What it does: Provides business strategy and management consulting services professionally for various high-earning sectors of industries.
Mission: To help leaders in multiple sectors develop a deeper understanding of the global economy.
Size & Presence: 30.000 employees, as of 2019.
Best Known For: One of the largest three management consulting companies in the world.
The Good Bits: Their powerful brand will give you great bargaining power for your next career. Offers a good deal of benefits package deal, provides a big opportunity to develop your skill and professionalism. They also provide fantastic mentorship, therefore, giving their employee a high chance to grow with the best quality of learning materials.
The Not So Good Bits: As expected from one of the largest management consulting companies in the world, the company has an unpredictable and intensive workload.
McKinsey & Company was founded in 1926 by an accounting professor, James O. McKinsey, who worked at the University of Chicago. The inspiration to build the company was coming from McKinsey’s own experience when he personally witnessed the inefficiency of the military suppliers in the US Army Ordnance Department.
Tom Kearney and Marvin Bower were the first partners who joined McKinsey, each of them joined in 1929 and 1933. Afterwards, McKinsey began to establish their values and principles, gradually setting up rules, in which Bower had his name credited to help the company to establish its policy. Some of the rules that Bower helped to set were that consultants should put the interest of clients before the company’s revenue, not discuss client affairs, tell the truth even if it is opposing their client’s opinion, and only perform services that were necessary and that the company can do well.
Later, Bower also set up the principle that limited them to only work with CEOs, then it was expanded to CEOs of subsidiaries and divisions. Another rule that he set up was to only work with clients who would follow the firm’s advice. All of these rules became the company’s ground rules which someday became a big part of McKinsey’s strict professionalism guidelines.
After the company opened its second office in New York in 1932, McKinsey had gone through a merger with another firm (Scovell, Wellington & Company). In 1937, James O. McKinsey died due to pneumonia. The New York office then purchased the rights to McKinsey’s name in 1946.
McKinsey & Company grew remarkably fast during the 1940s and 1950s, opening several office branches in Europe. In 1956, the company became a private corporation. The company’s client base grew bigger and more diverse. Governments, defence contractors, blue-chip companies, and military organizations were known to hire McKinsey to grow their businesses and developed their management practices. In recent updates, McKinsey began to take many public sector clients on a pro bono basis in 2001, which later expanded by starting off a Social Sector Office in 2008. As of 2022, McKinsey is operating in more than 130 cities in more than 65 countries.
McKinsey is known to have a flat hierarchy in its structure, with each member assigned as a mentor. Good news for graduates, McKinsey is known to prefer hiring recent graduates to experienced employees since 1953. The company is also popular with its tight competitiveness among its employee, whereby graduates and interns are guaranteed will have the most challenging workload and environment to learn and prove themselves stand out from each other. McKinsey expected its employees to improve their accomplishments, even implementing a serious principal ‘up or out policy to ensure the quality of its workforce stays at its highest standard. Consultants who are not upscaling their performance and not getting promoted will be asked to leave.
The company is recognized as the most prestigious, most trusted management consulting company. Since they often hire graduates from top business schools, it is also guaranteed that McKinsey has the best mentors in its expertise, graduates and interns will get many chances to be involved in interesting cases and in engaging learning experiences. Many former employees claimed to have driven, talented and fully dedicated colleagues in the company.
McKinsey’s strict and tight competitive recruiting process is common knowledge among professionals in its field. Most former and current employees applied online. Some former employees claimed to have difficult yet positive experiences during the interview stages. Some claimed to had three or four rounds of interviews with HR, the hiring manager, and the rest of the hiring managers from multiple locations.
There will be a case study interview to assess your skill standard and knowledge. Some positions will require graduates and interns to take a gamified test and coding test. McKinsey urged applicants to study their sample cases which consist of several areas, such as; Beautify, Diconsa, Electro-Light, Shops Corporation, Conservation, logistic vehicle manufacture, and more. All of these samples are accessible on their website. The company will also ask applicants to share their personal examples of their experiences and they will give you detailed feedback about your interviews.
Interns and graduates may apply through campus recruiting. McKinsey often held a campus-based event to seek out exceptional students—both undergraduate and postgraduates—to join their company. Students with excellent academic performance, a strong leadership quality, and experience working on/off-campus are desirable.
Eligible interns qualifications are those who are in junior year and expected to graduate between December 2023 and August 2024—as of recent opening—or in the senior year planning to enter a one-year master's degree, or currently finishing their first year in a non-business program, two years master program, and have less experience than two years.
Graduates and intern candidates may expect to work with the company as a business analyst (for a wide area of business) or client service team. But the company offers an opportunity beyond consulting, such as tech roles, Client Capability Network Roles, or in their broad internal roles. For the first two years, new recruits will be expected to work with clients and cases from various industries and functions before they go further for specific focused roles, which the company will guide them to find a suitable field they may want to pursue.
Graduates and interns will receive salaries ranging from $54.000 to $222.000 annually, depending on the division they’re working at. A business analyst intern may take home $87.800 annually, while a summer associate intern and MBA interns may take up to $172.000 annually. An IT intern may receive $55.300, data analyst intern receives $64.990. While a graduate student on internship may receive $48.000 up to $191.000 annually.
McKinsey involves in many social activities through their ‘giving back to communities’ programme and has been helping companies and organizations to reach positive social and greater environmental impact through their pro bono services. The company also has been enabling their employees to donate their time, energy, and financial support to communities around them. In 2021, more than 20.000 colleagues contributed 28.000 hours of pro bono service worldwide, volunteering in 350 nonprofit activities such as joining CodeBrave to mentor Syrian refugee students in Lebanon and completing one-off projects for a more inclusive economy with minority-owned small businesses. Still, in the same year, McKinsey partnered with Feeding America to deliver five billion meals that helped more than 45 million Americans in North America who were negatively impacted by COVID-19.
The company also partnered with The National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors on a pro bono initiative to build a three-digit hotline (988) for mental health, substance use, and suicide crisis. This is America’s first nationwide hotline for mental health and it will be available in July 2022.
The media reported that McKinsey was involved in an accounting scandal with Enron Corporation, an American energy company in Texas, which declared bankruptcy in 2001. The company reportedly used McKinsey’s service for 20 different projects. McKinsey helped the company to shift its business from an oil and gas company into an electric commodities trader. McKinsey denied the rumour that they were having a suspicion that Enron was using improper accounting methods, nor did they give advice on financing issues. The government didn’t investigate McKinsey and stated that McKinsey indeed did not provide advice on Enron’s accounting.