How the Recruiting Process at McKinsey, BCG & Bain Actually Works

3 days ago
8 min read

A career in consulting is the dream for many students. But the recruiting process is notoriously difficult, and so it seems like an elusive dream. How many interview rounds are there? What's actually being tested? How does the McKinsey Problem Solving Game fit in? Is BCG's chatbot case real? How many interviews do you need to pass before you get an offer?

Many rumors circulate around the recruiting process. In this post, we shed light on exactly how it works at McKinsey, BCG, and Bain — and what it takes to pass it. We'll show that succeeding in the interview is much more straightforward than most people think.

First: Who Are We Actually Talking About?

Before we dive in, let's quickly scope the discussion. Consulting firms don't just employ consultants. Like any company, there's a back-office (HR, finance, administrative assistants, visual designers who help produce slides), knowledge professionals (researchers providing insights on industries, functions, and geographies), and specialist roles (programmers, designers, data engineers — roles that didn't exist in consulting 20 years ago but have become indispensable).

And then there's the core: the consultants. These are the professionals doing the actual project work on a day-to-day basis. When someone talks about "getting into consulting," this is the role they mean. And that's the recruiting process we're covering here.

The Six Qualities Consulting Firms Are Looking For

The entire recruiting process is designed to identify people with a specific set of qualities. Understanding what those qualities are makes the whole process feel much less mysterious — because every step, from the CV screening to the final interview, is testing the same things.

Intelligence. You'll be responsible for analyses that clients pay a lot of money for. You need the intellectual horsepower to handle complex problems and immerse yourself in completely new topics extremely quickly.

Ambition. As a consultant, you can create lasting positive impact for your clients. Intrinsic motivation and the willingness to go the extra mile is a major prerequisite to do that.

Perseverance. You'll be in challenging situations frequently. You need the stamina to execute a project diligently even when it's tough — not just phoning it in, but upholding your highest standards.

Professionalism. You'll be confronted with clients who are not happy to see you. You should always maintain a high degree of professionalism. Anything you say or write should reflect respect for clients and colleagues.

Structured thinking. You'll soon be swamped with tasks and competing priorities. It's your job to get on top of things and manage your time, your work, and sooner or later, your team.

People skills. You need people to collaborate with you — clients as well as coworkers, people you typically have no formal authority over. You need empathy to understand their needs and motivations, and the ability to convince them.

It's quite a tall order. And reliably assessing all of these qualities in a recruiting process is a huge challenge for consulting firms — which is exactly why the

process is so elaborate.

The Big Picture: From Application to Offer

The hiring process looks broadly similar across all MBB firms. Here's the overall flow.

Step 1: The Application

It starts with your application. The most important element, by far, is the CV. You should include a cover letter too, but it's much less important — McKinsey doesn't even ask for one. A great cover letter will never compensate for a mediocre CV, and you can't use it to explain away a weak profile. The CV is your golden ticket to the interview process. For our complete guide on building one, see our Perfect Consulting CV post. And if you want help creating the perfect CV, check out our Udemy course CV Masterclass that takes your CV from zero to hero.

What constitutes a strong enough profile depends on several factors: the firm you're applying to, the level (undergraduate vs. graduate), and the country. But broadly: it's not important what you studied — it's important that you did very well. You need some work experience, ideally from high-quality internships. And ideally you're doing something interesting outside of university and work.

Step 2: The Intermediate Step

Once you pass the initial CV screening, there's typically an intermediate step before the main interview rounds. This could be an HR interview, a short case, a test, or even a game — potentially a mix of several elements.

The idea behind this step is to weed out candidates with lower chances of success before admitting them to the expensive, time-consuming main interviews. None of these games, tests, or pre-interviews are super reliable predictors of interview performance. It's really just a first filter to save time and money. You should avoid doing terribly, but there's usually no need to crush them.

If these elements were perfect predictors, consulting firms would get rid of case interviews entirely. The fact that some firms don't use any additional hurdles, others are constantly changing them, and everybody is doing something different should be enough evidence that these aren't the most important elements of the process.

Step 3: The Main Interviews

This is the core of the process. You could have one big day of interviews, or two rounds spread across several weeks. Either way, you'll go through a gauntlet of 3–6 interviews. They're all pretty similar in structure, but you still need to pass multiple ones. The reason is that passing one could be a fluke — but passing five or six cannot happen by accident.

This is why, for decades, this fundamental process hasn't changed, and it won't change anytime soon. Case interviews and personal fit interviews have turned out to be the best predictors for future job performance. Nothing the firms have tried as a replacement comes close.

Step 4: The Offer

If all of the interviewers in the final round agree on a positive assessment, you get an offer. That's it. No committee vote, no waiting period — if the interviewers all say yes, you're in.

