AlphaSights Associate Summer interview questions

I applied for this position online and got the interview invitation within 24 hours. The entire process took about a month. I went through the first-round video assessment, the second-round HR interview, and the third-round case interview. There are four questions in the video assessment and the questions were pretty basic. What everybody else posted are literally what they asked. The second round was very conversational and it went well. I wish to elaborate a bit on the third-round interview. Prior to the interview, their HR told me that I am supposed to receive the case several minutes before the interview starts. While on the day of the interview, the HR team didn't coordinate well with this manager interviewer and I got nothing even until the interview started. In the case interview, you are given three scenarios with each describes a client from a corporate/financial institution making a service request. You are supposed to pick two scenarios and then find two "experts" for each one you selected within 15 minutes. At the end of the case interview, the manager interviewer will conduct a "role play" with you, with the interviewer being one of the experts you searched and you being an Alphasights associate reaching out to this expert through a phone call. When we were mocking this phone call with expert, the interviewer kept on asking me questions as, "what does Alphasights do", "why would I spend time with you instead of speaking with the client directly" so on and so forth. I was kind of frustrated by this because before applying for this position, I saw employee reviewing this company as a "glorified call center" and this mock phone call just confirmed that. It demonstrated the repetitive and frustrating nature of this job as probably all I have to do is searching people online, cold calling them and being questioned again and again on what Alphasights actually does. Alphasights tried to set up their case as a consulting firm case interview, while the company per se is not comparable to a consulting firm. The case interview took an hour. Afterward, their HR manager interviewed me for another hour. Their HR manager just asked me a bunch of basic questions. Nothing special. To sum up, the point I want to make is that their third-round case interview gave me some insights on their business and honestly, it's not as interesting as I assumed it would be. I still rated it a positive experience despite the logistic issue I encountered because it let me figure out that this company didn't fit me. Farewell Alphasights and be well.

Quite disorganised. My telephone interviewer was someone else to whom I had researched (so this came as a bit of a surprise to me, addressing the wrong person), and then my in-person interview took a significant time to organise with long wait times for responses and rescheduling. When I arrived, the HR recruiter had not read my application as she asked what university I attended. Considering I had travelled across the country to be asked this, I felt quite disrespected. In addition, the interviewer was constantly looking at the clock behind me (which was very distracting) and spent the vast majority (80%) of the interview running through an acronym they use to complete their work (BREAD). In all honesty, I thought quite highly of the company beforehand, most likely because they are very aggressive in marketing themselves as a vibrant, fun startup to work for and place a huge emphasis on campus recruitment (targeting all the top universities). They have the fancy offices overlooking the River Thames, swings, indoor grass, a good graduate salary considering what they're doing - but the role is really for someone who doesn't know what they're doing with their career. I can't see many people staying for longer than a couple of years at best, which is what most profiles on social media confirms. From my understanding (we spoke about BREAD long enough to give me authority on this), an associate role involves 95% of your time on the phone, contacting people from their internal network and seeing if they are willing to be paid to give industry advice to someone (mainly consultants) who don't have the time to do it themselves. I asked, but was not told, how often they resort to LinkedIn if their internal network fails. I would therefore hazard a guess and say that LinkedIn spamming constitutes a large amount of your day. Additionally, I was told by someone who just took a graduate role there, that for the first year you are not actually allowed to contact clients directly, but you do all of the online research and vetting for someone more experienced to handle the call.