McKinsey & Company is consistently ranked as the most prestigious management consulting firm in the world. Their selection process is among the most rigorous in any industry, designed to identify candidates with exceptional analytical ability, structured thinking, and the communication skills to advise senior executives.
McKinsey's Hiring Process
- Application: CV and cover letter screening. GPA, university prestige, and extracurricular leadership matter significantly.
- McKinsey Problem Solving Game: A gamified cognitive assessment (Imbellus) that replaces the traditional Problem Solving Test.
- First round interviews: 2 case interviews + 1 Personal Experience Interview (PEI) with a junior consultant.
- Final round interviews: 2-3 case interviews + PEI with a Partner or Senior Partner.
The Problem Solving Game (Imbellus)
McKinsey replaced their traditional written Problem Solving Test with the Imbellus digital game in 2023. The game involves ecosystem management and disease spread scenarios that measure systems thinking, data interpretation, and decision-making under uncertainty. There are no 'right' answers. The game measures how you approach problems, not just the outcomes.
The Imbellus game measures cognitive processes: how quickly you form hypotheses, how you update your beliefs with new data, and how you manage trade-offs under time pressure.
Key Frameworks
- Profitability framework: Revenue - Costs. Used for cases about declining profits or market entry decisions.
- Market sizing: Estimate the size of a market using top-down or bottom-up approaches.
- Porter's Five Forces: Analyse industry competitiveness for market entry or strategy cases.
- 3Cs framework: Company, Customers, Competitors. A quick diagnostic for business strategy cases.
Personal Experience Interview (PEI)
The PEI assesses three dimensions: personal impact (leadership and influence), entrepreneurial drive (initiative and ownership), and inclusive leadership (collaboration and empathy). Prepare 3-4 strong stories from your experience that demonstrate each dimension. Use the STAR method, but go deeper on the 'Action' component.
Practice case interviews, Problem Solving Game simulations, and PEI preparation with MakingMoves.ai's AI-powered coaching platform.
Start Interview PrepIngmar van Maurik is the founder of MakingMoves.ai and Assessment-Training.com. With 10+ years in psychometric assessment design, he has helped over 1 million professionals prepare for job assessments.