive a first pass that may be machine made. The application page names the three things the firm judges a CV on: intellectual curiosity, extracurricular interests, and commercial awareness. It also says a CV should run one to two pages.

The advert prints the London starting salary, which we have not seen on another strategy firm graduate advert: £54,000, plus a £7,000 signing bonus and an annual performance bonus. It also prints a hard deadline of 23:59 on Sunday 1 November 2026.

Nine offices, nine different case interview routes

The 2024 graduate brochure sets out the hiring process office by office. We have not seen this table quoted anywhere else, and it changes how you should prepare.

Read down the right column and the differences are not cosmetic. Rotterdam asks for seven interviews and adds a written case, which is a different exercise: you build the argument alone, on paper, with nobody to ask. Australia asks for three. The US office lists no online test, so your CV goes straight to a case. Milan opens with a conversation rather than a test.

Preparation follows from that. If you are applying to Paris, every case you rehearse should run a full hour, because a 60 minute case asks for depth after the structure rather than speed through it. If you are applying to Rotterdam, at least one practice session has to be silent and written. If you are applying to the US, there is no test to warm you up and your first contact with the firm is a case.

One consequence is easy to miss. The advice written about OC&C tends to describe the London shape, which is the one the firm details most fully in its own advert. Applied to Rotterdam or Milan, that advice is about a different process. OC&C also sets a language requirement per office section, and five of the nine ask for a second language alongside English, with only the German sections naming a level.

Where the Analytics track moves the case interview later

London runs two separate graduate adverts, and you may apply to only one. The Analytics advert says candidates applying to the London office are invited to apply to one Associate Consultant position only, and that you cannot submit both.

The processes differ in two ways. Analytics adds an online Python coding test after the video assessment, and the advert says that only basic coding ability is required. Its first round is described as two 30 minute interviews with the Analytics Team, without the words case study that appear in the Strategy advert. The second round is identical in both: two 45 minute in person case study interviews with Associate Partners and Partners.

The brochure puts the same split more bluntly, describing the London first round as case studies for strategy and technical for analytics. So the Analytics route does not remove the case. It moves it later, and puts a technical screen in front of it.

The deadlines differ too. Strategy closes on 1 November 2026, Analytics on 8 November 2026. Both adverts print the same starting salary.

Three more facts about entry sit on the application page and are worth knowing before you choose a track. PhDs and post docs join as Associate Consultants, at the same grade as undergraduates. MBAs enter one grade higher, as Consultants. And the firm screens on a rolling basis, so the test link can reach you before the vacancy closes. Applying in the first week and applying in the last week are not the same decision.

A premium pet food case, worked in dollars

One first-hand candidate account of the London first round, posted on a public forum several years ago, describes market sizing and factor questions rather than long strategy cases. We cannot verify it and we are not treating it as a firm source, but it fits a 30 minute slot. Here is a case built in an OC&C sector, consumer goods, run end to end so you can see the arithmetic.

The question. A premium pet food brand sells through US grocery. It can buy more shelf space for $18 million a year in trade spend, and the team believes this wins two points of market share. Should it?

1. Play the question back, then size the market. "I want the US premium pet food market sold through grocery, then our share of it, then whether two points of that share covers $18 million of spend. Is this an annual decision?"
2. Build the number top down. About 130 million US households, and roughly half own a dog or a cat, so call it 65 million pet households. At about $400 of pet food a year each, that is a $26 billion market.
3. Cut it twice. Premium is perhaps 30% of spend, giving $7.8 billion. Grocery carries maybe a quarter of that, since specialty retail and online take the rest. That leaves roughly $2.0 billion sold through grocery. State both percentages out loud as assumptions you would check.
4. Run the decision. Two points of a $2.0 billion market is $40 million of incremental revenue. At a 40% gross margin that is $16 million of gross profit, against $18 million of spend. The move loses $2 million a year.
5. Say what would flip it. Break even needs $18 million of margin, so $45 million of revenue, so 2.25 points of share. "I would not fund this at two points. It turns positive above 2.25 points, so the question I want answered is how confident the share estimate is, and whether the extra shelf also lifts our existing units."

