Forrester Consultant Interview Questions
& Process

I submitted my resume for an open Consultant position after an acquaintance pointed it out. Within about a week, an HR person emailed me to set up a phone interview. We had to reschedule it because of the 4th of July holiday, and ended up doing it the week after. The HR rep called me at the scheduled time, and we talked for about 30 minutes. I was on the West Coast, and she was on the East Coast, so there was a 3-hour time difference. This was a screening interview, which I later realized was more of a courtesy call. Maybe it was to meet some company metric about how many applicants they follow up with? Anyway, by the end of the call, I found out they had already selected a candidate and were in the final stages of interviewing them, so this interview felt like it was just to check a box.

Got a call from an HR after applying on LinkedIn. She was great - very helpful and kept me hooked. After talking to the HR, I had a phone interview with the hiring manager in Singapore. The HR call is not a big deal, just a profile check and to see if I'm still interested. The hiring manager call was scheduled for 45 minutes. It seemed to go well and it was more of a mutual discussion than a skill test. Then I interviewed with another Senior Consultant, also in Singapore, which was more of a knowledge exchange. After that, I spoke with a Sales Manager from India. This interview was more about assessing my profile, but they explained the business and operations so well, I felt like I was already working there. The next interviews were with the Research VP, which was a bit unusual at first, but we eventually got into a good conversation. The final steps were a case presentation and a playbook presentation, which required a lot of prep and I think I did well. These were attended by key people from their Delhi office and the hiring manager via video call. The HR and hiring manager did a great job managing this long but smooth process. One suggestion would be to make the earlier interviews longer than 30 minutes so candidates can really express themselves, as the time flies by when discussing your profile.

I found out about the role from an employee referral. My friend sent my resume to the Forrester recruiter, and I got a call within a couple of hours. A few days after that initial call on a Friday, I had calls with the hiring manager and a team member. Following those, I was given a data file and a Powerpoint template to create a client-facing presentation based on the data and some project assumptions. I also had to create a blog post about the deliverable. Then, I interviewed with the group VP, director, and team. I presented my presentation to the group, both in person and remotely. They asked questions during and after the presentation about my analysis. The in-person interviews were easy, but the data exercise and presentation needed a lot of prep. The recruiter called me that afternoon, and I got a written offer within four days.