At McKinsey, all interviews start with a Personal Experience Interview (PEI) question. This should be a great opportunity for candidates to start strong and impress their interviewer. However, many fail to properly prepare for the PEI, which ends up costing them an offer.
To make sure you don’t make that mistake, we’ve laid out everything you need to know about McKinsey PEI questions below, including the four question types, tips on how to answer them from McKinsey coaches and recruiter experts, and the specific steps you need to take to prepare for the interview.
Here’s an outline of what we’ll cover:
- What is PEI at McKinsey?
- McKinsey PEI questions
- How to answer PEI questions
- Example McKinsey PEI answer
- Prep plan for answering McKinsey PEI questions
Click here to practise with McKinsey ex-interviewers
1. What is PEI at McKinsey?↑
PEI stands for Personal Experience Interview and is McKinsey’s version of a behavioral interview. It currently consists of four themes, which form the basis of the questions you can expect. These are:
The PEI is conducted during the first 10-15 minutes of every case interview at McKinsey.
McKinsey uses PEI questions to get a detailed picture of your personality, your motivations, how you react to people and situations, what you’re passionate about, and more. If you think that makes it sound easy, think again. It’s evaluating you for soft skills essential for thriving at McKinsey, so you’ll need to show that you’ve got them in spades.
1.1 What’s the format of PEI?
You’ll get a PEI question at the start of each case interview and each will cover a single theme. In other words, you will spend the full 10 minutes of the PEI discussing ONE particular soft skill McKinsey wants to test.
For example, you might be asked how you demonstrated entrepreneurial drive in the past. You will discuss that topic with your interviewer for 10-15 minutes.
To be clear, you are not expected to recite a 10-minute speech to the initial question your interviewers will ask. They will follow up with other questions as you tell your story to make sure they understand it in enough detail. The key point to understand is that these follow-up questions will be all about the initial topic too. What the interviewers are doing is guiding the conversation, so you should follow their lead.
For example, as you give your answer, the interviewer will probe with questions such as “What data did you use to make that decision?”, “How did the client react to this?”, “How was your team involved?”, etc. They do this to drill into the details that interest them and to test the strength of your answer.
1.2 Why does McKinsey do it differently?
At many consulting firms, you might have a standalone 1-hour resume interview with an interviewer who’s different from the ones you met in your case interviews.
Instead, McKinsey assesses you using both PEI and case questions across multiple interviews, allowing several of its interviewers to form an opinion on your experience and skills. Overall, this helps the firm develop a more informed judgment of its candidates’ personal abilities.
In a McKinsey Recruiting podcast episode about the PEI, Global Director of Talent Assessment Simone Jacobi mentions two major factors that make McKinsey PEI different from how other companies conduct behavioral interviews:
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The structure of the interview
Jacobi shares that candidates can expect a highly structured interview led by the interviewer. She explains: “We do that on purpose because we want to give the same chances to every candidate and hence increase the fairness of our interviews.” This means every candidate will likely hear the same introductory questions and get similar guidance on how to respond during the personal experience interview.
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Interviewers are not testing for culture fit
A culture fit interview is a type of behavioral interview that other companies conduct to evaluate whether you will thrive in a company’s specific work culture. Jacobi clarifies that McKinsey’s PEI is not a fit interview. As with the highly structured interview, deviating from the usual fit interview helps McKinsey increase the fairness of their interviews by reducing any form of bias. One such bias they want to avoid is the mini-me bias, which is a person’s preference for another who’s similar to themselves.
1.3 Why is the McKinsey PEI so important?
McKinsey consultants have to work within client organisations in very delicate situations, so strong soft skills are essential.
Of course, skills like problem-solving are extremely important too, and you’ll be tested on these as well. But soft skills are probably the most difficult to teach, so McKinsey wants to know you’ve got them already. For this reason, you won’t be hired if you get a low score on the PEI.
Now that you have some background on the McKinsey PEI, let’s take a look at the types of questions you’ll face.
