Follow-up questions PEI

Hello,

This is difficult to answer because the follow-up questions will fully depend on the stories you tell the interviewer, so there are very many follow-up questions that the interviewers might ask. 

Here are a few common examples, but feel free to message me if you want to go through some potential follow-ups to specific questions/stories that you have in mind.

1. In a story about your proudest achievement/difficult situation you had to overcome → Why was that particularly difficult for you?

2. In a story about your teamwork/leadership experience → Did you ever experience any conflicts while leading/participating in that group? What was the biggest achievement you accomplished there? 

3. In a story about how you navigated a conflict → How did your teammate/boss react when you said/did that?

Hi there,

Here is a laundry list in no particular order:

1. You mentioned x, can you tell me a bit more about that?
2. How did you actually go about doing y?
3. How did you think through z problem/solution?
4. When you proposed x, how did y person react?
5. Were there any issues with z?
6. What ended up happening after x?
7. I don't quite understand why you decided to do y. Can you explain your thinking further?
8. Were there any repurcusions to doing x or y?
9. Why didn't you do z?
10. Who do you think was to blame for x?

Hey there,

As Ken said, there are no specifically defined FUP questions. All questions interviewers will ask have the purpose to elicit the information that they want to hear from the candidates.

Usually, it's in the direction of

• What exactly happened in that situation?
• How did the person react? What was said?
• How did you tackle this? etc.

There are no trick questions.

If you want to learn about the PEI in detail, check out the article I wrote for PrepLounge on it: https://www.preplounge.com/en/mckinsey-pei

Cheers,
Florian

Such a list can be mile long :).

If anything in your answer isn't clear or its hard to believe, interviewer will ask to clarify that. So, be ready to clarify & explain. As long as you are sticking to a clear structure in your answer you should be fine i.e. set the scene/context clearly, explain what happened and what did you do & provide the insight- what did you learn/what was the outcome.

There are no set questions where interviewers will ask clarifying questions to get a better read of your PEI story.

Hello!

Congrats, that is the first step for all consulting carreers!

You said it, indeed, HR calls can be much more than just chats. However, if they literally told you that the target was to plan the interviews, most likely will be to know about availability and explain you a bit more of the process. 

Hope it helps!

Cheers, 

Clara