Consulting candidates spend weeks on cases and a few hours on the rest of the interview. It is a miscalculation. At most firms, each interview includes a part devoted to your background, your experiences and your motivation, the fit interview, and this part can eliminate a candidate who shines on cases. The firms say so themselves on their careers pages: they are looking for colleagues, not only sharp minds. This article explains what the fit interview is for, the questions that come up, how to prepare and structure your stories, and the mistakes that cost the most.
What the fit interview is for
The fit interview seeks to answer three questions that the case does not address.
Do you have the qualities the job requires? Leadership, the ability to convince, perseverance in the face of failure, teamwork, initiative. These qualities are proven through past experiences, not through assertions.
Will you be a good colleague? A consultant spends their weeks with a small team, often at the client’s site, under pressure. The interviewer wonders whether they would like to work with you at eleven at night before a steering committee.
Is your motivation solid? Firms want to understand why you want to do this job, and why with them. A candidate who cannot explain it risks leaving quickly.
The place of the fit interview varies across firms. At McKinsey, it takes the form of the Personal Experience Interview, described on its interviewing page 🔗 as an in-depth discussion of experiences that mattered to you, focused on your own role. BCG describes on its interview process page 🔗 an interview that explores your experience, skills and motivation for joining the firm. Bain states on its interviewing page 🔗 that it asks all candidates for a given role the same questions, to reduce bias.
This last point matters: many firms use structured interviews, with common questions and a common scoring grid. To understand what this changes on the recruiter’s side, the page on the structured interview, a method for recruiting with less bias 🔗 describes the logic of these grids, which you will meet from the other side of the table.
The questions that come up
Fit questions fall into a few families. The wording changes, but the substance stays the same.
Background and motivation
- Introduce yourself in two minutes.
- Why consulting? Why now?
- Why our firm rather than another?
- What made you choose your school or your internship?
Leadership and influence
- Tell me about a situation where you had to convince someone who disagreed with you.
- Tell me about a time you took responsibility for a group without having the title.
Failure and perseverance
- Tell me about a failure, and what you learnt from it.
- Describe a situation where you had to reach a goal despite a major obstacle.
Teamwork and conflict
- Tell me about a conflict in a team and how you handled it.
- Tell me about a situation where a team member was not pulling their weight.
Impact
- What achievement are you proudest of?
- Tell me about a situation where you changed the way things were done.
Motivation questions call for reasoned answers; almost all the others call for a story.
Preparing your stories
The most effective preparation is to build a small stock of stories, each able to answer several questions.
Choose four to six experiences, drawn from varied contexts: an internship, an association, an academic project, a sporting or personal activity. For its Personal Experience Interview, McKinsey advises preparing two examples per theme, choosing experiences that genuinely mattered to you.
For each experience, note the precise facts: the context, your exact role, the difficulties, the decisions you made, what others said or did, the result, what you learnt. The interviewer will dig: you must know the details.
Link each story to two or three qualities. The same experience of chairing an association can illustrate leadership, handling a conflict and perseverance. A simple table (stories in rows, qualities in columns) lets you check that every quality is covered.
Also prepare a real failure. Not a fake flaw (“I am too much of a perfectionist”), but a situation where something went wrong and where you understood your share of responsibility.
Prepare your stories in French and in English, if part of the interviews may take place in English.
These stories must be consistent with your CV: the interviewer often has it in front of them and picks from it. The strategy consulting intern CV template shows experiences written so that they can be told in interview: an internship, a Junior-Entreprise, a case club, each with a precise result.
Structuring an answer
A good fit answer lasts about two minutes, with a clear structure. The most widely used one has four parts:
- The situation: the context in two sentences, no more.
- The stakes: what the problem was, and why it was difficult.
- Your action: what you did, you yourself, and why you did it that way. This is the longest part.
- The result and the lesson: what changed, if possible with an order of magnitude, and what you took from it.
McKinsey adds a valuable piece of advice: lead with reasoning rather than actions. Explaining why you chose one option over another shows how you think, which is what the interviewer is trying to assess.
A condensed example. To the question “Tell me about a time you had to convince someone”:
“During my internship in the strategy department, I identified about thirty stores below break-even. The operations director refused to raise it with the executive committee, because he feared a closure plan. Rather than defending my figures, I tried to understand his objection: he wanted the analysis to distinguish recent stores, which had not yet reached their stride. I redid the analysis with that distinction, and we jointly presented a version that separated stores to turn around from stores to monitor. The committee approved a store-by-store review of the network. I learnt that an objection is often a piece of information I did not have.”
The story is short, centred on the candidate’s action, and ends with a credible lesson.
Common mistakes
- Reciting a memorised story. McKinsey warns that you should prepare for a conversation, not a rehearsed story. A story that is too polished collapses at the first follow-up question.
- Saying “we” all the way through. The interviewer wants to know what you did. Say “I”, without claiming other people’s work.
- Spending too long on the context. Two sentences are enough; what matters is the action.
- Choosing stories with no stakes. A story where everything went well from the start shows nothing.
- Giving a generic motivation. “Consulting offers a wide variety of engagements” convinces no one. Link your motivation to a lived experience, as in a good cover letter: our article on the cover letter for a consulting firm details this logic.
- Neglecting your final questions. A candidate with no questions shows they have not pictured themselves in the job.
On the day of the interview
A few simple reflexes for the big day:
- reread your CV and your stories in the morning, without trying to learn a script;
- find out about the interviewer if you know their name, to prepare one or two questions on their career or engagements;
- listen to the whole question and take a few seconds before answering; choosing the right story is better than rushing;
- adapt the length: if the interviewer often follows up, shorten; if they let you talk, stay within two minutes;
- end with your questions: about engagements, staffing, training, the office culture.
For remote interviews, McKinsey recommends a quiet place, your camera on and disabling AI note-taking tools.
Fit stories rest on your CV: every line must be able to become a story. If you are starting with little experience, the article on the consultant CV with no consulting experience shows how to write usable evidence. And so that formatting does not take up your time, the ConseilCV editor handles it and produces a PDF that firms’ screening software can read.
Frequently asked questions
Can the fit interview eliminate a candidate who did well on the cases?
Yes. Firms assess both parts of the interview, and a weak answer on motivation or teamwork can be enough to rule out a candidate, even one who shone on the case.
How many stories should you prepare?
Four to six well-mastered experiences are generally enough, provided each can answer several questions. McKinsey, for its part, advises two examples per theme of its Personal Experience Interview.
Can you use a personal rather than professional experience?
Yes, if it shows a sought-after quality and you played a real role in it: an association project, a sporting commitment, a personal initiative. What matters is the precision of the facts.
Should you talk about your weaknesses?
If the question is asked, yes, with a real weakness and how you are working on it. Fake weaknesses are spotted immediately.
Sources
- McKinsey & Company, Interviewing at McKinsey 🔗
- Boston Consulting Group, Interview process 🔗
- Bain & Company, Interviewing 🔗