2. McKinsey PEI questions↑
McKinsey PEI questions should hold no surprises. Your case interview invite should include information on the PEI themes you can expect. As we’ve mentioned above, here are the four themes McKinsey interviewers use as the basis for their PEI questions:
Let’s take a look at each one in a bit more detail, with information published on McKinsey’s careers page and insights from our coaches and McKinsey experts. We also included some examples of PEI questions we found on Glassdoor to show you the slightly different ways your interviewer might ask you for each theme.
2.1 Personal impact
“Explain a challenging situation you encountered when working with someone with an opposing opinion to yours.”
McKinsey describes "personal impact" on their Interviewing page: “Working with clients on challenging issues requires the involvement and support of many individuals. Interacting effectively with people is key to creating positive, enduring change.”
To earn everyone's support and involvement, McKinsey consultants have to be very persuasive. Once you work as a consultant, you may spend weeks devising the best strategy to convince a key executive of a certain course of action. The interviewer wants to see that you’re capable of doing this.
There is also an element of empathy here, and sometimes this question is framed more as "resolving conflict." This is because as a consultant, you need to be able to understand the concerns, motivations, and emotions of the people in your team and client organisation. You need to navigate organisational politics and work constructively with people who may react emotionally against you.
Essentially, persuasiveness and empathy go hand-in-hand, and ideally, your story should demonstrate both. In any case, you can’t convince someone (that you don't have authority over) to do something if you can’t understand their perspective and motivations.
Let’s look at some examples reported on Glassdoor to see how McKinsey interviewers frame this theme into questions.
McKinsey PEI - Personal impact question examples
- Tell me about a situation when you had to change someone's opinion.
- Tell me about some situation in which you disagreed with someone.
- Tell me a time you changed a group's mind.
- Tell me about a time you had to convince someone of something.
- Tell me about a time when you disagreed with someone on your team.
- Tell me a story about convincing others.
- Tell me about a time you had to resolve a conflict in a team setting.
- Tell me about a time you had to convince someone on your team to take a different approach.
2.2 Entrepreneurial drive
“Talk about a time when you worked to achieve something that was outside your comfort zone.”
On the McKinsey PEI podcast episode, McKinsey engagement manager Richard Hojel clarifies that “entrepreneurial drive” is not about being an entrepreneur or starting your own business per se; instead, it’s about being entrepreneurial in your approach to what you do and the situations you face.
For this particular PEI theme, McKinsey is evaluating your resilience and resourcefulness, your willingness to take risks, and your continuous quest for ways to grow, learn, and innovate. These are characteristics you’ll have the opportunity to demonstrate from day one at McKinsey because as a consultant, you’ll often be placed in very challenging situations. You’ll be asked to solve problems in industries you have never worked in, and you’ll have to build trust with clients who have spent a very long time in the industry.
McKinsey wants to know how you’d act and react when facing this type of situation. Would you take ownership? Would you be overwhelmed? Would you see this as an obstacle or as an opportunity to innovate? Your story should show that you were able to put together a plan that responded to a tough situation, and then you executed it relentlessly.
Bear in mind that the PEI wants to test how you’d work as a consultant, where you’ll constantly be interacting with different stakeholders. We recommend using an example where you had to work with other people, whether it’s your classmates, colleagues, or club members. This might be a better fit rather than a story where you might have shown great resolve and drive, but you’ve done so on your own and without impacting others directly.
Here are a few question examples under this PEI theme.
McKinsey PEI - Entrepreneurial drive question examples
- Tell me about a time when you faced a challenging situation with a tight deadline.
- Name the biggest obstacle you've ever had in your career, and how you overcame it.
- Tell me about a really complex project you worked on.
- Describe a time when you faced a challenge.
- Describe one challenging situation in your career and explain how you reacted.
- Tell me about a time when you had to make a difficult decision.
- Give me an example of how you handled a crisis.
- Describe a time when you were on a team that failed. How did you navigate that experience, and would you have done anything differently?
- Tell me about a time when you delivered results despite a challenging environment or context. What was the situation, what was your goal, and what were the results?
