McKinsey

Most consulting candidates take Solve, a gamified problem-solving exercise the firm states requires no preparation, followed by a Personal Experience Interview (PEI) on past examples of impact and leadership and a Problem-Solving Interview built around a typical client scenario. Candidates for technical roles may also face an Expertise Interview with coding or domain assessments. Two distinct interview formats – structured behavioural and live case – run in the same recruiting round, so preparation has to span the PEI's example-driven expectations alongside the case practice common to consulting recruiting.

McKinsey's main consulting entry points by degree are:

• Business Analyst (BA): the full-time undergraduate role; analysts join a client team from day one
• BA Internship: an 8 to 10 week summer placement working alongside client teams
• Junior Fellow: an early-career consulting role offered only in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands
• Associate: the post-graduate and MBA entry point, owning workstreams from the start

The summer BA internship is the standard pre-offer path to a full-time BA seat, so a strong internship typically converts into a return offer rather than re-entering the following autumn's recruiting funnel.

It maintains offices in 130+ cities across 65+ countries and counts 86% of the Forbes Global 500 among its clients by its own published count. The structural consequence for an early-career applicant is that a BA in one office can be staffed on projects led from another – choice of practice often matters more than choice of office in the first year.