There has been a lot of interest in my recent article about entrepreneurial drive, so I decided to write a similar text about the personal impact interview, which is also part of McKinsey’s Personal Experience Interviews, PEI.
As a McKinsey partner, I did more than a thousand recruiting interviews with candidates throughout my 15+ years at the firm. A surprising number of candidates stumble in the personal impact interview, perhaps because of lack of preparation, but more likely because of having the wrong idea about what was actually looked for in the interview. In this article I will cover three topics:
What is the most common mistake candidates make in the personal impact interview?
What are the most important things to highlight in the personal impact interview?
Example of a great personal impact story for a McKinsey interview
What is the most common mistake candidates make in the personal impact interview?
A big majority of candidates come into the personal impact interview thinking that what they need to display is the most impressive impact they have had. Something that created a lot of financial value, something that made a big difference in society, at their company or their university, or something that generally could not have been achieved by most people. Also, knowing that analytical skills and problem-solving skills are important in consulting, candidates are often biased towards topics that involve cracking difficult problems.
As a result, a lot of stories are very similar and do not hit the points that the interviewer is actually looking for. A typical story goes something like this: “I started a new position at [company x]. Very quickly I noticed that there was something wrong with how people did [process x]. By analyzing [data x] I concluded that we should take [action x] to improve this process. After implementation, we achieved [result x]”. There is nothing really wrong with this way of telling a story, but it is not what the interviewer is looking for in the personal impact interview. The above example primarily shows that you can identify problems, analyze data, and draw conclusions based on your analysis. That is what the case interview is testing, not the personal impact interview.
In the personal impact interview, the interviewer wants to assess the soft skills of the candidate, when it comes to understanding underlying motivations and influencing change, something I will elaborate a bit more on later in this article. As a consultant, you will certainly spend a lot of time cracking difficult problems, but coming up with a new, great solution to a problem has zero impact if it is never implemented. Therefore, more than half of your job as a consultant is to drive change and making sure that new solutions are understood, embraced, and implemented. And more often than not, you are working with clients who have done things in a certain way, for a specific reason, and have a lot more experience than you, certainly, in the particular process that you are trying to change. Changing ways of working is tough, and humans have a built-in resistance to change. So, no matter how good your idea is, making it work in practice will require a lot of persistence, courage, influencing, and change management skills. That is what the interviewer is looking for in the personal impact interview.
If you start by telling the typical story mentioned above, you will soon be asked follow up questions along the lines of
“What happened between the identification of the solution and its actual implementation?”
“Tell me about a specific meeting when you felt the person was warming up to your idea”
“How did you feel when you were communicating your suggested solution?”
“Tell me about the reactions you got”
“How did you collaborate with the person to get it done?”
All these questions are asked because, in the personal impact interview, the interviewer does not really care about what the solution was, but about how you worked to make it happen. So, let’s get into what is most important to highlight when you talk about the “how”.
What are the most important things to highlight in the personal impact interview?
There are a few things that will set you on the right track if you can display them:
Listening skills
Influencing skills
Confidence and courage
Listening skills: If you want to break through change resistance, you will always have to start with listening. If you don’t understand the person’s underlying motivations and the reasons why they are not willing to change, you will never leave square one. And listening in this context doesn’t just mean paying attention to what is being said. It means active listening, taking a real interest in the person, being curious about them, getting into their shoes, and trying to understand what their biggest concerns really are. Think of it as an iceberg, where the part that you can observe without going under the surface is very small. Your interviewer might sometimes ask you “why?”, when you talk about the behavior of a person whose mindset you were trying to change. That is often a trigger for you to show that you were able to listen, were curious enough, and empathetic enough to have an idea of the person’s real motivations. And if your answer is something along the lines of “Because they hadn’t thought about it” or “because they weren’t smart enough”, it shows only one thing. You are arrogant.