- Can you describe a time when you had to solve a complex problem with limited data?
- Can you tell us more about what did not work so well in your past projects, and how you went about resolving it?
2.3 Inclusive leadership
“Share an example where you effectively worked with people with different backgrounds.”
McKinsey will only want to hire you if it sees you as a potential leader at the firm. In any case, leadership is not only a necessary quality for people in senior positions. A consultant will often need to lead their clients, and they’ll need to do so without having direct authority over them.
The “inclusive” aspect is highly relevant here too, because McKinsey believes in “harnessing the power of diverse thinking to drive results”. You’ll therefore need to work effectively with people whose backgrounds (ethnicity, expertise, educational level, age, etc.) might be very different from yours, and maximize everyone’s differences to your advantage.
With that in mind, it’s worth noting that you don’t need to be the “official leader” in the story you tell to answer this question, as long as you acted like a leader. In fact, if you led without being the designated leader, that’s an even stronger example of leadership.
Let’s see how McKinsey interviewers frame this PEI theme into questions
McKinsey PEI - Inclusive leadership question examples
- Tell me about a project that you have led.
- Tell me about a time when you led a team through a difficult situation.
- Describe a situation where you used your leadership skills. What was the situation, what was your role, and how did you impact the situation through your leadership?
- Tell me about a time when you led a team to overcome an obstacle.
- Tell me about a time when you influenced someone without having authority over them.
2.4 Courageous change
“Revisit a time when you experienced a significant change or encountered an ambiguous situation and share the actions you took to adapt to the new circumstances.”
Courageous change is a recent addition to McKinsey PEI, and it’s in response to the rapid changes and constant disruptions in today’s world. Working at McKinsey, you’ll need to be able to respond to such sudden and unexpected changes within your own team, or your client’s needs, with courage, adaptability, and positivity.
McKinsey interview coach Htoo shares that working at McKinsey, you can expect to receive feedback from your managers every 1 to 2 weeks. You’ll need to take the feedback with a positive mindset and see it as an opportunity for growth.
He further expands on this, saying that each project at McKinsey is basically like getting a new job, as it involves working with completely new teams and managers from diverse backgrounds, each with their own working style. “Adaptability is key–since projects are typically short, it's important to quickly adjust to your manager's preferences."
In your “courageous change” interview, your interviewer will want to evaluate if you can work and thrive under such unpredictable circumstances.
Let’s take a look at some ‘courageous change’ question examples.
McKinsey PEI - Courageous change question examples
- Tell me about the time you had to adapt to a major change in a team.
- Explain a time you had to overcome a sudden change and how you did it.
- Describe a time you went outside of your comfort zone and faced significant change.
- How do you react to change?
You’ll notice that the examples in each category are pretty similar to each other, so there shouldn’t be any surprise when you get into the interview.
Extra: Values and purpose interview
Recruiting director Jacobi mentions the “values and purpose” interview in the McKinsey PEI podcast. It won’t be a surprise one either. If you’ll get this interview, your recruiter will let you know. If you won’t, don’t worry–not every candidate receives this interview as it’s not yet used in the same way in all offices at this point.
The “values and purpose” interview has a unique format, which is as follows:
- 1st part: Your interviewer will talk about McKinsey values in detail. Then they’ll pick one and share their experience of how this particular value came to life for them in their McKinsey career.
- 2nd part: Your interviewer will then ask you to pick a McKinsey value. It doesn’t have to be the same as the one they shared. You’ll then speak about the value as you’ve experienced it in your own life. With your interviewer’s guidance, the two of you will explore the value—how it has shaped your behavior, etc.
3. How to answer McKinsey PEI questions↑
There’s no mystery about how to answer PEI questions. You’ll need to prepare several stories from your personal and professional experience to demonstrate the four PEI themes we’ve just covered.
How many stories? McKinsey interview coach Peter recommends preparing two examples for each of the four PEI themes. You’ll likely have more than three interviews, so there's a chance two different interviewers could target the same area. Just to be on the safe side, though, you might want to avoid repeating the same story in the same round.
