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Bain & Company interview questions

114 questions researched across 4 Bain & Company seats in Generalist Consulting, Advanced Analytics. Below are 12 of them.

Seats we researched

  • Associate ConsultantGeneralist Consulting · graduate · 40 min
  • ConsultantGeneralist Consulting · experienced · 45 min
  • Associate Consultant InternGeneralist Consulting · intern · 40 min
  • Advanced Analytics InternAdvanced Analytics · intern · 30 min

12 Bain & Company interview questions

  1. Estimate the annual market for fuel consumed by private cars in this country. State your assumptions and sanity-check the result.

  2. Tell me about a time you influenced a team to change direction.

  3. Tell me about a time you overcame a significant obstacle.

  4. Describe a situation where your work created a tangible impact for the people you were serving.

  5. New case. You're having lunch with an old university friend who's thinking of opening a coffee shop in Cambridge, England, a large university city about an hour and a half from London. She wants your help deciding whether it's a good idea. What do you think? Take a minute to lay out how you'd approach it.

  6. She likes your framework and wants to know how big the market is. For now, focus only on Cambridge residents, not commuters or visitors. How would you estimate the size of the market?

  7. Assume Cambridge has 100,000 residents and on average each drinks one cup of coffee a day. Walk me to an annual number of cups bought from coffee shops.

  8. Here's some more information: price per coffee is 3 pounds, cost per cup is 1 pound, it costs 245,610 pounds to open the shop and 163,740 pounds a year to run it. How many cups does she need to sell to break even in the first year?

  9. So, after running the numbers, do you think it's reasonable for her to open the coffee shop?

  10. Different client now. FashionCo is a long-established player in the women's fashion market, and its revenues have declined every year for the past five years. The CEO wants to understand what's causing the decline and what to do about it before a management meeting at the end of the week. How would you structure this?

  11. Where would you start, and what would you want to know about market and consumer trends?

  12. Brainstorm the ways FashionCo could grow revenue, and give me the pros and cons of each.

What a strong answer does

The questions above fall into 2 kinds. What a strong answer does differs by kind, not by question.

Case9 of 12 above
Clarify the objective; build a mutually exclusive structure; prioritize the highest-value branch; analyze with evidence; synthesize a recommendation, risks, and next step.
Behavioral3 of 12 above
Lead with the claim and context; isolate your personal action and decision; explain the trade-off; quantify the result; finish with what you learned and changed.

102 more Bain & Company questions

The rest of the bank — 114 in total — is asked by the interviewer during practice, so you meet them the way you would on the day rather than reading them first.

Practise Bain & Company questions

How these questions were researched

Every question carries a provenance grade. Some were reported by candidates who sat the round, some come from the firm’s own published guidance or a source that trains for it, and the rest are written to match how this firm asks. Each seat is studied on its own — the round it actually runs, the order it runs it in, and what it is listening for. A Bain & Company round is not a generic behavioural screen, and practising one as the other is how people walk in unprepared.

Falas is not affiliated with or endorsed by any employer named. Simulations are independent practice based on publicly described recruiting formats.