How to pick consulting firms by reading their own publications, not ranking lists
Most consulting candidates pick the firms they'll apply to based on the same ranking blogs everyone reads, but there's a much better signal hiding in plain sight on each firm's own site, and almost no one looks at it.
Every major consulting firm publishes a surprising amount about what they actually do, including practice area pages with descriptions of the work they take on, industry reports written by partners and managers in the past year, press releases announcing partner appointments and office openings, anonymised client case studies, and the occasional webinar or panel on whatever the firm thinks is the next big shift in a sector. Taken together, these tell you far more about a firm than any external ranking does, and they cost roughly the same hour to skim.
A ranking is what other candidates think of a firm; the firm's own publications are what the firm thinks of itself, and that's a much more useful signal when you're trying to decide whether to apply.
What firms publish, and what each thing actually tells you
There are five categories worth paying attention to.
Practice area pages. Every firm has a section listing the practices they take on (Strategy, Operations, Digital, Mergers, Public Sector, and so on). Read past the marketing language and look at which practices have rich content versus which ones are placeholder, since the depth of the practice page roughly tracks how much of that work the firm is actually doing.
Industry reports from the past year. This is the strongest signal: if a firm has put out five reports on digital banking transformation in the last twelve months, that's where they're investing and that's the kind of work you'll get staffed on, while one report from eighteen months ago tells you the practice probably exists but isn't growing. The reports also tell you which specific industries the firm is leaning into, which is often more granular than "financial services" as a category.
Partner appointments and lateral hires. When a firm announces a partner who's joining from a competitor or being promoted internally, that's a public signal of where they're trying to build capability, and a firm that has hired three new partners in healthcare in the past year is going to staff a lot of healthcare cases, with the cities those partners sit in telling you which offices are growing.
Office openings and expansions. A new office in a region tells you the firm is expecting work to come from there, and a press release about a renewed regional commitment usually means the same. If you want to work in a specific geography, this is the most direct signal you'll get about which firms will actually be hiring there in the next two years.
Client case studies. Many firms publish anonymised case studies on completed work, where the level of detail varies but they're useful for understanding what kind of clients the firm tends to work with. If the case studies skew toward Fortune 500 retailers and you want to work on government strategy, the misalignment is something you'd want to know before applying.
How to read one firm in an hour
Take a single firm you're considering and spend roughly an hour going through the categories above, in this order.
Start with the most recent six to twelve months of industry reports, noting which industries appear repeatedly and which barely show up, and reading one report end-to-end to get a feel for how the firm thinks about a topic, not just what they think about it.
Next, look at partner appointments and recent lateral hires across the past year, group them by industry or capability, and the clusters will tell you where the firm is actively investing.
Then check the office locator and any press releases about office expansions, because if the firm has been growing in three specific cities and you'd be open to one of them, you've just identified where you have a meaningfully better chance than the average applicant.
Finally, skim the practice area pages for whichever capability you'd most like to be staffed on, and compare the depth and recency of content there to the equivalent on a competitor's site.
By the end of the hour you should be able to answer four questions about the firm: where they're investing right now, where they're hiring, what kinds of clients they tend to work with, and how that compares to the firms next to them on your list.
What this changes about your applications
A candidate who's done this is operating with a different kind of specificity in their application materials and their interviews.
In a typical cover letter, the line that gets used is something like "I am drawn to your firm's strong global brand and intellectual rigour", which sounds exactly like every other application. Someone who's read the firm's recent reports writes something more concrete, along the lines of "Your firm published two reports in the past six months on consumer payments in the Gulf, which is the area I worked on at my current company, and I'd be excited to contribute to that practice", which takes a few extra minutes to write and reads like someone who chose the firm on purpose.
The same shift happens in a fit interview when the interviewer asks why this firm: the candidate who's done their reading doesn't reach for the brand answer; they reference a specific piece of work the firm has been doing recently, connect it to their own experience, and the answer takes thirty seconds rather than forty-five, with the interviewer registering the difference immediately.
The bigger benefit, though, has nothing to do with the cover letter or the interview answer. Reading the firm's publications usually changes which firms make your final list, sometimes by removing one and replacing it with another you hadn't considered, simply because you've stopped applying to firms whose work doesn't actually match what you want to do.
What rankings are useful for, and what they're not
Rankings aren't useless: they're a reasonable starting filter when you know almost nothing about an industry, and a non-target candidate who's never thought about consulting can use a ranking to identify which thirty firms exist in the first place.
What rankings can't do is tell you which of those firms is right for you, since two firms ranked similarly in the same tier can have completely different work mixes, geographic focuses, and growth areas, which means a candidate who treats the ranking as the answer ends up applying to the same fifteen firms as everyone else, while someone who treats the ranking as a starting list and then reads the firms themselves usually applies to a sharper shortlist of seven and ends up with a meaningfully better hit rate.
A small worked example
Imagine two firms sitting next to each other on a typical Tier-2 ranking, where they look almost identical from the ranking alone, with the same tier, similar prestige, and a comparable global footprint.
Spend an hour on each and the picture changes.
Firm A has put out twelve reports in the past year, eight of them on industrial decarbonisation across Europe, has hired four partners into European energy practices in three different cities, and has case studies that skew toward heavy industry and infrastructure clients. If you want to work on energy transition projects, this is a firm whose work you'd actually be near.
Firm B has put out six reports, mostly on digital and data work for consumer businesses in North America and Asia, has concentrated its recent partner hires in the technology practice, and publishes case studies about digital transformation for retailers and banks. If you want to work on energy transition, you're in the wrong building.
Where the ranking suggests these two firms are comparable, an hour spent on each makes it clear they're working on completely different problems, and that's the difference the exercise actually makes.
The same hour, completely different output
Skimming three ranking blogs and skimming one firm's recent publications take roughly the same time, but a ranking gives you a number that everyone else also has, while the firm's own publications give you a real picture of what they're doing and where they're going.
Pick three firms from whichever ranking you trust and spend an hour on each. Most candidates will tell you afterwards that at least one of the three drops off their list and is replaced by something they hadn't considered.
That's a better outcome from an hour of research than any ranking has ever produced.