Speaking with a McKinsey Analyst

McKinsey & Company l Portugal l Business Analyst

A 60-min interview with Ricardo Cardoso, a McKinsey Business Analyst.

Keep in mind that this interview only provides high-level guidance on how to better prepare for the interviews and illustrates the sort of relevant insights you can find by networking with people. It doesn´t intend to describe the interview process in detail. Enjoy the talk!

#1: Top reasons to recommend McKinsey & Company?

For me, it is clearly the learning and the impact you can have. Large corporations and CEOs rely on us to make decisions, so the pressure is to perform and give the best answer always there. 

There is no option but to deliver fast and with a very high quality, impacting the life of people, corporations and sometimes even countries! This responsibility, together with the adaptability you must develop to jump between industries and teams, forces you to learn very quickly. 

If your driver to join The Firm is not learning and having a measurable and positive impact project after project, I find it very hard to make it sustainable and actually enjoy the job in the long term. 

#2: What defines the culture of the company?

Excellence.

Everyone has the pressure to consistently give 110%.

#3: What makes a resume stand out?

I used a simple, standard template that wasn't distracting.

I recommend including only relevant work; remove everything that doesn`t involve tangible actions or impact. Speak about your contribution, not a team as a whole. Use the STAR method as a reference for building strong bullet points.

Extracurricular activities can help but, in my opinion, they only become game-changing if you manage to explain clearly the impact you had on specific activities.

On those, my advice is to focus a lot on how you communicate, explain the setting / the challenge clearly and then proceed to explain the impact you had and how you did it. 

Be sharp in the communication - to the point and clear.

#4: What is the assessment game about?

The game is probably the harder phase to find materials and practice because, in fact, you should not need it. It´s made to test your problem solving and strategic thinking abilities in a gamified way and that is how I believe you should approach it! 

To prepare I strongly recommend learning the rules and thinking about how you will approach each game beforehand by researching videos in YouTube and on the McKinsey website. 

This will allow you to approach them in a much more confident way and will take out the burden of trying to memorize all the rules on the spot with the natural nervosism of an interview. 

#5: How did you prepare for the assessment game?

There aren´t good platforms to prepare at a reasonable price.

But you have everything you need on the internet - look for videos in YouTube (type solve McKinsey game) and read the rules in the McKinsey website.

#6. What about the business case? How did you prepare it?

I don´t recommend starting by jumping directly to solve a case (and even less practicing with someone already at McKinsey). First, it's essential to master problem-solving, calculations, structuring, interpreting graphs, etc. So it´s better to learn step by step.

For me, it was very helpful the Brazilian website Crafting Cases. They have free samples that were really useful (didn't need to pay). You can even email the team with questions, and they get back to you.

Something that worked for me was:

(1) Asking some friends from school to do mock cases with me (no need to start with people who are very advanced with case practice)

(2) Conducting some mock interviews with people who are also preparing for interviews. It helps you see by yourself common mistakes.

(3) Don´t memorize lots of frameworks because that falsely makes you think you have an answer ready for any business case. You shouldn't crack a case; you should find your own approach and shape it in your own way, collaboratively with the interviewer.

Frameworks are helpful and a good reference, but they don´t solve cases alone.

Take as an example the following question:

"If a large multinational corporation wants to prepare a training to ensure everyone operates consistently across all geographies, what would you focus on?"

At the end, it was a business case with Maths, but there is no framework alone that can fit in a case like this. You need to think on the spot and come up with your own answer.

#7. Was networking important to get the job?

I did have a dinner, together with other students from my university, with the McKinsey team one year before applying, so it was useful to know more about what they did. 

I didn't do a lot of networking after that, for me it was more about understanding what working at McKinsey would look like and applying. 

I truly believe McKinsey looks for exceptional talent and not connections on their interview process. If you believe you are a good fit and would enjoy working at McKinsey, take your chance even with little network support. 

That said, it’s becoming more and more common for people to reach out directly to McKinsey analysts and ask for tips or help with a mock case. Many people write to me on LinkedIn and I really make an effort to answer to everyone. At the end it is a volume game - do not take people not answering as something personal, just move on and try to reach out to someone else, at the end you will find someone to clarify all your doubts and realise that usually people do not answer because they end up not seeing the notification as they were busy, not that they do not want to help! 

If you pass the assessment game, McKinsey assigns you a buddy (at least they did it with me), so that helps a lot. These buddies help you along the process

#8. I wish I had known.... what?

Take a look at the game dynamics in advance, even with little preparation needed, do not take it for granted

Start preparing for the interviews early on. Once you pass the game phase, recruiters can reach out to schedule the interviews on a very short time frame (1 or 2 weeks). 

For the strongest candidates, the personal (behavioral questions) become key. At that level, most candidates can solve business cases very well, so the personal experiences are a great opportunity to create personal connections, convince the interviewer that you are really the right fit for the team, and, of course, they set the tone for the rest of the interview because they come first. 

If you want to start off strong and feel confident going to the business case remember to put some effort preparing the personal part of the interview!