Also, it’s possible that one of your examples might not fully match how your interview frames their question. For example, one of your stories could fit the “entrepreneurial drive” question, “Can you describe a time when you had to solve a complex problem?” However, your interviewer’s question might have something to do with solving a problem with limited data or within a tight deadline. So, it’s good to have two examples to choose from and make sure they’re different enough to fit certain variations of a PEI theme.
Overall, you’ll need to prepare eight examples to demonstrate the four areas listed above. You’ll need to be able to go into a lot of depth, as you’ll be talking about it for 10-15 minutes, and the interviewer will ask you specific questions.
Let’s go through our 8 essential tips to help you construct these stories in the strongest way possible.
3.1 Use a framework
Using a framework to answer PEI questions can bring many benefits. It helps you avoid making common mistakes, such as forgetting to explain what the impact of your actions was, or the lessons you learned.
Perhaps counterintuitively, a framework can help you sound more natural and authentic in the interview. The solid structure means you’re less likely to lose your thread, so you can be more relaxed about going off on slight tangents if prompted, or if something suddenly comes to mind.
There are different ways to tell your story, but we suggest you keep it relatively simple. The STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) is a popular approach for answering behavioural questions because it’s easy to remember. You may have already heard of it.
However, we’ve found that candidates often find it difficult to distinguish the difference between steps two and three, or task and action. Some also forget to include lessons learned in the results step, which is especially crucial when discussing past failures or overcoming challenges.
With that in mind, we’ve tweaked the framework into the (admittedly less catchy) SPSIL method:
- Situation: start by giving the necessary context
- Problem: outline the problem you and your team were facing
- Solution: explain the solution you came up with to solve the problem outlined
- Impact: if possible, quantify the impact you had in solving the problem
- Lessons: conclude with any lessons you might have learned in the process
McKinsey interview coach Peter suggests a similar outline but recommends another element: a consequence of not solving the challenge. You could include this after laying out the problem, as a way to illustrate the stakes involved in the story.
Of course, you can use the STAR method if you prefer, but the candidates we’ve worked with have tended to prefer SPSIL, as there’s no overlap between steps and they feel they’re less likely to miss something out.
3.2 Choose stories that are highly relevant
When brainstorming stories to tell in your PEI, one advice from this McKinsey PEI introductory video is to “pick stories that really mattered to you, examples when you made a difference, whether it’s in a team setting or a challenging situation.” You also want to think about how relevant the stories are to the day-to-day work of a consultant.
This doesn’t mean you can only give work-related examples. For example, is “captaining a university football team to a cup final” relevant to what you’d be doing at McKinsey? Actually, it could be very relevant, especially when answering the "inclusive leadership" question. As a captain, you presumably have to show leadership in high-pressure situations, react decisively to changing circumstances, and use good communication skills to get a team of diverse people with various strengths, weaknesses, and personalities, to work towards a common goal.
Conversely, a story about how you nailed a complex and important task during an internship might on the surface seem more relevant, but if you were simply executing what your boss was telling you to do without interacting with different stakeholders, using initiative, or working as part of a team, it probably won’t be an effective story for any of the PEI themes.
3.3 Make your story authentic
McKinsey talks about PEI questions being a chance for you to show them "your best you." So what example from your past really demonstrates you at your best? If it can be something unique, then great. But more importantly, you need to tell it in a way that’s real, so it doesn’t sound like a copy of the dozen other ones they’ve heard that week.
Part of this will come with practising telling the story until you can do so naturally and relaxed. But this will be hard to do if you don’t have true enthusiasm for your story. So take the time to find strong examples from your past that you can really get excited about. Sensing your excitement and enthusiasm about the story you’re telling will surely pique your interviewer’s engagement.
3.4 Go deep
Interviews at McKinsey are not supposed to be monologues; they’re two-way discussions. That means that the interviewer will frequently interrupt you as you tell your story to ask further questions and to get you to delve deeper into aspects of it.
