A job interview with Wellspring Consulting will generally include the following elements:

• A discussion of your background, experience, and objectives
• A case problem to solve, derived from a Wellspring client engagement
• An opportunity for you to ask questions about Wellspring Consulting as a firm, and about the job for which you are applying

In preparing for the case portion of the interview, you should keep the following in mind:

• After the interviewer’s introduction of the case, ensure you are clear on the core question(s) being asked.  Then determine what logic you should follow and information you should gather to make a well-informed recommendation.  Look for important quantitative or logical relationships that could provide key insights. Seek to actually solve the problem, in real time, in interaction with your interviewer
• The interviewer will lay out some initial facts of the case.  However, important facts will still need to be uncovered.  It is up to you to determine what questions to ask to elicit sufficient information to arrive at insights and answers
• In most instances the case problem will be unfamiliar to you, and its solution will require more than standard business logic.  Preparing for interviews by studying standard case frameworks and approaches may be somewhat helpful, but too strong an orientation towards standard methods may reduce your ability to think creatively about how best to solve the problem.  Keep an open mind
• If you are unfamiliar with the social sector, you may find it helpful to familiarize yourself with the basic governance and management structure of nonprofit organizations and the types of strategic questions social sector organizations face prior to the interview
• Realize that your interviewer will probably set up the case to have some blind alleys and apparent conundrums.  Be persistent.  We don’t expect you to solve a case right off the bat – in fact the cases are not constructed for you to do so.  It is through a process of investigation and discovery that you will arrive at your best solution to the case