McKinsey Personal Experience Interview (PEI): A detailed guide

The Personal Experience Interview (PEI) is the FIT interview specific to McKinsey. It differs from the more traditional FIT interview that you can find in other strategy consulting firms such as BCG or Bain. That is, with Imbellus or Digital Assessment, another of the tests specific to McKinsey.

Lasting 15-20 minutes, it is part of the McKinsey recruitment interview (45-50 minutes) and encourages you to talk specifically about an experience that demonstrates the qualities sought by the firm in its new hires. Here, you won't be answering questions like”Introduce yourself“,”Why BCG?” or”Tell me about your last internship experience“.

FIT represents 50% of decision-making at McKinsey. So it deserves that you prepare for this exercise seriously. We recommend at least 5 hours of preparation. Here are our tips to help you.

4 qualities that McKinsey is looking for:
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Through the PEI, McKinsey will seek to identify 4 qualities:

• the Leadership, or Inclusive Leadership : your ability to lead teams, formally or informally, while building positive, healthy, and strong relationships with customers and colleagues. The idea is to demonstrate your ability to work with people from very diverse backgrounds and backgrounds.
• the Personal Impact : your ability to influence or persuade others in contexts of pressure to have a very positive impact on the overall result. Here, you will often be asked for an example where you managed to change the mind of someone who was not under your authority and who did not agree with you initially.
• TheEntrepreneurial Drive : your ability to set and achieve ambitious goals by working hard and maintaining a high level of positive energy throughout projects. The idea here is to share an experience where you succeeded in achieving a goal that was outside of your comfort zone.
• the Courageous Change : to put it simply, the idea is to demonstrate your ability to react to a significant change, by proposing and implementing an action plan to adapt to this new situation.

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Examples of questions from the McKinsey PEI:
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Leadership, or Inclusive Leadership :

• Tell me about a situation where you have successfully worked with people from different backgrounds.
• Give me an example of a situation where you have shown leadership
• Have you ever been in a situation where a conflict involving a member of your team prevented you from reaching your goal? How did you solve this problem?
• What strategies do you use to motivate the people around you?

Personal Impact :

• Tell me about a time when you were able to convince someone who was not under your authority?
• Describe a situation where you had to use your communication skills to get out of a difficult situation.
• Do you want to be remembered for something in particular? What should you do to get there?

Entrepreneurial Drive :

• What is the achievement that makes you the most proud?
• Have you ever failed to reach a goal? How did you handle the situation?
• Tell me an anecdote where you managed to get out of a complicated situation.
• What is your opinion on failure?

Courageous Change :

• Describe to me an anecdote where you faced a significant change and implemented actions to adapt to this new situation
• Can you describe a situation where you were faced with an unexpected change? How did you react?

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How do you choose your experiences?
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We recommend that you prepare at least one experience per dimension you are looking for, which makes 4 solid stories to tell your interviewers. Ideally, plan 2 stories per dimension, for 8 experiences in total. Try not to repeat the same story to two different interviewers as this may penalize you. The whole challenge of the PEI is to be able to tell these stories in a synthetic way, while saying enough to impress your interviewer and detail your personal initiatives.

In fact, it is very important to tell your stories using the pronoun “I”. Here, we are interested in your actions, motivations and learning and not in those of your team or organization.

Be careful, if McKinsey is looking for individuals with a history of top performers, be careful not to brag. You can highlight your successes indirectly, by integrating them into an overall story and by remaining factual. For example, there is a difference between saying”I was the best on my team“and”I exceeded my sales goals by 50%” or even”I was lucky enough to be promoted a year in advance, which allowed me to have access to managerial missions“. Maintain a neutral tone and stay factual. Humility is a quality that is highly sought after in new hires.

We recommend using the framework STAR (Situation, Target, Actions, Result) to prepare your stories:

• Situation : in one sentence, the context of your story.
• Target : the difficulties to be solved or the objectives to be achieved.
• Actions : the actions you have taken to solve the difficulties and achieve the goals.‍
• Result : the result of your actions, preferably positive (objective achieved, difficulty overcome) as well as the lessons you learned from them.
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Conclusion: Stay natural!
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Don't write your stories word for word or learn scripts by heart. As you will be doing several interviews, the risk is that you will lose enthusiasm and seem too robotic when you tell them. A method that works very well is to prepare, for each story, a list of Bullet Points for each point in the STAR framework. This will allow you to have a natural conversation with your interviewer, which is what you should aim for. Moreover, don't worry if your interviewer interrupts you from time to time, this will often happen when he/she wants to ask you a specific question or better understand this or that point of your story.