How I landed a McKinsey job offer
To any aspiring management consultant, hopeful business-focused undergraduate, soon-to-be business school graduate, landing a job at McKinsey — arguably the most prestigious consulting firm in the world — is the dream. Getting a job at McKinsey carries a thick sense of mystery because acceptance rates are less than 1% each year, making it orders of magnitude harder to get into that Harvard. I will share in this article how I got an offer from not only McKinsey, but the “BB” in “MBB” as well. (In the consulting world, “MBB” stands for the collective trio of top firms — McKinsey, Bain, and BCG.)
Assess your prep time & design a schedule
The first step to approaching your mission of getting a MBB offer is to take a step back (classic consulting move!) and assess how much time runway you have.
If you’re currently a student, you’d want to understand when campus recruiting occurs. If you’re an experienced hire, there’s a few more questions you’d want to ask yourself, including:
- How much longer do you want to stay at your job?
- Are there any other life changes you need to plan around (e.g., moves)?
The second question is then to decide how much time you’re able to dedicate to preparation. Generally speaking, the shorter your time runway, the more time each week you’d want to dedicate to your prep.
I personally had ~2 months to prep (time between when I decided I wanted to recruit for consulting and when on-campus recruiting started), and I was willing to dedicate ~5 hours each week leading up to the interviews. This represents ~40 hours of prep time — talking with friends, this seems like the sweet spot.
How much time you’re able to invest will also inform what preparation resources you want to leverage.
Getting your foot in the door
There are two different recruiting processes depending on whether you are “on cycle” or “off cycle”. “On cycle” means you are on campus as an undergraduate or graduate student and there are set recruiting cycles for consulting firms. These consulting firms usually start the process at the same time, and over a 4 to 5 week horizon, you will go through the interview process and find out whether you got the offer or not. For “on cycle” recruiting experiences, you should figure out who the recruiter is (i.e., HR representative from that consulting firm responsible for your school’s recruiting process) in case you have any questions for him or her.
“Off cycle” means that you are currently no longer a student and would be an experienced hire. For candidates like these, the best option is to get a referral from someone in that consulting firm in order to kickstart the recruiting process. Look up your LinkedIn 1st or 2nd degree network and see who are connections that are currently working at these consulting firms, genuinely connect with them, and ask nicely about referrals. There’s often a monetary incentive for these referrals, so it’s really a win-win situation for you and your connections.
Best resources
During my 2 months of prep, I read the most popular case interview books, as well as tried a couple of other newer ones as well. This section will synthesize which resources I found to be the most high value, and which aren’t worth your time (especially if you’re hoping to prep with <2 months).
Here’s the guiding principle: with any job application process, you want to understand the landscape as well as possible. What does the interview process look like? What do these firms care about? What type of skills and work ethic are these firms looking for? To understand the ins and outs of these companies and their interview processes, you want to leverage information from people who have been there and done that, either directly from current consultants, or resources from current / recent consultants.
By a wide margin, the best resource I found was a book called Case Closed. It’s a newer book that was just published last year, but I decided to give it a shot since it was really affordable, had great reviews, and seemed most in touch with the latest interview processes of the past 3 years versus other consulting prep books which were first published maybe 15 years ago.
What I found most helpful about Case Closed is that it covers the entire application process from the perfect resume writing to super accurate case interviews that helped to prepare me well for my own interviews. Here’s an example: every other case prep book I had read left out resume writing, which is critical to passing the resume screen. Although I had good prior internships, my resume didn’t quite flesh out personal impact, entrepreneurship, and passion. When I had shared my resume with some friends in consulting, they told me that in all honesty it wouldn’t pass the resume screen. That’s when I came across Case Closed and realized (and then corrected) all the mistakes.
If you have more time, I’d also suggest checking out Case In Point. There are some good tidbits in here, and maybe something you learn from the frameworks could come in handy, but there’s not that much here you’d learn that will “wow” an interviewer.
Strongly recommend: Case Closed
Pros:
- Covers everything you need to know about the process
- Has detailed, inside knowledge about the process since the author actually worked at McKinsey recently
- Practice cases are very well written and spot on
- Less than half the price of Case in Point, Case Interview Secrets, and others
Cons:
- Relatively new book so it had fewer reviews (but that makes sense since it was just published last year)
Recommend checking out if you have time: Case In Point
Pros:
- Good intro to concepts like estimation and sizing with helpful suggested numbers (e.g., US population is 320mn)
Cons:
- Too many frameworks in this book to the point where it got really confusing
- Practice cases were not always well laid out and, after the first few, became overly simplified
Recommend skipping: Case Interview Secrets
Pros:
- Written in a colloquial, easy-to-digest style
Cons:
- This was popular for a while but I found that it was out of touch and not representative of actual interviews
How to effectively “case” with friends
The consulting case interview has a unique and, honestly, quite strange and formal format that requires practice. In short, you need to practice a lot. You might hear that from others but not quite understand how much is enough practice. Every legitimate case prep book will have practice cases but I found that the quality of these practice cases really deferred greatly. See the comparison across “best resources” above for case practice material suggestions.
The best way to practice is grabbing your brother, sister, friend, or consulting club member and getting them to case with you. Make sure that you and your case partner have access to the same materials and are on the same page regarding what case frameworks to you. This will make casing a lot easier, especially in a virtual world, which is the post-pandemic world we are in today. Set a relatively easy and consistent cadence, such as doing one case a day for two weeks, or a case every other day. You want to make sure that each practice case is followed by clear, actionable feedback that you work on in your next case interview.
Deciding on offers
If you do everything here right, you should have at least one offer from MBB and a bunch of the other consulting firms, as well as some industry offers like Google BizOps, etc. Congratulations!
The first question to ask yourself is — do you want to go down the consulting path or the industry path? The benefits of consulting is that it acts as a ‘stamp of approval’ to show your future job opportunities that you have passed the (very high) consulting hiring bar, and you’ve built your business toolkit. The benefit of industry is that lifestyle will be much better, and if you have your heart set on a certain industry, this is a way to get there faster.
Once you decide on a category, evaluate the offers that you received in that space. Talk to as many people as you can within the company; the recruiter would be more than happy to connect you, as they’re incentivized to get you to sign the offer.
Most of all, enjoy the process — you’ve worked hard to get them, and you deserve it! If you approach the decision process with the same rigor as you approached the interview preparation, there is no doubt you’ll make the choice that’s best for you.