These questions can be quite specific, so you need to have a lot of details ready for your stories, more than you’ll be able to use.
McKinsey interview coach Peter advises recalling specific details such as your thoughts and feelings as you went through the situation, verbatim quotes of what people said and how they reacted, how you reacted, etc. Carefully prepare the details to “show the story is actually genuine and make the interviewer feel they were there with you in the situation.”
Remember, quality is more important than quantity. For instance, you may have been president and captain of various clubs at university, but simply listing them all won’t really show the interviewer that you have strong inclusive leadership skills.
You’d be better off taking one example of something you did during your time at university that showed true leadership and developing it into a detailed story with enough depth to stand up to ten minutes of scrutiny.
3.5 Give just enough context
A lot of candidates spend too much time setting the context. You should only give the minimum context needed to understand the problem and the solution in your story. Nothing more. A good test here is to make sure you don’t spend more than 30 seconds on this part of your story. Let’s look at an example.
Too much context: “The example I am going to give you dates back to two years ago when I was in my third year of university. I was playing for the football team, and we had just had a fantastic season. At the end of every season, there is always a tournament to determine who is going to win the championship in the region where my university is. Not all universities get to go there. Only the best ones do. The first few games we played went really well. Throughout the tournament, we managed to maintain our performance. Finally, after 3 very tough games, we managed to make it to the finals.”
Right amount of context: “Two years ago, I made it to the championship finals with my university football team. The story I am going to tell you relates to that final game which was the most important one in the season.”
Notice how the second example goes straight to the point and only gives the necessary information. A lot of candidates fail to do that in PEI questions, which results in their interviewer asking them to speed up and go to the core of the story.
One way to keep your answers concise and efficient is to maintain top-down communication. Start with the most important details, then go deeper into each detail as the interview requires. McKinsey interview coach Peter advises incorporating natural pauses into your answer to give your interviewer a chance to ask questions. These questions should then allow you to dive deeper into the details that are relevant to the main question and your story.
3.6 Focus on YOU
The PEI is about YOU so your answer should focus on how YOU demonstrated the skill your interviewer is looking for. A good test here is to make sure that you use “I” a lot. When you tell your story, and you hear yourself saying “I did this,” “I felt that way,” and “I suggested this,” you’re on the right track.
Using our football example above, your answer should focus on YOUR contribution to the final game. Maybe you were the best defender on the team, in which case you should detail the tactics you used to prevent the opposite team from scoring. Or perhaps you were the captain of the team and had to talk individually to players to maintain a cohesive group, or you were able to harness each player’s strength to your team’s advantage. Whatever your role was, you should tell your interviewer about the specific things YOU did to secure the victory, not what the team did in general.
3.7 Give numbers where possible
Experienced hires should give some metrics when it comes to the ‘impact’ part of the story to demonstrate that their actions had a real measurable impact.
This might be harder to do if you’re a graduate hire and you don’t have work experience, but you should still try to include some numbers if possible.
For example, if your story is about how you implemented some changes at a summer job, can you say that as a result of your actions, profit went up 10%? Or perhaps you estimated that waste went down 20% or saved 30 minutes each day?
Even in the football team example above, it’s still possible to quantify your actions’ impact with numbers. For instance, you might say, “After the tactical changes I implemented as captain with 20 minutes to go, we had 3 times as many shots as we had in the first 20."
3.8 Pitch your story in 30 seconds
You’ll have several stories to choose from, so choosing the right one to answer the question is crucial. One way of making sure that you don’t pick the wrong story is to pitch a summary of it to the interviewer before you embark on telling it.
You could pitch one story at first, then let your interviewer confirm whether it fits the theme they want you to cover. If they think it’s not a fit, then offer your second option.
You can also use McKinsey interview coach Peter’s format, where you open with “This question reminds me of two situations.” Then give a 10-second summary of your two stories, and ask them, "Which one appeals more to you?"
If you don’t start with a pitch and launch straight into an ill-chosen story, the interviewer won’t be able to tell you that you’re on the wrong track until a few minutes in, at which point you’ve lost a lot of time.
