The Brattle Group Research Analyst Interview Questions & Reviews

Interview Details – 1) Phone Interview
2) Full day interview including case interview

Interview Details – First round - HR rep calls. Takes about an hour. Mostly trying to figure out if you would be a good fit for the position, asks about teamwork, quant skills, programming and research experience.

Final round - Brattle paid for me to come in to Cambridge and put me up at a hotel overnight, a few blocks from the company. Met with five people - an analyst, two principals, associate and senior associate (or something like that). One interview is case, which consists of a longer word problem, a few econ questions, looking at some regression output. Nothing too tricky but you should be familiar with intermediate level econ concepts.

Didn't get an offer, I was told it was because of fit, which I believe because I got an offer at a competitor. Really nice and smart people, impressive company overall but smaller than most so the hiring process may be a little more idiosyncratic.

Interview Details – This is a first round phone interview, and the questions are mostly fit and behavioral. The employer is interested in your undergraduate research experience (data analysis) and teamwork experience.

Interview Details – The initial interview was an on campus interview with someone from HR and an analyst. Pretty much discussed my background such as past work experience and courses. They want to get a sense of how your background is pertinent and why you want to go into economic consulting. They also asked some questions about how to work with data sets and how I've used econometrics in past projects (i.e. honors thesis). It also helped that the interviewers were upbeat, nice people who were enjoyable to speak with.

The final round interview was on site in San Francisco. It lasted several hours long, including five one-on-one interviews ranging from junior to senior employees as well as lunch with two analysts. The one-on-one interviews mostly consisted of questions about my background, behavioral questions, why I want to go into economic consulting, and some specific questions about past coursework mostly concerning how I've applied the knowledge.

One of the interviews is a case interview, which was the most difficult aspect, especially given that I'd never had a case interview before. In that sense, some of that inexperience and nerves led to more mistakes than I perhaps would've otherwise made. It's more of an economic analysis/damages type case with multiple parts. Nevertheless, going over management consulting type cases would be helpful to some extent.

The lunch was fine although I didn't quite make the impression I wanted to. Sometimes you immediately click with people on a social level and I didn't completely get to that point, which made for some moments of slight awkwardness. At the end of the day, it's an opportunity to learn more about the specifics of the analyst role and get a feel for the people, culture, etc.

Also, the office environment was casual, which is a plus, and employees overall were generally down to earth. It's a tight knit environment.

Didn't receive an offer, but I was impressed by the very high level of talent at the firm.

Interview Details – Asked about my background - why I chose my college and major, why I am interested in Economic Consulting, why I am interested in Brattle. They asked some questions about my econometrics project and my honors thesis. What is my idea of a good research? What is one significant mistake I made.

Interview Details – I first applied to the Research Analyst position online, and received an e-mail asking to set up a phone intervie with someone from HR. The phone interview consisted of basic questions such as "Why Brattle?", "Why did you chose to major in economics, attend your university?", "What projects have you done relating to the job?", etc. The interviewer was easy to talk to and knwe what she was looking for. About a week later I received an e-mail asking me to come onsite for a day of interviews.

When I first arrived I was given a schedule and interviewed with another Research Anlayst, followed by the case study, followed by an Associate, followed by an interview with a Principal, lunch with 2 Analysts, and then an interview with another Principal.

The case study was an optimization problem that required some calcualtions and asking questions related to the problem. It also involved some net present value stuff, and I was then asked to interpret a regression output. I made some silly mistakes on the case study and didn't do as well as I would have liked.

Everyone was friendly and it seemed like a good place to work, but I was a bit confused what the two Principals I interviewed with were looking for. I gave completely legitimate answers to a number of questions, but they seemed unsatisfied with my answers and I obviously wasn't what they were looking for. For instance, I gave 3 detailed (5+ minute) examples of work I did on the job, or projects I had completed that required doing economic analysis in the energy sector, but one of the Principals asked "What else?" several times. I'm not sure if he just ran out of questions to ask or if he just wasn't satisfied with the experiences I gave.

Another principal asked me about my long term goals and I told about how I wanted to gain experience on different projects and learn from working with others so I could eventually have a greater leadership role and play a bigger part in a company in the future. For some reason she didn't like this answer, even though there is generally no right or wrong answer to this question, as long as you show some sort of thought/direction about your future. They are my goals! No one who I have talked to for 20 minutes really has a right to correct me on what my goals should be. I was really disappointed by this and felt like I was being talked down to.

Overall it was an OK experience, but I wish I would've interviewed with someone in the department I was interviewing for before flying out there and realizing I wasn't what they were looking for. It was a bit of a waste of time for me and them as a result. It seems like a decent place to work and everyone was very intelligent, but I wan't overly impressed and didn't really make a connection.

Interview Details – A applied for the position through an off-campus recruiting event. They ended up not participating in the event and offered me a phone interview instead. I was given only one week to schedule and prepare for the interview, which happened the week before final exams. It was carried out by an HR and consisted of standard economic consulting questions: quantitative project, group conflict, why working for us, etc. She also asked whether I interviewed with other companies.

I had had another phone interview in the morning and was quite exhausted by then, so I couldn't think of good questions to ask and good experiences to relate to. I think it all boils down to conveying yourself well and relating your skills to the job requirements.

Interview Details – Initially there were two phone interviews; both focused on resume review and backround/experience in quantitative analysis. The final round was held at the cambridge office, and consisted of four fit interviews and one case/quant/econ interview. All interviewers asked about experience handling data and doing analysis. The case interview included several questions about intermediate econ. topics.

Interview Details – The interview process was fairly normal. A few weeks after I applied online I was scheduled for a phone interview in which a girl from the HR department (i.e. not someone who I would eventually work with) spoke with me about my experience, school, skills. Most general questions, why do you want to work here? why did you decide to major in what you did (econ in my case)? how do you work in teams? describe a mistake you made etc. They seemed to really want to hear about quantitative abilities.

A few days later I heard back about an office interview which I scheduled for the following week. This entailed a very long day of 1 on 1 interviews, 7 in total, and a case exercise. These were fairly straight forward and similar to the phone interview, all questions were fair and most people were easy to talk to. The case was not your typical management consulting case and focused more on economics and was more of a mini-test. There were 7 or 8 questions on it and it tested you math, economics theory, statistics knowledge. All in all, it was exhausting and perhaps it was a little overkill in the number of people I spoke to but I didn't feel that it was too difficult or unfair in any way.