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BCG Medium

Met With Problems

#Non-profit

Your client is Amy Sherald, the Chief People Officer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art ("The Met"). Located in New York City, the Met is one of the world's largest art museums, with 250 gallery rooms …

Estimated Time 31 minutes
Difficulty Medium
Source Darden
56 / 100
Your client is Amy Sherald, the Chief People Officer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (“The Met”). Located in New York City, the Met is one of the world’s largest art museums, with 250 gallery rooms and a collection of more than 2 million works of art. This mega-museum welcomes over 6 million visitors annually. Amy’s department reported unusually high human resources (HR) costs last year and has come under scrutiny from the Executive team and Board of Directors. Amy has hired your team to help her address this problem.
Mock Interview
Interviewer

Your client is Amy Sherald, the Chief People Officer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art ("The Met"). Located in New York City, the Met is one of the world's largest art museums, with 250 gallery rooms and a collection of more than 2 million works of art. This mega-museum welcomes over 6 million visitors annually. Amy's department reported unusually high human resources (HR) costs last year and has come under scrutiny from the Executive team and Board of Directors. Amy has hired your team to help her address this problem.

You

Thanks. Before analyzing, I'd like to clarify a few key questions...

Interviewer

Good question. Let me provide some background information...

You

Based on this, I suggest analyzing from these dimensions...

AI Score
Clarifying + Framework /5 Exhibits + Analysis /5 Brainstorm + Conclusion /5 Universal Skills /5
Practicing...
Score coming soon
AI Mock Interview

This BCG non-profit case asks the candidate to diagnose why the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s HR costs spiked and to recommend where the Chief People Officer should focus short-term cost reductions. It tests the ability to build a cost-focused (not revenue-focused) framework, segment a workforce into meaningful groups, run turnover-cost and staffing-needs calculations from an exhibit, brainstorm structured cost levers, and deliver a risk-aware recommendation under interviewer scrutiny.

Key Insights:

  1. Structure the framework around costs, not revenue. The client explicitly rules out revenue streams, so wages, recruiting, training, retention, and turnover/severance are the levers that matter.
  2. Segment the workforce before analyzing. Breaking HR costs across the four staff types (artistic, executive, administrative, security) exposes how differently compensation, turnover, and severance behave by department.
  3. Read the exhibit selectively. Solving turnover cost needs only staff count, % turnover, and cost per turnover; time-to-fill and compensation type are distractors that a strong candidate sets aside.
  4. Volume, not unit cost, drives the problem. Security has the lowest cost per turnover but the largest headcount and highest turnover rate, making it responsible for almost half of the 2019 turnover cost and the clear place to focus.
  5. Tie the staffing math back to headcount. A coverage-based calculation points to an optimal security headcount near the lower end of current staffing, so not backfilling vacated positions captures savings without an active layoff, though reduced oversight and staff morale are real risks to weigh.

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