The Personal Experience Interview (PEI) element of the recruitment process at McKinsey is a little different from the ‘fit’ interview questions you may encounter at BCG or Bain.
Typically, you won’t be asked generic opening questions such as ‘Tell me about yourself’ or ‘Why do you want to join McKinsey?’. Instead, this part of the interview, which usually takes around 15-20 minutes of a 45-50 minute interview, focuses on one specific experience that you’ll discuss in detail.
This makes PEI a very different kettle of fish from other interview formats, so you’ll need to prepare for it differently.
Here are our top tips to help you prepare.
Key Takeaways:
- In the Personal Experience Interview (PEI), interviewers focus on a single experience to assess your Connection, Drive, Leadership and Growth.
- Prepare eight achievement stories that you could use in your interviews. These should include one strong example for each of the four PEI skills, plus a backup example for each.
- Focus on your personal contribution to the situation rather than what the team did or the eventual outcome.
- Avoid sounding over-rehearsed. Don’t script your stories word for word; instead, aim to tell a compelling story about your personal achievement in a natural, conversational way.
Get familiar with the exercise
First, make sure you understand the skills McKinsey is testing for in the PEI: Connection, Drive, Leadership, and Growth. In other words, you’re being asked to demonstrate your soft skills before moving on to the hard skills required to solve a case question.
Each of these skills can be demonstrated through a different type of example. To showcase Connection, describe a time when you influenced, persuaded, or convinced others. To demonstrate Drive, choose an example where you set and worked towards an ambitious, challenging goal. For Leadership, you do not need to have held a formal leadership position. Instead, focus on a situation where you brought out the best in others, especially while working with a diverse team. Finally, to highlight Growth, describe a situation involving significant change or ambiguity, and explain how you adapted, learned, and sought feedback throughout the process.
If you’d like to explore these skills in more detail and see what a McKinsey PEI looks like in practice, check out our Consulting Interview Prep Toolkit. It also includes an example of a top-scoring PEI interview with a candidate who went on to join McKinsey.
Prepare your achievement stories
With the PEI skills in mind, identify eight achievement stories that you’d like to use in your interviews. These stories should include one strong example for each of the four PEI skills, plus a backup answer for each.
McKinsey provides guidance on the types of stories that align with each of the four main PEI skills.
- Connection: Explain a challenging situation you encountered when working with someone with an opposing opinion.
- Drive: Talk about a time when you worked hard to achieve excellence in particularly tough circumstances.
- Leadership: Share an example where you worked effectively with people with different backgrounds despite challenges.
- Growth: Revisit a time when you had to rapidly learn something new to tackle a challenging situation
We recommend avoiding the use of the same story multiple times within a single interview round. When interviewers compare notes at the end of the day, you want to have demonstrated a range of achievements rather than risk looking like a ‘one-trick pony.’
The challenge of the PEI lies in telling your stories concisely while providing enough detail to impress the interviewer. We recommend using a simple framework with proven success: describe the situation, explain the key challenges, describe your actions, and conclude with the results.
Most importantly, keep the focus on you. The interviewer wants to understand your actions, your thought process, the reasoning behind your decisions, and your learnings from the experience./p>
A common mistake candidates make is spending too much time describing the context or talking about what ‘the team’ did. Instead, focus on your specific actions, motivations and decisions.
Don’t rehearse too much
We recommend practising your stories a few times to ensure you can recall important details and tell them clearly. However, we do not recommend scripting them word-for-word or rehearsing more than a couple of times.
An over-rehearsed story can make you sound overly prepared and less authentic. Instead, aim to make the PEI feel like a natural conversation between you and the interviewer.
It’s also worth noting that the interviewer may interrupt at any point to ask a follow-up question or encourage you to expand on a particular aspect of your story. Don’t be thrown off by this. The interviewer is simply looking for additional evidence to assess your capabilities and is often trying to uncover more reasons to score you positively on the dimensions being tested—they just need to hear the evidence first.
