In this can't-miss conversation, we chat with former McKinsey Engagement Manager Rick Wilmot. Rick shares a wealth of insights applicable to anyone pursuing a role in management consulting, including:
- How McKinsey evaluates candidates
- Key mistakes to avoid for office selection (and why he is against side-dooring)
- The importance of compelling fit interview stories
- Tactical networking tips
- Rick's approach to helping candidates ace McKinsey interviews
Rick is a pro case coach and would love to guide you to your offer. More info below.
Connect with Rick
- See Rick's coaching calendar
- Read more about Rick
- Follow Rick on LinkedIn
Management Consulted Links
- Unlock top consulting jobs on the Management Consulted Job Board
- Join the Black Belt program for 8 hours of individual coaching with Rick
- Get firm email formats in the Firm Directory
- Top-down communication article
Transcription:
Thanks so much for joining today's episode of Strategy Simplified. I'm Eden, your podcast host for the day, and today I'm joined by one of our top Management Consulted case coaches, Rick Wilmot.
He's a former McKinsey Engagement Manager, and we're going to dive into a lot about who he is. So I'll save the rest of his intro for in a minute. But today, just to kick us off, Rick, thanks so much for joining us.
Can you give us a 60-second introduction of your background pre-MBB?
Yeah, sure. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
So pre-MBB, I spent some time in the US Army National Guard, did that while I was getting my undergrad, got a computer science degree, ended up getting convinced by a professor to stick around and do a master's too as her grad assistant. And then I stumbled my way into a fast-growing tech company that became a billion-dollar unicorn. So super cool.
I started off as an engineer, ended up as sort of a special projects right-hand man type of person to the head of R&D at just a super fast-growing B2B tech company. Spent five years and changed there. We, the company was sold to a private equity buyer.
Culture was changing after that. And along the way, I had just encountered some management consulting folks in the wild doing their thing. I had no idea that this was a profession that one could have, or that there were these M's and B's and B's out there that were like these super desirable versions of those.
But, like I said, I was lucky to find myself in a place where I had had some success, and I had the wherewithal to just quit life, go to B school, and try to get into WB. So, applied, got into a few great places. I ended up getting a fellowship full ride at University of Michigan, Ross, which is amazing.
I was married and had some kids by that point. So, the volume really mattered to me, and I knew I could get in the chair with all these awesome consulting companies through Michigan. I did that, and it all worked out.
So, I ended up taking a summer offer with McKinsey, spent that summer in the coal mines outside of Birmingham, Alabama, was sealed to a boots on, came back, and accepted a full-time offer right out of there. So, spent four or five years with McKinsey after that.
Wow, that is a really amazing introduction. Thank you so much. All I want to say is like, so you've done nothing with your life, I can tell.
Very cool.
I'm so glad to have you here today. So, when you joined McKinsey during your MBA at Ross, what insights do you have that you share with your coaching clients or with any other candidates that are trying to break into McKinsey? If you can give me like maybe one or two insights on how to break in and what they should be doing to set themselves apart.
Yeah, I'd say most many people will be coming through what I would call the standard pipeline. So there'll be their access to McKinsey or BCG or whatever will be primarily through their university. So that could be a general career office, a business school program that you're in, things like that.
And those programs tend to do a very good job. Like they really want you to go to McKinsey. They want to say like, oh, we're sending all these alumni to these high profile places.
They do a very good job and generally have a lot of good resources that you should take advantage of. If you are not that, which certainly many people, how can you replicate some of those resources? MC is a fantastic way to do that.
YouTube is a fantastic way to do that. Back in my day, blogs, forums, Reddit, it was like really excellent. You have to dig for it, but really excellent stuff.
So, and Management Consulted is absolutely sort of everything, gold-plated, professional, in a box. And obviously, I'm a fan, but, you know, some combination of that and your school programs are amazing. One other thing that I would recommend is don't, don't under emphasize the importance of the office that you're applying to.
A lot of the offices within these places are much more interested in finding and retaining talent than others. San Francisco office in every firm is oversubscribed. They could fill their seats with lateral transfers from other offices instantly any day they want.