How It Looks at Each Firm

The process looks broadly similar everywhere, but the specific steps differ. Here's what we've observed recently at each firm. Note that these may look different for different levels of seniority or different offices, but they give a solid picture.

McKinsey: There's an intermediate step with an interview and the McKinsey Problem Solving Game (PSG) — a series of mini-games developed by psychometricians that test strategic planning and decision-making. Currently, the first part is an ecosystem game where you build a functioning food chain, and the second part is a tower-defense game. If that's successful, candidates have 3 interviews in the morning. If that goes well, there's a final round in the afternoon with 1–2 more interviews.

BCG: There's a preliminary round with an HR interview about your experience and motivation, plus an online case delivered via a chatbot called Casey. For the main part, there are 2 classic interviews. If successful, a final round with another 2 interviews.

Bain: There's a pre-round with a psychometric aptitude test. If positive, the main part starts with 3 short interviews. If successful, there's a final round with 3 full interviews.

The Anatomy of a Single Interview

Now that you know the overall process, let's zoom into what a single, full-blown consulting interview actually looks like. A typical interview takes about one hour and has four parts.

Part 1: The Intro (~5 minutes). Brief introductions and ice-breaking. The interviewer might ask about your background, your travels, or something from your CV. This is low-stakes but sets the tone — be warm, professional, and natural.

Part 2: The Personal Fit Interview (~15–20 minutes). This is where the interviewer assesses your soft skills. You may answer classic questions about your motivation, strengths and weaknesses. Or — and this is more common at McKinsey — you'll talk about past experiences. Consulting firms have realized that the best predictor for future behavior is past behavior. So they'll dig into your past for stories about leadership, overcoming obstacles, or navigating a challenging team situation.

At McKinsey specifically, each interviewer asks just one personal fit question — and you'll spend up to 20 minutes on that single story, with detailed follow-up questions probing your thought process, your motivations, and whether the outcome was really as positive as you're describing. For our full guide on this, see our McKinsey PEI post.

Part 3: The Case Interview (~30–35 minutes). The famous part. You solve a hypothetical business problem by interacting with the interviewer — requesting and structuring information, analyzing data, interpreting charts, doing mental math, and coming up with actionable recommendations. The case interview tests your structured thinking, your analytical ability, your creativity, and your communication skills — all at once.

The case interview isn't about knowing the right answer. It's about demonstrating how you think. A strong candidate structures the problem clearly, forms hypotheses, tests them with data, and arrives at a recommendation they can defend. A weak candidate recites memorized frameworks, goes silent during math, and gives vague recommendations that hedge everything.

Part 4: Your Questions (~5 minutes). At the end, you get to ask the interviewer a few questions — about the job, their personal experience, or the firm. This is your chance to show genuine curiosity and leave a positive final impression.

And that's one interview. Over the course of the process, you'll go through 3–6 of them. They may look slightly different from firm to firm and office to office, but they're all designed to test the same core qualities. And because personal fit interviews and case interviews do that so well, all firms — from MBB to tier 2 — continue to use them.

A Word About Objectivity

Even though the MBB process — especially McKinsey's — is seen as one of the most formalized and systematic in the corporate world, it's not an exact science.

To give you a sense of what we mean: during the post-COVID hiring boom, the consulting industry was growing so fast that the threshold to pass the interview was meaningfully lower than it is today. Even if HR and recruiters tell you the evaluation is always objective and consistent, that's simply not true. Your chances of passing are higher when the industry is booming and the firms need people, and lower when the market is tight and the firms are being selective. For more on the post-COVID hire boom and the following crisis, check out this article.

The practical implication: for the vast majority of candidates — those in the middle, not the rockstars who always pass and not the weak candidates who never do — there's a gray area. Inconsistent processes, different interviewer personalities, and whether you're at your best on interview day can all make the difference. That's why preparation matters so much. The more prepared and confident you are, the more you can succeed in any situation, even when the conditions aren't ideal.

The Bottom Line

The consulting recruiting process looks intimidating from the outside, but it's actually quite logical once you understand what's being tested. Every step — from the CV screening to the final case interview — is designed to assess the same core qualities: intelligence, ambition, perseverance, professionalism, structured thinking, and people skills. There are no hidden tricks, no secret handshakes. Prepare your CV well, build strong personal fit stories, and practice enough cases to feel confident under pressure.

If you want to start with the case interview side, our Case Interview Mastery course on Udemy gives you 7 full McKinsey-style cases with detailed solutions. And for the CV side, our CV Masterclass takes you from a blank page to a finished document. Both taught by us — two former McKinsey consultants and interviewers.

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