4. McKinsey PEI example answer↑
To illustrate the framework and tips that we’ve discussed above, we’ve laid out an example answer to one of the real PEI questions that we found on Glassdoor.
Question
“Tell me about a time you had to convince someone of something.”(Personal impact)
Pitch
Candidate: I’d like to tell you about a time at my previous company when I convinced my boss that we should pitch for a contract she thought we had no chance of winning. We didn’t win that contract but, thanks to the relationship we established with the brand via the pitching process, we started to do a lot of business with them from that point onwards. Does that sound like the sort of thing you’re looking for?
Interviewer: Yes, sounds interesting. Please go on.
Clock: 30 seconds
1. Situation
Candidate: Okay, well this was during my previous role at an advertising agency, where I was working as an account manager. We were having a disappointing year and pressure was building to win some new clients, or cuts would be inevitable. Through a connection, we were invited to pitch for a contract to make the Christmas TV spot for a well-known chocolate brand, which was a huge deal.
Clock: 1 minute
2. Problem
Interviewer: A big opportunity then?
Candidate: Well, yes and no. The problem was that there were at least six other companies pitching, who all had more experience in TV than us and greater resources. As our budget was already tight, my boss didn’t want to make the necessary investment in pitching, given we had such a slim chance of winning it.
Interviewer: What are the costs involved in pitching for a contract like this?
Candidate: Mainly paying for people’s time. We would have to get a couple of freelancers from TV involved, plus it would mean adding to the load on the in-house creative team who were already busy in their day-to-day.
Interviewer: I see, please continue.
Clock: 2 minutes
3. Solution
Candidate: I knew our lack of profile in this area meant we were unlikely to win the pitch. But I did some research and found that this brand was starting to do a lot of digital advertising campaigns for some of their other snack products: working with influencers on Instagram, user-generated content, etc.
Candidate: This was an area where our agency had a lot of expertise. I made some calls and learned that their digital campaigns were done by various different agencies, rather than one trusted partner. This suggested that they could be open to working with us in this area and that we could use the Christmas pitch as a “foot in the door.”
Interviewer: And is that a common tactic in the industry?
Candidate: No, at least not at our agency. We've always worked with minimal resources, and pitches take up a lot of time. My boss’s policy was only to pitch for things that she felt we had a good chance of winning.
Interviewer: Ok, please continue.
Candidate: On top of that, I knew she hated going in cold to pitches (not knowing the people in the room). So, first I did some research on who was going to be in the pitch meeting. I found that the marketing director was going to be at the same event as my boss in a few weeks' time, so that would give us the chance to establish a relationship. In my own time, I built a presentation showing the brand’s digital ad campaigns over the last 6 months and the synergies with our expertise areas.
Candidate: I knew that my boss was extremely concerned about our bottom line and that she always liked to see the numbers in a presentation. So I included some rough estimations of what these digital campaigns could be worth to us over 3 years, hoping to reinforce how valuable this approach could be for us long-term.
Interviewer: So how favourable did the estimations look? Could you go into some more detail on the numbers?
Candidate: Sure. So based on my experience in the industry, I estimated that the budget to produce 12 months of digital content for one of their snack products would be in the region of 300K, and typically the agency fee would be 20% of this. If we did a good job, we could be confident of gaining another similar contract with them by year 2 and another in year 3.
Candidate: So my ballpark projection was that working this brand could be worth 360K profit in 3 years - extremely significant given that last year we had made around 140K profit. In the presentation, I compared that estimate against how much this initial pitch investment would cost us - around 3K.
Interviewer: Thanks, those numbers certainly sound significant. Please continue.
Candidate: So first I showed the presentation to one of our most experienced account managers to get her on board, and then together we took it to my boss. She was interested, but she was still concerned about the reaction of our creative director, who might be unhappy about his team having to work late generating TV spot ideas that would probably never be executed. However, I made it clear that I was happy to be the one coordinating with him and essentially be the "fall guy" on this to take the heat over extra hours worked, acting as a buffer between him and my boss.