Notice what carried the answer. Every assumption was named as one, the units stayed consistent from households to dollars, and the recommendation came with the number that would change it. Two of the three would survive a challenge from a Partner. The share estimate is the soft one, and saying so first is better than being told.

The dimensions below are the ones our own grader measures on a market sizing answer, each carrying a share of a hundred. They are ours, written by us, and OC&C publishes no equivalent.

The marking scheme the firm never prints

OC&C states what it wants in a consultant and publishes no marking scheme. Its brochure says the firm treats each problem as unique, and that there is no generic framework and no rulebook. That is a position on frameworks. It says nothing about how an answer is marked. The weights below are ours, written by us: they are the dimensions our own grader measures on a structure, each carrying a share of a hundred. OC&C has never seen them.

Six ways candidates lose an OC&C case

1. Treating a 30 minute case like a 45 minute one. The first round gives you half the time of the second. Spending four minutes writing a structure in silence spends a seventh of the interview.
2. Announcing a framework. The firm's own brochure says there is no generic framework and no rulebook. Naming one shows you arrived with a shape and are looking for a problem to fit it.
3. Carrying units sloppily in a sizing question. Households, pets, dollars per year and market share are four different units. A sizing answer usually breaks at the unit before it breaks at the arithmetic.
4. Skipping the sanity check. A $26 billion US pet food market is checkable against your own sense of the category. Say why the number looks right before you go on.
5. Preparing London and applying to Rotterdam. The office decides the format. Seven interviews and a written case is a different preparation from four spoken ones.
6. A CV that leans on the header. It goes in anonymous, and a tool may read it first. The three criteria the firm names have to be visible in what you did, because the header is gone before anyone reads it.

Two of these are specific to this firm, and four transfer. The fit practice covers the behavioral half, which the online assessment touches before any interviewer does, and practice by firm shows the drills available against a named process.

A test before a case is now the usual European shape. Altman Solon times its test, then leads the cases itself shows the same two steps, with both of them described.

What OC&C does not publish

Any sample case. OC&C publishes no worked case of its own. It does run its own virtual case workshops, which it describes as introducing the case format used for recruiting at OC&C with example cases, and those are free. The cases used in them are not posted online, so attending is the only way to see them.

The test vendor, length or pass mark. The advert names the assessment and describes its content in one sentence. It does not say who built it, how long it runs, how many questions it has or what score passes. Any of those numbers you read elsewhere did not come from the firm.

The calculator rule. No page we read says whether a calculator is allowed, in the test or in the interviews. Read that as silence rather than as a prohibition. Ask the recruiter, and plan to be able to do the arithmetic either way.

How a case is marked. No dimensions, no weights, no scoring language anywhere. The firm is precise about the shape of its process and silent about the measurement inside it.

What the AI screening tool weighs. The advert discloses that it exists and that some decisions may be made without prior human review. It does not say what it looks at, and points to the privacy policy for the rest.

Its own headcount, consistently. The 2024 global brochure says 15 countries and 700+ people. The 2025 UK brochure says 14 countries and 900+ people. A manager advert read on the same day says 14 offices worldwide. We publish the range and the date of each rather than pick one.

One last thing worth acting on. The firm's recruitment fraud page says genuine mail comes only from addresses ending in occstrategy.com or occrecruitment.com, and that it never runs a recruitment process through a single channel. Anything that starts and ends in one chat thread is not this process. If your invitation contradicts something on this page, the invitation is current and we would like to hear about it.

What changed on the OC&C page

We correct in public and we date it. The body above says what is true today; this log says what this page used to say, so a reader who saw the earlier version knows what moved.

29 September 2026. An earlier version said OC&C's screening steps could not be verified, and refused to describe them. That refusal was the page's central claim, and it was wrong. The six London steps are printed in the firm's own job advert, and the office by office routes are printed in its 2024 graduate brochure. Nobody here had opened either document. Both are now in the source register at the head of this page.

29 September 2026. Three sentences that read like established facts have been rewritten as what they were, our own observation: that strategy firms almost never publish a salary, that nobody else quotes the office table, and that most sizing errors are unit errors. We have measured none of the three, so none of them is stated as measured.

29 September 2026. The structuring weights are now named as ours where they appear, rather than only at the end. OC&C publishes no marking scheme at all, and the earlier wording left room for a reader to think the hundred points came from the firm.