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Preparing for your McKinsey interview

The Interviewer’s Perspective
Common Interview Questions
Case Studies
Ask a Question

THE INTERVIEWER'S PERSPECTIVE
During every stage of your interview process we will be probing your ability to listen, process information, think creatively, and articulate your thoughts. We will assess your strengths against the four major attributes we believe are common to successful McKinsey consultants:
· Problem-solving ability
· Personal impact
· Leadership
· Drive/aspirations

Problem-solving ability
We’ll use case studies and other probative techniques to gauge your intellectual horsepower, logical reasoning ability, curiosity, creativity, business judgment, tolerance for ambiguity, and intuitive feel for numbers.

Personal impact
Your presence, personality, level of assertiveness, empathy, and communications style are intrinsic to your success as a consultant. We will test your ability to listen as well as to articulate your own point of view—and your ability to stand by your views if challenged. We will try to see if you would be comfortable in a team situation, and if you have an interest in other people and a sense of self-confidence without arrogance - in other words, we are looking for people who are fun to work with.

Leadership
Your willingness to take on a leadership role is as important at McKinsey as your ability to work as part of a team. We will explore your ability to seize opportunity and take action and ask you to show us how you might build a team and encourage and facilitate a shared vision. We will be looking for signs of entrepreneurship, including a willingness to take a personal risk. We will seek evidence of your persistence in the pursuit of what you want, and your ability to keep a clear focus amidst escalating demands.

Drive/aspirations
We will be assessing your personal drive for excellence, as well as your energy level and perseverance. We will want to know if you set high aspirations for yourself and expect outstanding results. We will assess how you handle obstacles and if you are willing to go outside your comfort zone in order to achieve what you want.

COMMON INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
During your McKinsey interviews we will be probing your strengths along four key areas: problem-solving ability, personal impact, leadership, and drive/aspirations. We will be asking a series of questions designed to help us get to know you better along these lines. Here is a sampling of the type of questions you can expect.
· To assess your problem-solving ability
· To assess your personal impact
· To assess your leadership
· To assess your drive/aspirations
Problem-solving ability
· How would you go about estimating your competitor's budget for ___________ expenses? What other numbers would you want to know in order to estimate it?
· What kinds of things could a ________ business do to become more profitable?
Other things such as competitive position being the same, which type of business do you think would have greater returns on sales: _________ or __________?
· What could you do to reduce absenteeism in a ______ factory?
· Where might you look for information on traffic patterns near a shopping mall?
· Describe a situation you handled creatively.
· Describe a situation in which you had to convince others that your view, approach, or ideas were right or appropriate.
· Describe a tough decision and how you reached it.
Personal impact
· What experiences have you had working in teams? Using a specific example, what role did you play on the team? How did you select that role? What were the most/least satisfying aspects of working on that team? What is the most difficult thing for you in working with a team?
· Describe your relationships with colleagues, professors, bosses, and others in a significant academic/work experience. In what ways were you most effective with people? What conflicts or difficulties did you experience? What kinds of people did you find most challenging? What would your colleagues say about you?
· Describe the social environment at your school. How satisfying was it for you? What difficulties did you experience? Did you have any specific problems with faculty or administration? With which groups did you interact most comfortably? Why?
· How do you spend your spare time?
· Describe a delicate situation in which your personal sensitivity made a difference.
Leadership
· Describe a situation in which you recognized a problem or opportunity and organized people or actions in response. Did you choose to pursue this situation on your own or did someone else ask or suggest that you pursue it? What obstacles did you face? How did you overcome them?
· What leadership roles have you played in school, at work, in your community?
· When have you felt most fully challenged and stimulated in your academic or work experiences? Most frustrated? What did you do about your frustration?
· Have you ever had an idea or a goal to achieve something that required action by other individuals beyond just yourself? How did you get the idea or come to set the goal? How did you find or mobilize the requisite resources to make the idea or goal become real? How did you deal with any unforeseen events along the way?
· Your resume indicates that you _______. What prompted you to do this? What obstacles did you face and how did you overcome them? What satisfied you most about the experience? Least? Did you have to make any sacrifices along the way? What lessons have you learned? Knowing what you do now, would you do it again?

Drive/aspirations
· What aspirations do you have for yourself over the next 5 or so years — professionally and personally?
· Describe a situation in which you were aspiring to reach a goal. What obstacles confronted you along the way? What did you do to overcome them?
· Describe a situation that demanded sustained, unusually hard work, where others might have thought you couldn’t succeed. Was the experience stressful? If so, how did you handle the stress?

