Beyond the resume: Finding your best talent
At McKinsey, finding, attracting, and developing distinctive talent is how we help our clients tackle their most complex and pressing challenges. And while we receive more than one million applications each year, the lasting impact of those challenges—on our clients, their industries, and our world—means we need to proactively find the most driven, curious, and determined problem-solvers and people leaders to tackle them.
Throughout our history, McKinsey has continuously innovated and evolved our approach to hiring distinctive and diverse talent. We’re proud that 2024 was no exception: We expanded our reach to find exceptional people with a wide range of backgrounds at over 120 new-to-us sources, and, for the first time, 50 percent of our incoming consulting class were women. Finding the right combination of hires—including both skills and experience—wherever they are is a challenge many organizations share. Here are some of the lessons we’ve learned from our first 100 years that can help you reach your talent goals.
Be refreshingly honest
Hiring the right people starts with making sure the right ones apply. In our case, management consulting is a fast-paced, high-performance job that requires a mix of toughness and optimism and a willingness to learn and to contribute significantly. We know that is exciting to some but also isn’t for everyone—so we talk about our people value proposition in authentic and transparent ways to help prospective hires understand what it’s really like to work here.
An easy place to start is with your job descriptions. We recently made ours more specific to the day-to-day work each role focuses on in terms that aren’t “consultant speak.” We also further outlined the essential functions of the job that are core to being able to perform it (for example, periodic travel and giving and receiving feedback) and balanced our employee value proposition with clear expectations, for example, not only what you will get (fast growth, leadership training) but also what you will need to give (hard work, investing in others), so that applicants can make an informed decision as to whether the role is right for their skills and aspirations.
Another way to help candidates get a “real look” at your roles and culture is by empowering “real people” to tell your story. Last year we kicked off a live virtual series, McKinsey Unpacked, where our Talent Attraction leaders interview colleagues across a variety of roles to share their career journey and answer candidates’ questions on everything from culture to interview tips in a candid and informal way. We’ve achieved an average of about 2,000 registrations per session by promoting broadly across channels—and by delivering on our promise to give candidates an authentic and unscripted view of what working at McKinsey is really like.
Of course, your messages are only authentic if they are also accurate. We recently launched a global new-joiner survey to gauge how the expectations we set during the recruiting process compare with their experience working in the role. This feedback loop is critical to continually ensuring that our external messages to candidates match our value proposition for employees— and to identifying opportunities to innovate both experiences.
Make people feel like (more than) one in a million
Job seekers can often feel like they are being processed instead of being truly engaged, so creating a caring candidate experience can be a powerful differentiator.
While experience is the sum total of all interactions that candidates have with your organization, some of them shape candidate perception more than others. We recently launched a global effort to define the “moments that matter” for our candidates—not only those we hire but also those we don’t—to prioritize where to focus our care. We found that some small fixes can make a big difference, for example, warming up our turn-down communications to let candidates know that we’re rooting for them as they pursue other opportunities (which has also led to an increase in how many candidates would recommend McKinsey to their network).
Of course, warm language is not enough; you need to show, not tell, candidates that you care about them. One important way we’ve done this at McKinsey is to invest in candidates’ skills regardless of whether we hire them. For example, our global Next Generation Women Leaders program, based primarily in Europe, brings together college and early-career women for an intensive leadership development program, and our Future Leaders Program in Brazil helps first-generation Black students gain exposure to consulting while building their business tool kit. Not all participants in these programs ultimately apply to McKinsey, but they all benefit from the opportunities to learn and build their networks.
We’ve also put caring at the heart of our rigorous selection and interview process. Every application is reviewed by a member of our Talent Attraction team to make sure our candidates’ skills and experience are considered carefully and holistically. Our structured interview model enables candidates to demonstrate their skills in an objective, unbiased way, and we conduct regular training for our interviewers to ensure they are adept at asking probing questions to elicit candidates’ strengths and expertise. And as candidates progress through our interviews, we are deliberate about providing feedback to them whenever possible to help them succeed in their job hunt, including if it’s with other organizations.
Creating a sense of care, and, more importantly, delivering on it in the interactions that matter can cultivate an appreciation for your organization that endures beyond an individual’s candidacy, resulting in a corps of positive ambassadors no matter where they land.
Don’t just focus on the ‘usual suspects’
Engaging your candidates with authenticity and care won’t help you meet your talent goals if you’re focusing too narrowly on where you’re hiring. Too many organizations rely on the same hiring sources year after year, which can lead to less robust results and a poor employee experience, both of which hamper your ability to hire the right talent in the future.
At McKinsey we’ve made a concerted investment in expanding the places we look for top talent, adding over 120 new-to-us sources last year to find distinctive problem-solvers and leaders from different backgrounds, points of view, and areas of expertise. We’ve also innovated how candidates can demonstrate their skills even if they come from far outside a consulting or even business background: for example, our digital “Solve” game gives candidates a chance to showcase their problem-solving skills in an ecosystem environment that requires zero business knowledge or experience.
We’re proud that as a result of our efforts, we hire distinctive and diverse profiles, from inventors and patent holders to Olympic and professional athletes, veterans, and published scholars and authors, to name a few. By purposely curating a mix of capabilities and perspectives, we deliver better answers for our clients and a better experience for our colleagues.
In today’s competitive talent landscape, organizations must continuously adapt their strategies to find and successfully attract top-tier talent. Candidates, in turn, are seeking ways to engage with potential employers authentically and meaningfully. By prioritizing transparency, fostering genuine care, and casting a wide sourcing net, both organizations and candidates will benefit.