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McKinsey runs interviewer-led cases. The interviewer holds the structure and moves you question to question, so the job is to answer what is in front of you cleanly, do the arithmetic without fumbling, and say what an exhibit implies rather than reading it back. You are not being rewarded for driving. You are being rewarded for being sharp inside a frame someone else set.

Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Bain lean candidate-led. You open by laying out how you would break the problem down, ask for the data you want, and the interviewer largely follows. That loads weight onto the opening minutes: a structure built for this client question rather than a memorised framework bent to fit, and then the judgement to stop analysing and commit to a recommendation. In both styles the usual way people fail is not an arithmetic slip. It is setting out a structure and then quietly abandoning it.

The internship is the main route to a graduate offer at most of these firms, which /tracker/consulting-graduate-scheme covers in full. Cycle-wide dates and how the tracker works sit on /tracker.

Solve is McKinsey's digital assessment, taken in a browser before interviews. It is built as scenario-based simulations rather than a question paper: you are dropped into an unfamiliar environment, given rules and data, and asked to make choices under time pressure, and it captures how you got to a decision as well as the decision itself. The scenarios inside it have changed more than once since it launched, so treat any walkthrough you find online as possibly out of date and work from the instructions McKinsey sends you.

Casey is BCG's chat-based case. A bot plays a client contact, presents a problem, and you type back structure, short calculations and readings of the exhibits it gives you. Bain is the less settled one: candidates in some markets report an online assessment from Sova covering reasoning and work style, but it is widely reported rather than something to plan around, and your invitation email is the only reliable guide.

What is absent matters too. Strategy consulting is one of the few graduate sectors where the first automated filter is not a recorded video interview, so rehearsing competency answers to a camera transfers almost nothing here. Timed mental arithmetic and chart interpretation do.

McKinsey pairs cases with a personal experience interview, and it is not a competency round under a new name. You bring one story, usually about leading through resistance or about personal impact, and then you stay in it. The interviewer keeps pushing: what exactly did you say, what did the other person do, why that choice rather than the obvious one, what would you do differently.

That punishes breadth. A polished answer covering three achievements runs out of material by the fourth follow-up. What holds up is a real situation you remember in detail, including the part you got wrong. BCG and Bain ask experience questions too, usually shorter and folded around the case, but the same depth test applies: they are checking whether the story is genuinely yours.