Case Studies
As part of our interviewing process, we ask candidates to discuss a business problem with each interviewer. Your insights on the case are used in conjunction with the rest of the interview process to help us reach a decision on your potential.

Most candidates enjoy the cases and the business problems they raise. Hopefully, they also help you become better informed about our firm and the kinds of clients we serve.
· Why We Use Case Studies
· How You Should Approach the Problem
· What We Are Looking For
· Dos and Don'ts
· Some Common Mistakes<>
Why We Use Case Studies
Case studies are a valued part of the interview because they expose you to the kind of work we do every day. Just as important, they give us an opportunity to see how you think about problems and gain insights into your ability to solve them.

Your ability to deal creatively with complex or ambiguous problems in unfamiliar businesses, to structure your thinking, and to reach sensible conclusions with the available facts in a short space of time is your most important asset as a consultant. Since no particular background or set of qualifications prepares you to do that, we’ve come to rely upon the case study approach as an integral part of our interview process.

How You Should Approach the Problem The cases you discuss in each of your interviews will be different; however, they are generally based on the interviewer’s professional experiences and will usually describe situations with which you are not familiar. Your case migh focus on deciding how a company should react to a new competitor or determining what attributes a company should look for in seeking a joint-venture partner.

In addressing the case, it is important that you apply a logical, well-structured approach that enables you to reach a reasoned conclusion. At a minimum, you should be sure that you:
o Understand the statement of the problem and the question that you are being asked to answer — ask for clarification on points that you feel are unclear.
o Think broadly — do not get bogged down on one particular issue before you have explored other areas that may be important.
o Address the issue — candidates often focus too much on their own area of expertise rather than the important issues (e.g., accountants focusing on the financial aspects of new product development without mentioning customers).
§ Break the problem down into a logical structure — there may be several issues to be addressed in order to reach a conclusion.
§ Address the issues one at a time — your interviewer may not expect you to get through all of them in the allotted time.
§ Communicate clearly and succinctly.
§ Request additional information — as you build an understanding of the problem, there may be more information that you need.
§ Test your emerging hypotheses--keep coming back to check that you are addressing the question you were asked.
§ Conclude--synthesize your thoughts concisely and develop a recommendation.

If you are stuck, a useful fall-back is to think about what really makes the difference between profit and loss (revenue minus costs), i.e., focus on the key problem areas that the company must address to make money. Although it’s not always relevant, it will be key in many situations.

What We Are Looking For
In most instances there is no “right answer” to the problem. The key is that you demonstrate your ability to think it through in an insightful way, that you reach a reasoned conclusion that is supported by the evidence, and that you can clearly synthesize the discussion. Listen carefully to the scenario; if you miss critical information it can affect your ability to solve the problem.

During the case study, we look for evidence of your ability on a number of dimensions--logical reasoning, creativity, quantitative skills, business judgement (not business knowledge), pragmatism, and an ability to structure problem solving. We also look for evidence of intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm for typical consulting issues.

Equally important is for us to get a sense that you are comfortable with our working style--learning from the emerging facts and developing revised hypotheses as more information becomes available. You should be receptive to new information and use it to push your thinking forward. When you are asked a question, you should refer back to any relevant information that’s already been discussed rather than answer it in isolation.

Case Study Do’s and Don’ts
§ Listen to the problem--make sure you are answering the question that you have been asked to answer.
§ Begin with setting a structure--think of 4-5 key questions that you need to answer before you can synthesize the overall issue.
§ Stay organized--finish one key question and arrive at a point of view on it before you go on to the next.
§ Step back periodically--summarize what you have learned and what the implications appear to be.
§ Communicate your train of thought. Even if you have considered some alternatives and rejected them, tell the interviewer what and why.
§ Ask for information judiciously--make sure that the interviewer knows why you need the information, and be prepared to propose quick and inexpensive ways of collecting it.
§ Watch for cues from the interviewer--and keep an open mind
§ Do not try to “crack the case”--it is much more important to clearly demonstrate a logical thought process than to arrive at the solution
§ Use business judgment and common sense.
§ Relax and enjoy the process. Think of the interviewer as a teammate in a problem solving process and the case as a real client problem that you need to solve.

Some Common Mistakes
§ Misunderstanding the question asked or answering the wrong question.
§ Proceeding in a haphazard fashion, i.e., not identifying the major issues that need to be examined or jumping from one issue to another.
§ Asking a barrage of questions without explaining to the interviewer why you need the information.
§ Force-fitting a few familiar business frameworks to every case questions, whether they are relevant or not (or misapplying a relevant business framework that you do not really understand) rather than simply using common sense.
§ Not being able to synthesize a point of view based on the information provided by the interviewer.

Ask a Question

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