Ayman Babikir

I grew up in the Middle East and came to the US for Stanford. When consulting recruiting started, I didn't have what a lot of my classmates had: no family friends at Bain or McKinsey, no older sibling who'd been through it, no clear idea what a case interview even was until I was already in the middle of one. I got through it by asking people who had no particular reason to help me. Enough of them said yes. I spent three and a half years at Bain, and a lot of time was specifically in recruiting. I interviewed candidates through full cycles, led resume review for our Stanford campus team, and did a full-time internal case rotation on the firm's own recruiting strategy, which meant taking apart the funnel we used to evaluate everyone else. You learn things there you can't learn as a candidate. Which resumes got read carefully and which got twelve seconds. How the same fit answer lands differently depending on who's sitting across from you. How often a strong candidate lost for reasons that had nothing to do with whether they could do the job. I was also a case buddy for applicants from underrepresented backgrounds: first-gen students, international candidates, people from schools the firm didn't recruit at. That's the part that made me want to coach. What separated those candidates from the ones who sailed through usually wasn't ability. It was that nobody had told them how any of it worked, and they had no one to practice against. I'm now an investor at a venture capital firm in New York, which is useful for the question clients usually get to eventually: what consulting actually leads to, and how to talk about that in a room. I work on resumes, casing, and fit prep. I'll tell you what isn't working while there's still time to change it.