Interviewer: Right, so did the plan work?
Clock: 5 minutes
4. Impact
Candidate: It did! We worked like crazy for ten days to create a strong presentation. The pitch went really well. As expected we didn’t win, but we were able to present some very creative ideas and steer the conversation towards our terrain: digital. Afterwards, I was able to have a long conversation with their marketing head about digital opportunities. Within weeks we were in regular contact with him.
Two months later, we ran our first digital campaign for them, and soon they became one of our regular clients. The next year 15% of our revenue came from that client.
Clock: 6 minutes
5. Lessons
Interviewer: Great result. Anything else you’d like to add?
Candidate: Yes, some lessons I learned. The creative director, as feared, was pretty unhappy about it at first and resisted taking on the additional work. When he saw how hard I was working on the project, he softened up a bit, and he put in a great performance on the day, but I wish I made more of an effort to win him over earlier. I think I learned the value of getting all the main stakeholders behind the process, not just the ones who have the final say.
Interviewer: Ok, and how could you have done this?
Candidate: In the creative director’s case, probably by showing him the creative opportunities that would become available if and when we were able to start working with the brand on their digital campaigns. And I should have explained that pitching to a room full of well-connected executives was a great professional opportunity for him in itself, which I think he realised eventually.
Clock: 7 minutes
Interviewer: Okay, that’s been really interesting, thank you. I suggest we now move on to the case interview.
5. Prep plan for answering McKinsey PEI questions↑
Now that we’ve covered everything you need to know about PEI questions and how to answer them, let’s take a look at the steps you should take to prepare.
5.1 Find and research your stories
As discussed earlier, you’ll need around six detailed stories up your sleeve. We recommend outlining ten and then gradually cutting the weaker ones as you start to fill in the details.
If you’re having trouble finding enough stories that work, talk to old colleagues or classmates and see if they remember anything you did. Something relatively small that you’ve forgotten about can sometimes be fleshed out into a really strong story.
In fact, even when it’s something that you remember well, it can be useful to talk to someone else who was involved, as they’ll likely have a new perspective on it that could be useful.
5.2 Practise on your own
We recommend writing your answers down on paper within the structure of our SPSIL framework. This will help you see which parts of your story need editing down to be more concise, which parts need more detail, etc.
When you’re happy with them on paper, start practising out loud on your own. You’ll find that the more you do this, the more convincingly you’ll tell them.
It’s also helpful to try answering different questions with the same story. For example, the marketing agency story in the previous section might be relevant to a variety of questions about working with stakeholders, managing disagreements, leadership, etc. If you practise delivering your story in different ways, you’ll be more comfortable responding to questions during your real interview.
Of course, by yourself, you can’t simulate thinking on your feet or the pressure of performing in front of a stranger. Plus, there are no unexpected follow-up questions and no feedback.
That’s why many candidates try to practice with friends or peers.
5.3 Practise with peers
If you have friends or peers who can do mock interviews with you, that's an option worth trying. It’s free, but be warned, you may come up against the following problems:
- It’s hard to know if the feedback you get is accurate
- They’re unlikely to have insider knowledge of interviews at your target company
- On peer platforms, people often waste your time by not showing up
For those reasons, many candidates skip peer mock interviews and go straight to mock interviews with an expert.
5.4 Practise with experienced MBB interviewers
In our experience, practising real interviews with experts who can give you company-specific feedback makes a huge difference.
Find a McKinsey interview coach so you can:
- Test yourself under real interview conditions
- Get accurate feedback from a real expert
- Build your confidence
- Get company-specific insights
- Learn how to tell the right stories, better.
- Save time by focusing your preparation
Landing a job at a top consulting company often results in a $50,000 per year or more increase in total compensation. In our experience, three or four coaching sessions worth ~$500 will make a significant difference in your ability to land the job. That’s an ROI of 100x!
Click here to book McKinsey mock interviews with experienced McKinsey interviewers
