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64 The McKinsey Mind

LESSONS LEARNED AND IMPLEMENTATION
ILLUSTRATIONS
You may not think about it explicitly, but you probably interview
someone every day. It could be a customer, coworker, or competi-
tor. Consider how many times you have interacted with someone
who had important data and information that related to a problem
you were working on. What, after all, is interviewing? Nothing
more than a discussion between two or more persons conducted
for the purpose of gaining specific information and usually with a
slightly higher than normal level of formality.
Consultants, especially consultants at McKinsey, treat inter-
views with the utmost respect. They spend much time and effort
preparing for them and learning from them. You should, too.
Our discussions with McKinsey alumni confirmed the effec-
tiveness of interviewing skills when transferred to other organiza-
tions. Outside the Firm, however, the context is different.
McKinsey interviews are a standard operating procedure for every
project, and they are conducted with purposeful consistency (to the
extreme of having a specific MS Word template for summarizing
findings). In other business scenarios, interviews are regarded dif-
ferently. As a result, they are often less formal, with much less
preparation and follow-through. Our alumni told us stories of how
they have been working to increase the effectiveness of data gath-
ering through interviews, and they helped us identify ways you can
make the most of interviewing in your career:

• Structure your interviews.
• Interviewing is about listening.
• Be sensitive.

Structure your interviews. You may have sensed by now that
we subscribe to the logical, ordered, and structured approach to
problem solving. This orientation is probably a combination of our