Step-by-Step Guide to Talking through your McKinsey PEI
One mistake I often see when I help applicants prepare for their McKinsey interview is that they don’t know how to take their interviewer through their PEI, or Personal Experience Interview. Rather than posing a series of unrelated questions, McKinsey interviews typically dive deep into one behavioral prompt during each interview, which will be one of the following:
Explain a challenging situation you encountered when working with someone with an opposing opinion to yours.
Talk about a time when you had to work to achieve something in a limited period of time that was outside your comfort zone.
Share an example of an instance where you effectively worked with people with different backgrounds.
Revisit a time when you experienced a significant change or encountered an ambiguous situation and share the actions you took to adapt to the new circumstances.
This means that applicants have to (1) pick a really killer anecdote/situation/example to discuss, and (2) elegantly take their interviewer through their experience, answering follow-up questions and responding to grilling as they go. Let’s focus here on (2), how to actually take your interviewer through your anecdote so that those 10-15 minutes go as smoothly and engagingly as possible. (I have more on (1), how to pick killer anecdotes, in my McKinsey Guide.)
You need to prepare to move through a behavioral question/case from beginning to end. For example, if an interviewer asks about your work at a certain internship, your answer shouldn’t just be a collection of stories about things you did on the job. It should move coherently through the entire experience: How did it begin? What were you tasked with? What did your team do? What was your specific role? What was the end result of your work? What did you learn from this experience?
For each story, you can follow the STAR Method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) in your mind to structure it from beginning to end. By using this method, you will ensure that you cover all aspects of your story, and it will provide the structure that the interviewers want to see.
Situation. Describe the situation that you were in or the task that you needed to accomplish. You must describe a specific event or situation, not a generalized description of what you have done in the past. Be sure to give enough detail for the interviewer to understand. This situation can be from a previous job, from a volunteer experience, or any relevant event.
Task. What goal were you working towards?
Action. Describe the actions that you took to address the situation with an appropriate amount of details and keep the focus on YOU. What specific steps did you take and what was your particular contribution? Be careful that you don’t describe what the team or group did when talking about a project, but what you actually did. Use the word “I,” not “we” when describing actions.
Result. Describe the outcome of your actions and don’t be shy about taking credit for your behavior. What happened? How did the event end? What did you accomplish? What did you learn? Make sure your answer includes multiple positive results.
+ Bonus: Try to also relate your story back to consulting, and weave it into why you would want to work for the Firm. For one of us, a big reason I wanted to join McKinsey was its commitment to allowing members to have an “obligation to dissent,” so I made sure to bring up that value in a few of our stories.
Just know that even though your McKinsey interviewer might really like your story, they might interrupt you as you are talking through it, or ask you to recount a different experience entirely. This happened to one of us during our interviews – I had been prepared to discuss my work as a tour guide working with visitors to the university, but the interviewer wanted an anecdote where I was working with the same teammates over time. I had to think quickly and pivot! Luckily, I had another prepared.
They will also drill down on details, especially anything that seems unclear or that doesn’t quite add up. Another one of my interviewers grilled me on what exactly I had said to resolve an interpersonal tension — what actual actions I took to diffuse the problem to achieve my impact, what my thought process was around them, and exactly how the people involved responded. Be prepared to provide further details on anything you mention.
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