Influencing skills: Depending on who you are, and who the person you are trying to influence is, there are a lot of different tools at your disposal. The most important thing for the interviewer to understand in the personal impact interview is that you are not stuck with only one way of influencing others. The most common issue seen in candidates is that they rely way too much on logical persuasion only. If a person does not respond to logic and facts, you dig for more facts, do more analysis, present it more clearly, and finally they will have to understand. Unfortunately, that is rarely the case. And you need to show that you have other ways to deal with it. Did you coach a person at some point to find the answer for themselves? Did you build alliances with others to build peer pressure? Did you appeal to authority? Did you make exchanges, find rewards for change, or try to explain what’s in it for them? Did you try to build a deeper connection with the person and take the relationship route? Or did you do something else? Explain how you really went about trying to change things.
Confidence and courage: During the personal impact interview, your interviewer might ask you at some point when you are describing a specific situation when you tried to influence someone: “How did you feel before that meeting” or something similar. This is because they are looking for some sign that what you are describing was a tough task for you. If you didn’t feel nervous or a little anxious about the situation, chances are that it wasn’t important enough, or the person you were trying to influence wasn’t enough of an authority in your eyes. Your clients as a consultant will be more senior and more experienced than you, and it will take courage to stand up for your thoughts and recommendations. And you can only display courage when something is a bit scary, unknown, or challenging. So don’t be afraid to talk about your emotions in the situation you are describing. Everyone has them.
Example of a great personal impact story for a McKinsey interview
I’ll wrap up by sharing an actual story told to me by a candidate, and that I think is a good example of a personal impact story for a McKinsey interview. The candidate had spent a couple of years at another consulting firm before applying to McKinsey and her story came from one of her early projects there. It went something like this:
“I was working with a team of clients who were in a sales job and had to spend a lot of time in negotiations with their customers. Successful negotiation outcomes always rely on preparations, and the recommendations we came with certainly required more time and effort from their team to prepare more in-depth insight materials before going into discussions with their customers.
From the very start, I could feel a lot of resistance from the client team, and I sensed that they felt not only that I was young and inexperienced and wasn’t in a position to tell them what to do, but also that somehow the fact that they now got more on their plate was my fault. Moreover, I was the only consultant working with that client team, and it was hard for me to find colleagues to get support and advice.
Noticing the dynamics in the client team, I came to realize that there was one person in specific who felt like an informal leader. She wasn’t the most senior, but she did have some authority with the rest of the group, and she was quite vocal. Also, she was the person who seemed most skeptical toward me. And every time I felt I had a little progress with the rest of the team, it rolled back once she came back into the picture.
One night, by coincidence we were the last two people leaving the office and split a cab. In the car, I took the courage to ask her ‘honestly, do you think that I am delivering value here?’ to which she responded ‘honestly, no’. It felt like a blow to my stomach, but it also made me realize that I had to do something different to improve the situation. So, the next day I took her for coffee, to continue the discussion. I told her that I really respect her work, and I don’t want her to feel that she is wasting her time, but that I don’t want to feel like I am wasting mine either. And I asked her if there is anything else that I can do for her that is more meaningful, beyond just the process that we were trying to implement. I felt like I had to really get out of my comfort zone to have this discussion, and I think she felt that she had been a bit harsh on me, and we shared a somewhat emotional moment together. We did agree to both thinks about what we could do differently.
Shortly after that, we got into a new phase of the project, where the team was scripting and delivering new storylines for their coming customer meetings, and this was one of the biggest challenges in her job. I started spending a lot more time with her outside our formal meetings to help her on this topic, and she kept repeating to me that my support was helpful. From that point on, the trust between us kept increasing, and the dynamic not just with her, but with the whole team improved”
I think this story is a great example of all the important elements in a personal impact interview. The candidate for sure showed listening skills. She sensed early on that there were some unspoken problems and while she may not have fully understood them even in the end, she took action to actively learn more from her client, and just the act of active listening can sometimes help. She displayed good influencing skills by trying alternative routes to impact, building relationships and rapport, trying to find ways to address her client’s ‘what’s in it for me’, and in exchange got someone more open to putting effort into the original plan. And she showed courage when she approached the dialogue, opened up about how she felt, and dared to take it to a more personal level, even though it was something outside her comfort zone. All in all, a great story.
If you need help finding the right personal impact story from your own experience, or how to best highlight the right skills, check out our PEI digital course or reach out for PEI coaching.
