Cross regional recruitment

Hello,

Unfortunately, I think the McKinsey Canada employee you talked to is right - it tends to be significantly easier to get hired in your home/school region, because of immigration, language barriers, and existing recruiting networks. Unless you speak the local language and have the correct work authorization, it is much harder to get an offer outside your country of residence. Some MBB offices allow cross-regional transfers after you have accrued some tenure, but these can also be tricky to negotiate and I would not take them as a given.

Hi Hamza,

You are correct to be sckeptical here!

I highly advise you do not try Canada/US unless you have a working visa/citizenship. This is especially true at entyr levels (where they're not going to go through the expense of sponshorship).

Middle East countries will indeed be better targets for you.

Remember, the best way to figure a lot of this out is networking! Every single company and every office has a different policy and every-evolving scenarios (for example, Australian consulting offices used to import consultants, but now they rarely do as the immigration laws changed ~5 years back)

Good luck with your networking and applications!

Hi Hamza,

Q: Will it be practical to apply to their Qatar/UAE/KSA offices from my country of residence i.e. India?

In general, your chances are higher in your local country than abroad, unless you have a clear connection with that country (eg studied/worked there).

Normally you should apply in a country where:

1. You have working rights
2. You can speak the local language
3. You can show some kind of connection

The Middle East is an exception for #2 as you don’t need to know Arabic to work there. It is also usually easier to get a job there compared to other countries in terms of #1 and #3. For this reasons, it is often a good area to target if you don't want to apply in your home country.

The best way to increase your chances is to find a consultant that can refer you, they should be able to confirm whether that country could work given your profile and increase the chances of being invited.

You can find more on referrals here:

▶ How to Get an MBB Referral

Good luck!

Francesco

Middle East / GCC is talent scarce, meaning that they tend to import talent from other regions. This doesn't apply to Canada. GCC rules tend to be more friendly towards providing visas.

So, all in all, GCC is much more likely to accept you as a candidate vs. Canada - which will probably only sponsor Visas for more qualified / experienced candidates that bring something a bit more unique to the table.