New York is insane. Maybe a Pittsburgh office, or a Minneapolis office, or a Denver office. It is easier to get noticed, easier to maybe even make a connection with a partner, or someone more junior that shares some elements of your background, and easier to get paid attention to.
The bar is the bar. You have to crack the case. You have to tell compelling stories.
You have to do all the things. But it is a little easier to, I think, get a look, get a little attention, make some connections at some of the offices that maybe are not on that Tier 1, super hot, always oversubscribed list.
Yeah, I agree with you. That's really great insight. I think a lot of times, candidates don't think about how many lateral transfers are trying to get into those offices.
And so they don't realize the challenge that they're facing is that they're not only dealing with other candidates and their peer group trying to get in, but also everyone else in the world trying to get in. So I always talk about Miami, you know, why not go spend three years at Miami, in Miami, you know? Like who doesn't want that?
Yeah, and McKinsey has oddly small-sized Miami and LA offices just for the market size. So again, you know, nothing is easy here, but maybe easier, especially if you're a self-portrait kid. You know, the people tend to want to make connections and help out or advise those that share some background with them.
And I'll tell you that some of the small offices, their look, we called it side-doring. So I really want to be in San Francisco, but I think it would be easier to get into the Minneapolis office. So I'm going to apply there.
They've got a good nose for that. So like, hey, my partner's from here. I'm from here.
I did my undergrad, you know, 50 miles away, and then I loved it, or, you know, I know that this office or this economy is very strong in manufacturing, and like, that's where I see myself long term. So have a reason, you know, this side-doring phenomenon is very real. People get this advice from people like me, and they may try to go use it, which is, you know, certainly something they could do.
But have a story, you know, there's always a story for New York, right? Hey, I'm young, I'm from a small town in Oklahoma. I want to see the world.
I want to meet a lot of people. I want to like, New York's just an easy story. But if you want to look at maybe one of these, you know, less than household name offices, have something to say about it.
I totally agree, and that's really great insight. Thanks so much for sharing. So you were involved in the decision-making process for hundreds of candidates at McKinsey, which makes you such an amazing coach, by the way.
So side note, just again, Rick is a coach of ours. You can book a meeting with him through the link in the show notes. But anyway, can you tell me what are the two key traits or skills that your top candidates displayed?
And if you want to elaborate on that, how can you achieve those skills and traits if you don't already have them?
Yeah, yeah, sure. So to be clear, you've got what's called a back page at McKinsey, and these are non-billable, non-consulting activities you're doing to contribute to the firm. This could be knowledge developments, you know, like setting up happy hours and stuff for your office, or contributing to like retreats, trainings, things like that.
Mine was recruiting, so I spent a lot of time out in the field networking, you know, just flying in the, you know, Michigan or Duke or UVA or Cornell or something that Thursday night, meet with kids, network, do a happy hour on Friday, get out, and then come back six weeks later for interviews of all those same people. So I interviewed 100 to 150 people as an interviewer for McKinsey, and then you sit in the decisioning room with everyone else, that interviewed everyone else for the day. So many more times that just participating in discussions of what we saw during the course of the interview.
So certainly wouldn't divulge any confidences here, but there's not a lot of confidences to divulge. So we're talking about exactly what McKinsey is telling you that they're looking for, compelling personal interest stories on these well-defined dimensions. For McKinsey, it's pretty well-defined.
For other firms, it can be a little more loosey-goosey. And then we want to see you crack the case and be fluid with it. Now honestly, many people who are successful are just no doubt about it.
Like they're clean, fresh, prepared, you know, their math is immaculate. I really think that it is important to understand that you are still a person talking to a person, and people form impressions and they like you or not. And when I say like, I mean, I would like to see this person in my team room solving a problem with each, right?
So they're good with numbers, they're fast, but they're looking at me. They are making conversation, they're smiling when I say something completely silly. You know, they're making an impression on me that makes me think, yeah, this is a McKinsey consultant.
Like, they would be wonderful in a team room. With some investment maturation, I could put this person at a client site without watching them for a week. And they're going to comport themselves in a way that's good, effective, building relationships with our clients.
So when it's not clear-cut case of either a pass or a fail, you'll have two interviewers on run one. So either you both knows, both yeses or yeses and noes. If that is the case, there will be a pause button hit and there will be an open discussion in the room.
