Getting into McKinsey: what actually holds up in the stories about the hiring gauntlet

Five floors out of eighty

Eighty storeys tall, and only five of them matter: floors sixty through sixty-four, 3,456 square metres to a level, 6.25 per cent of the whole building. Thirteen tennis courts, roughly, stacked five times over. Every other floor does something else, and the people who work in the building don't know exactly what happens up there.

Because up there is no warehouse. No crates, no pallets, no goods waiting their turn in a corridor. What comes into those offices enters a mind, and leaves again as a decision made by someone else, in another city, inside another company.

That is the business of strategy consulting. One thing alone gets sold there, advice. And whoever sells it has, before anything else, convinced themselves of something simple: that you leave those five floors higher up than you came in.

Telling the story is an Italian associate, with the quiet certainty of someone who has already walked through that door. She starts from the practical questions — where you get in, how much you earn, how long it takes to climb one rung — and works through them one at a time, without detours.

But first she lays a single question on the table, almost a riddle: what do two former employees who ended up at the top of two enormous companies have in common? The answer is that both passed through there. Two names set side by side, as though the same staircase had carried them all the way up, floor by floor, to the sixtieth.

Due uomini, una sola porta

Sundar Pichai leaves Wharton's MBA in 2002. He stays at McKinsey only a few months, just long enough to cross a room and reach the door at the far end: by 2004 he is at Google. That threshold he really did cross, and quickly.

The other portrait sits in a different light. Ted Pick joins Morgan Stanley in 1990, fresh out of university, as an analyst. He leaves for Harvard's MBA and returns to the same bank. A career built entirely inside a single building, the one on Times Square: always the same lobby, always the same elevators.

The name that actually binds Morgan Stanley to the trade of paid advice is another. James Gorman, chief executive from January 2010 to December 2023, and, since January 2025, Chairman Emeritus. A man who has left that desk behind.

Two names set side by side point in one direction: look where this school leads. But the message was never the two men taken one by one. It was the imaginary line stretched between them, the one meant to run from a revolving door in Manhattan to the top of the world. One of the two never pushed that door open.

Five hours, and the weeks nobody sees

The path has the clarity of an escalator: online application, a test at a computer, then the interviews, split into two rounds. "On average it's five interviews in total, an hour each," the associate recounts. Five hours. Less than a working day.

Then you sit down at the computer, and there is no sheet of calculations waiting for you. The test is called Solve, and it asks for something else: build an ecosystem, defend a species. A small world that reacts to your moves while the program watches how you reason. "Not a traditional math test" — anyone who takes it understands as much within the first minutes.

Behind it stands Imbellus, which in 2018 put in writing the measures the test rests on: critical thinking, decision-making, metacognition, situational awareness, systems thinking. The calibration came from a pilot of 527 McKinsey candidates, in November 2017. The old numerical-verbal papers were set aside; in their place came a test interested in how a mind works, more than in what it has memorized.

The interviews, meanwhile, take a shape that widens and narrows. First round: two meetings of forty to sixty minutes. Final round: two to four. Four to six case interviews in all. Five sits comfortably inside that margin, without fuss.

And before any of this comes the work nobody sees. "I'd say 30 to 50, something like that," the associate answers when asked how many cases she prepared. Thirty, fifty business problems tackled one after another, in the weeks before the real day. Evenings that all look alike: a desk, a problem, then another.

The ratio says it all, and it is the true shape of the filter: weeks of preparation for an exam that lasts five hours. The gate is narrow in height, never in width. Almost everything that decides the outcome happens before anyone looks you in the face.

Arriving with the solution in hand

Ask anyone, in a classroom or an office, whether they can see that something is off, and they will. They raise a hand, point at the spot, and stop right there. The difference begins exactly one step further on: taking the problem, opening it up, breaking it into the pieces that make it up, and showing up with the solution already in hand. Not the alarm. The solution.

There is a moment in the day when this difference shows more clearly than anywhere else. It comes late, when the energy is spent and the mind spins without traction after hours of answering questions. At that point almost every response has to be automatic, surfacing on its own, with nobody going to fetch it. Otherwise the worst thing happens: solving the problem and trying to recall how problems get solved at the same time. Two efforts in the same instant. Neither one lands.

The number of practice cases ground through reassures whoever says it out loud and tells the listener nothing. Having done many is one thing. Having the move already in your hands when exhaustion strips everything else away is another.

The way to get there has the rough texture of things that actually work. Before sitting down in front of the firm you truly want, you sit real interviews elsewhere — at places that interest you less, where a mistake costs little and teaches a lot.

