McKinsey Final Round Experience - Your Thoughts?

Question

Hi All,

I recently went through my McKinsey final round interviews applying for the Delivery Manager role, and it was a really weird experience to be honest. Would like to hear your thoughts on this…

Interview 1 (PEI + Case) - The partner joined 10 min late, which I guess is reasonable considering hectic schedules. There was an initial 10 min spent on my CV, experiences, and my motivations to join McKinsey. Then my PEI went really well and I felt that I had established a connect with the partner. However, the partner then said that he hadn’t been assigned a case so the Case Study won’t happen. On speaking to HR, they’re saying I’ll have to repeat the whole interview (including PEI) but they’ll consider this partner’s feedback on the PEI. Overall, seems quite unfair to me to have to repeat the PEI again.

Interview 2 (PEI + Case) - This time, the first 20 min of the interview went in talking about my CV experience, background, describing 2-3 projects, and specifically focusing on my role in them. The PEI (Leadership) was skipped completely! However, since I had prepared well, one of my project descriptions was the PEI story itself. Next came the case - typical McKinsey cases have 3 parts - brainstorming, exhibit analysis (charts/graphs etc.), and a math question. In my case, the partner read the case prompt, then told me he’d show me 2 slides for 5 min each (the exhibit and the math) and to keep my answers ready. Then, after 10 min, he jumped back to the brainstorming (which was now relatively limited because I had already seen a lot of data from the exhibit). And then jumped directly to math without asking for insights on the exhibit (effectively brainstorming and exhibit got mixed/combined). He also discouraged me from sharing the future potential implications of the math answer (which I got right)

Apologies for the extra long message (and the ranting), but I feel overall that the whole experience was extremely unstructured and I feel it did impact my performance negatively.

Appreciate your thoughts on this. I know partner interviews can go off script, but not being ready with a case and ignoring the PEI topic completely seems a bit too much.

What do you all think?

Answer 1

First, let me say I am sorry that you felt that the experience was not structured. Some partners like to be a bit unstructured in interviews to check your comfort with ambiguity and ability to go with the flow. As long as you did well on the analytical, conceptual and quantitative, you should be fine.

Answer 2

Hi there,

That definitely sounds like a frustrating experience and you’re not overreacting at all. Partner rounds can be quite unstructured, but missing a full case or PEI is surprising for me. Unfortunately, I don't think there is much you can do in this case other than hope for the best.

Answer 3

Sorry to hear.

It does sound more unusual than the typical interview experience. With the first interview at least, it seems something went technically wrong and they couldn't respond to it.

The unfortunate thing is that you can't do much about it. These things are part of the interview experience, which is why it's good to diversify your applications a bit and not depend only on individual firms.

And still, it doesn't sound like the interview went badly. So there's a strong chance that you'll still get an offer.

Best,
Cristian