And it will basically be on the higher ranking person to bring the lower rating person up if they want to. They might just surrender and say, oh, you know, that problem you cited actually, maybe I did see that too. So, but when you decide you want to pull that person up, it's called pounding the table.
And I'm going to say, look, they aced the math. They know their interpersonal stories are fantastic, moving. And, you know, she was just like really compelling in the way she was able to tell this, like I can see storytelling elements here that I think could really be an asset to the firm moving forward.
Or, hey, yeah, I did, she made a similar error on the math with me, but I nudged her just a bit and she like totally quickly corrected right back on track. And that other interviewer could say, yeah, you know, I didn't nudge her there. Maybe if I had not let her get so far on the road after she misplaced the decimal point, you know, things could have gone differently.
So these are clients that are like being compelling to me, capturing me, making me like, oh, wow, yeah. She made a major error there, got really flustered. I nudge her a little bit, but boom, gone.
Night and day, back to business. And then she nailed it. So making a good impression like that, will pay all the dividends in the world when it's like a split decision or at the end of the day.
So, you were at a Tech Unicorn. You exited that. You moved to Ross. Then you moved to McKinsey. And then you left McKinsey. So, out of all of that, knowing what you know pre-McKinsey and post- McKinsey, what is it that you learned at McKinsey in particular that changed the way you do things? And how has it shaped what you do today?
So much. Like, I had no idea what I didn't know when I went in. I had barely made a PowerPoint slide coming up to Tech. Barely. Very little Excel, but I won't focus there. Just the ability to story-tell and communicate in a sort of top-down way, like eyes on the prize first.
Align on what do we even care about here? And what does great look like? And then walk that all the way back down to the ground.
Like, what are the legs that you need to build on this chair in order to stand it up? You know, and, spoiler alert, this is case structuring. So, like, when you're out there drawing your framework for case, like, you actually do that.
You actually are constantly pushed to think in these structured ways. Can't over-refer to size enough. Aligning on what great looks like first, and then breaking the problem down until it is in addressable chunks, you know, attacking those chunks, and then, you know, being intelligent, flexible along the way, and you know, asking yourself, hey, we've learned a lot since we were at the Whiteboard talking about this three weeks ago.
Is this still what good looks like? Et cetera, et cetera. So, I could go on all day, but that just as an abstract concept, you know, I learned a lot, and I really employ it in my life today.
Rick, I really love that. One of the things that we do here at Management Consulted is we actually go into teams, to corporate teams outside of consulting, and we teach them top-down communication best practices. And I, for one, went through that journey.
I'm still going through that journey of learning how to streamline and narrow focus and tell a concise story that my stakeholders will want to have a quick yes to. And so I love to hear that, like, you were so successful before, but you still had to have a transformative, mindset shift, and I can't even imagine the success that you're having in other areas of your life because of it.
It's not stuff they teach in the US in high school. It's not stuff that your first boss out of undergrad is going to read unless you go to McKinsey. And, you know, there's just so many smart people out there that I think could benefit from a little training in this way.
Exactly. So if you're listening to this, I'm going to have David put our top-down communication best practice standards in the show notes, so be looking out for that. But let's transition into coaching.
So Rick, you're one of our most favorite coaches, which is why you're on the podcast today, and we love that you're on our team. And I know it's just something that you do to give back. So can you tell me as a coach what your process looks like and how you help candidates prepare for their interview process?
Yeah. So like you said, the give back part, that can sound a little trite, I think in the context. I am just a tech investor and an advisor now.
I work with startups in the GenAI space, Invest, Advise, StepIn. Exited a big one in the spring this year. Kind of wasn't sure where I wanted to put my time next.
And got connected up through another MC coach, learning all about what you guys do. And I really enjoy coaching. I get a lot out of it.
And so for me, a great coaching of a candidate, I'll just split the undergrad. You know, rising junior looking for a full-time role. It doesn't have to be McKinsey. Bain, BCG, you know, Monitor, Deloitte, EY-Parthenon. The interviews are very, very similar. All the same.
What great looks like for me is multiple sessions. So the ability to really get to know a candidate, like sort of a 20, 30 minute walk me through your resume. Help me understand. I'll pause you. I'll ask you questions. And I've got an eye towards building your personal or behavioral stories down the road as we're doing that.