Then you go looking for people. Those who do the job every day, to hear it described from the inside: the days, the pace, what actually gets watched. This matters most for anyone with nobody in the family, or among friends, who can say what consulting even is.

And it pays to move early, because the clock is further ahead than it looks. Application windows open and close fast, and those who arrive late find them already shut.

Opinion reported as such, not verified by the editorial team.

The last rung has no clock

Analyst, associate, manager, director: four rungs, and a cadence declared almost like a clause of a contract — "on average each role lasts about two years." Two years, the jump. Two more, another jump. Whoever enters learns quickly to read their own life in blocks of two, and to count it out on their fingers: four roles, eight years, and at year eight, the partnership.

Then the ladder ends, and above it there is still one more rung. You become partner "after about 10 to 15 years." Between the last role that carries a title and that threshold lies a stretch no clause measures: years of continuing to climb while no one says when you'll arrive. That is where the mechanism changes its nature. Up to that point you rise because you work well. Up there you are co-opted for your book of business — how well you solve a problem weighs less than how many clients you bring in, and how much weight you yourself carry when the moment comes.

And that rung, in recent years, has grown narrow. In 2021 the new partners named worldwide were more than 400. In 2023, around 250. In 2026 they are 224 — a class the press described as the smallest in years. The ladder has stayed exactly the same; the last step has been raised.

There is a word that decides who climbs it, and it isn't networking. Networking creates awareness: it lets people know you exist, that you work well, that your name travels the corridors. Sponsorship is another matter entirely. It is the senior partner who watched you work inside a difficult negotiation, who remembers how you moved when the thing got tangled, and who, in committee — at the moment it is decided who rises — takes the floor for you. The first makes you visible. The second speaks in your place, in the room where you are not.

Il venerdì che era il suo compleanno

«La consulenza strategica in Italia ha un range tra i 30 e i 50 mila euro,» racconta l'associate, «e McKinsey si posiziona nella fascia alta.» Vale la pena fermarsi su quanto è larga quella forbice: twenty thousand euros of gross annual pay. These are two different lives, not two shades of the same one. In Milan, the bottom and the top of that band decide whether you share a flat with someone or keep it to yourself.

Wait, let me redo this properly in English only.

The Friday that was her birthday

"Strategy consulting in Italy has a range between 30 and 50 thousand euros," the associate says, "and McKinsey sits at the top end." It is worth pausing over how wide that spread is: twenty thousand euros of gross annual pay. These are two different lives, not two shades of the same one. In Milan, the bottom and the top of that band decide whether you share a flat with someone or keep it to yourself.

Other numbers orbit that one, and they are restless numbers. A McKinsey Business Analyst is put at around €40,000 gross. Under the heading "Strategy Consultant," Experteer records a median of €52,000. For Italy the average climbs to €65,000 on Glassdoor, where the figures come from employees themselves and end up stacked one on top of another: the analyst who just arrived and the director with ten years of meetings on their shoulders, in the same pile. No entry-level payslip looks like that number.

Then there is the price, and that one is paid in hours. The end of a project in Italy meant every weekend at work, one after another, without a single Saturday spared. The last day was a Friday. It went on until ten at night. It was her birthday, and the only thing she had asked was to spend it in her home office.

The wide roads it all starts from

The path begins in Milan and ends in Milan, with Beijing in between. Politecnico di Milano and Tsinghua keep open, in Management Engineering, a three-stage road: the first year of the master's in Milan, the first semester of the second year in Beijing, the last semester back under the arcades of the Politecnico. Two universities, two countries, one shared degree: a double degree.

Whoever takes it packs a suitcase twice. The first time for a lecture hall in Lombardy, the second for a campus on the other side of the world, where the lessons change language and the classmates change accent. Then comes the way back, to the same arcades where it all started, with a Chinese semester stitched on.

Then there is the China of Huawei, and that too is a well-worn road. Seeds for the Future has run in Italy since 2013: ten to fifteen students set off each year. A week of classes and visits, lecture halls in the morning, factory floors in the afternoon. It is training, and it shows on the way home: they come back with notes in their suitcase, not a paycheck.

In 2019 the Politecnico and Huawei opened a joint laboratory on millimetre waves for 5G and 6G, the very high frequencies the new networks run on. Another stretch of road, opened inside a classroom, carrying students into the trade before anyone asks them for a résumé.

These are wide roads, and people walk them. A semester in Beijing. A week inside a corporate campus. Things that happen quietly, without ceremony: no one posts a name on a board, no one pops a cork. People leave, come back, and life meanwhile has moved on.

They stay there, open and walkable, long before a glass tower ever rises on a city's skyline. A building can be counted, floor by floor, from the sidewalk. A road cannot. Whoever walks it leaves no plaque behind.