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interview success rate is almost70%, but there is a weakness, which offset that does not have experience in dealing with individual and technical skills.
This is a very good question and unfortunately the answer varies quite a bit.
The1% success rate is probably numerically accurate, but practically misleading.
By far the biggest “cut” is the consulting resume / CV screen. Its important to remember that McKinsey gets an awful lot of resumes out of the blue — but historically has done the majority of its recruiting out of the schools (under grad, MBA, JD, MD, PhD).
The cut at this level varies a lot. I can’t speak to the PhD CV screen as I never screened those myself. When I was there, the preference was to have alumni of a particular institution screen resumes and CV’s from those institutions.
So Harvard MBA alumni would screen Harvard MBA resumes, PhD alumni would screen PhD CV’s, etc… the idea was you wanted someone familiar with what’s impressive on the resume and what’s not.
The biggest factor on the resume / CV is the name of the school.
If a resume has Harvard MBA or Stanford MBA, when I was there, it was like an automatic pass. McKinsey would interview anyone graduating from those programs for no other reason than they got admitted into those programs.
But if someone had an MBA from any other school, the screening would be a lot more strict.
As I mentioned earlier I can’t speak too much to the PhD Cv screen as1) I did not do it myself, and2) my understanding was it was different than the resume screening process for Undergrad, MBA, JD which tended to be more similar.
For non PhD candidates, the second most scrutinized item on the resume was usually some kind of numercial score – SAT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT, MCAT. Basically we were looking for people who were exceptionally smart especially in math and sciences.
Its not so much that consultant is that math driven (all the math I did while I was there was really adding, subtracting, multiple, and dividing… okay and a bunch of percentages), but the very structured, systematic, hyper logical, scientific method type thinking process that people with strong math scores tend to have, tend to handle that part of the job rather well.
Round1 “pass rates” are the next most likely to vary. By the time you get to round2 and3, the numbers converge and are more consistent across recruiting sources. And Round1 was usually done by alumni or people most familiar with the likely background of the candidate, the latter rounds would sometimes have more flexibility.
If I recall correctly, Round1 pass rate was all over the place. You could interview20 –30 people who looked really good on paper, interview them in round1, and take2 people to round2 (that would be on the low end).
I’ll qualify my estimate as follows. I never managed the recruiting process across rounds. I only interviewed candidates in a specific round in a process managed by someone else. I never followed candidates through multiple stages. And my experiences were fragmented – resume screens for Stanford grads, but case interviews for PhD’s.
If I had to give you a ball park and oversimplified estimate (and keep in mind this is a very, very, very rough ballpark), the “pass rate” might be10% –20% at Round1,10% –30% for Round2, and20% –50% for Round3. That’s my best guess.
In general Round1 pass rate is the lowest because either a candidate1) totally lacks social skills (a deal killer) and we find out really quickly,2) lacks practicality (a big problem for PhD applicants who aren’t comfortable with the lack of mathematical precision…. e.g., in consulting we deal with are profits shrinking a little or a lot… someone with a PhD sometimes wants to know that profits are shrinking by50.2341%), or3) can’t do a case
Round2 is generally more cases of different types to make sure the candidate didn’t just get lucky on the case in Round1, and indeed does have a repeatable and consistent ability to do cases.
Round3 is a lot more of the same with a lot more data points (e.g, more interviewers) and is an opportunity for the firm to sell the candidate too.