We're just learning about you, how you work, how you communicate, what you like. You know, I rarely will get a person who's never done a case before, right? They've done some peer, you know, case coaching, trading.
But I find it really useful to use a relatively easy and open-ended case as sort of a diagnostic upfront to just see how's your structure? How's your communication? How's your comfort with numbers?
How comfortable are you when I correct the number of years? How comfortable are you when I say, what else? What else?
What else? Can you think of anything else that we could do? Like that happens in the real world.
And it's, I always say this case is such an artificial out of nowhere format. Like you've been building your resume for a while. You've been talking about yourself your whole life.
What the heck is this case thing? It's got its own rules, its own etiquette. You don't encounter this around the dinner table or when you're out with friends.
So you gotta learn it. So I'll put a diagnostic case on you. I'm just sort of very little coaching at that point.
I just want to see how you're doing. And then from there, we can build a plan together for the next, you know, two sessions, four sessions, six, whatever. Runway is great.
You know, I love to be talking to someone who's four weeks out from an interview. Happy to talk to someone who just realized they have an interview tomorrow. That's fine.
We can work with them. But again, you know, based on what we see in terms of, you know you a little bit, diagnostic case, we can start to build a plan that helps you address the issues that you need. So you're really polished and you're really ready to deliver your best when, when it's time to do that.
That's great. So what other areas outside of case, which is obviously incredibly important, but outside of case, what are the other areas that candidates need to not forget to prep for?
So PEI, obviously, and again, I think the fact that this case exercise is so foreign and so scary, you can just, humans want to respond to the threat, not the thing they're familiar with. So don't neglect your PEI. I love telling people stories back to back.
So, you know, I can often get a, yeah, I went to this boutique data analytics firm and they were losing market share in one of their brands for this client. And well, and then we kind of figured out that it was more about packaging, I think. And, but like, they're going to change it now.
And like, there's all kinds of gold buried in the story. It's not compelling as I just sort of, you know, did it there, but helping clients to understand what they really did, how they really contributed. Very often I'm coaching on, you know, you need to build credibility and trust with your clients as a consultant, and then you need to cash that in that matters.
So like, let's talk about that. You're a rising senior. You're 21 years old.
You're the most junior person here. Let's talk about this. How did you ingratiate yourself in this team?
How did you become not that that young person? Who is that again? You know, where were you?
What were you doing to build this credibility, build this trust? And then how did you cash it in when it mattered to produce this fantastic number on your resume at the end of your bullet point here? So I think there's always room to be better on your personal story.
I don't care how big your resume is. You could always do a better job of telling it in a more compelling way and a way that is going to put thoughts into the interviewer's head about, Oh, I work in situations where I need to build credibility. I need to build trust.
And I'm an EM, where I'm a junior partner now. I need followership and I need people that I can deputize and send up to clients that think like that. And when you're demonstrating that, you are just putting points on the board and letting them know.
And if I can help you to workshop that story, so it's really popping on those dimensions, then that's awesome to me.
That's wonderful.
All right.
Let's talk about one more thing as far as coaching and things that candidates need to be thinking about. We work with a ton of mid-career candidates that are trying to transition into McKinsey in particular and among many other firms. And networking into an interview pipeline, especially at McKinsey, is so incredibly important for those folks.
So can you talk a little bit about best practices on how to do that? I'll give you two minutes if you can. Just kind of give us a landscape of what that looks like and how to best go forward.
Yeah. So again, the pipeline is the easy path. It's not easy, but comparatively, it is easy because there are just, it's well defined.
They're looking to fill slots for interviewing. They're going to interview X number of people at Michigan, X at Duke, X at NYU. So A number one, I would always advise, let's say you are in your late 20s, graduated from University of Chicago or Texas or something, what, six, eight, seven years ago, something like that, go back and look through your alumni, career services, et cetera.
Those career offices, if you're thinking about a firm and your university was a target school for that firm, they very likely still are, and they very likely have a relationship with the career services office, and that career services office very likely has an alumni outreach or some tools accessible. See if you can get networked in via that. If you went to Chicago, you live in Chicago, you would like to apply to the McKinsey Chicago office, hit up the University of Chicago Career Services Office, alumni, hey, I want, I will, you know, firm all have major offices in Chicago.
