Went through McKinsey's hiring process for a client development / AE-equivalent role sitting in their growth, marketing and sales practice. Sharing because there is basically nothing online about this track.
Background: I'm enterprise AE, 8 years in, mostly SaaS. A McKinsey sourcing partner reached out on LinkedIn, which I think is how most people get into this pipeline. I did not apply cold.
The structure:
Four interviews total. Two were pure PEI (Personal Experience Interview). One was a case. One was a "client scenario" round that's basically the closest thing to a sales interview I encountered.
The client scenario round was the most interesting. They gave me a fictional situation where a prospective client is skeptical of McKinsey's pricing and timeline and asked me to walk through how I'd approach the conversation. This maps directly to enterprise deal-closing skills, but framed in consulting language. What they want: structured thinking, genuine curiosity about the client's actual constraint (not just objection-handling), and the ability to position value without over-promising.
The case round was a standard McKinsey case. I did about two weeks of case prep with a partner from a consulting prep community. Given I was coming from sales, I needed more time on structuring math under pressure than actual BD people usually do.
PEI: Two stories minimum on each core dimension. Have a story where you drove an outcome through a resistant stakeholder. Have a story where you built something from nothing commercially. Have a story where you made a call with incomplete data and were wrong, and what you learned.
What the interviewers were calibrating for: They're not looking for traditional salespeople. They want people who can be credible in a room with C-suite clients AND close. Those two things are in tension more often than people admit. The tone of every conversation was: "You need to be a peer advisor, not a quota-carrier."
I got an offer. Didn't take it, comp gap was real after accounting for the lack of variable upside. But process was tight and interviewers were sharp.