They all want great relationships with Northwestern and University of Chicago in particular, UIC for sure. That's a great way to try to squeeze in that pipeline. If you can't get in the pipeline, you know, networking through people, you know, common interests, common background.
I bet if you're at a Fortune 1000 company, there's someone maybe in the second or third degree of your orbit that has worked at one of these firms. That might be, oh, yeah, you know, I did work there. Let three years ago, my buddy actually made partner there now.
He's an awesome dude. You guys would get along great. Let me put you in touch.
Now, that's a wonderful way to network in, and partners can get you on the interview doc at all these firms. There is an extra pipeline phenomenon out there that can be called upon. In the absence of that, you know, we've got LinkedIn, we've got email.
Find out, maybe reddit maybe or somewhere somehow, what the email format is for the email address at your target firm. Look for people who share your undergrad, share your background, share, you know, oh, I'm from, you know, Wapakoneta, Ohio, too. There's like 10 people from there.
So that's a great connect. If I was from there, I would open that email. So look for people with commonality, reach out, and as a process tip, always give them something to say yes to.
And that yes should be on a Friday afternoon. So would it be okay if we got together and connected? I'd just love to learn more about the XYZ Chicago office.
Consulting downtime happens on Friday afternoons and just be a good salesperson and give them the option to say yes to what you have to offer.
That's that's excellent insight. And just so you know, a fun fact for our listeners, our firm database has almost every firm's email format. So you don't need to go look at Reddit, just go to our firm directory, pull up your favorite firm, email them, don't LinkedIn them.
Find them on LinkedIn, email them. Anyway, and we have templates available on our OXS pass. I'm not trying to make this a page, but anyway, all that's available to you.
We did all the work for you, made it very easy. So cool. Okay, let's wrap this up with one fun fact question about you.
Can you tell me what your favorite movie or book or any kind of media that you're consuming right now could be Strategy Simplified, the podcast? Tell me what that is and why you like it.
So I'm not a big fiction reader, never have been. I'm not a big non-fiction reader, I'm a big practical reader. So I want to read things that are going to help me to be more efficient, effective in things that I'm doing.
I have been focused in my non-coaching life almost exclusively on generative AI technologies. I like re-taught myself to code from back in my engineering days, just so that I could mess around, experiment with things, contribute in some ways. So I'm just looking for things that are A, brushing up some of those technical skills that I used to have, and B, just giving me insights and new angles on where this technology could be going, what are cool supplements to it.
But my free time is, I spend with my kids, not with a book. So I don't begrudge those that do, but my reading tends to be a little on the nerdier, wonkier side. And when I'm passionate about something, I'm really passionate about it, and I tend to want to learn all I can.
All right. That's great. I love the nerd alert is great.
It's awesome.
My nerd alarm is broken. It just went off for so long. It just, I haven't replaced it, so.
That's awesome. Okay, cool. All right.
So final thoughts, like what do you want to leave our listeners with before I let you go?
I wish I had known this organization existed when I was recruiting. I think I made excellent use of my school's resources and things like that, but I still went in not sure. I never had a former person at one of these firms telling me, like, how to pass you or, you know, obviously I was crushing it with other MBA ones on occasion.
But, you know, clearly if you're already a client, there's just unbelievable resources. I got called out here because I didn't know they had the email formats. I'm just like, it's so deep.
You can't get to it all. But, you know, take advantage of it. And those that aren't clients yet, maybe take advantage of all the free stuff.
They're really putting out a lot of great content that I used to frankly like sift around on pre-Reddit, like billboard forum days to get. And it's just all right here. So enjoy.
And, you know, if you feel like you need any help, prep, coaching, you know, love to meet you, love to work with you.
Awesome. Thanks so much, Rick. So this was a great conversation.
And so to all of our listeners out there, you can easily book a session with Rick or book eight sessions through our Black Belt Package. JF is going to put all of those resources that we mentioned today in the show notes. And overall, I'm just so grateful for your time, Rick.
Thanks so much for spending all of this time and all of your giving all of your knowledge and passing it on to all of our candidates.