This process is lengthy and overall ended up being a waste of my time and effort. First, you'll get an invitation to set an interview time with a recruiter from the firm. It was a bad sign from the jump when there was supposed to be a link provided in the email to join the interview, but none was provided. The recruiter didn't even realize this oversight and called my cell phone number a few minutes after the scheduled start time. Conversation was easy enough and I took a quick Excel assessment that doesn't provide any performance feedback. No performance and messy communication will be an ongoing theme here, which surprised me because this is supposedly the creme-de-la-creme of consulting firms.
The first actual interview was a case-study interview that I worked hard to prepare for, practicing math by hand to refresh those parts of my brain. I was supposed to have the second and third interviews the same week, but it was a hassle to get them scheduled. When they finally were scheduled, I got an email saying something along the lines of "thanks for using our system to cancel." I hadn't put through any cancellation request. From the outside looking in, it seems like it's a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. Hopefully the firm's clients don't experience the disjointed scheduling I had. I think the main problem was that these people are all over the map: I'm dealing with a recruiter in Florida; the person actually scheduling the interviews is in Costa Rica; my last interview was with someone in Colorado; overall poor coordination with trying to recruit for a role that could be based in Atlanta, Tampa or D.C.
I emailed the recruiter about a week after my last interview, got a response the next day saying they were working on making a final decision. Meanwhile, the job's reposting on LinkedIn, probably by people in Costa Rica.
That was the last response I had from the firm. Over a month went by and I finally see a status change on the McKinsey Dashboard from "In Progress" to "Closed."
I put a good amount of effort and dealt with a lot of rigmarole, the least anyone could do is send me an email saying "yay" or "nay." So, don't believe the other advice you see online that tell you that McKinsey always follows up with people they actually hold interviews with because that's false information. It might be true for the Consulting and Business Analyst roles because those are the people they're sending out for billable hours, so they want to leave everyone after those roles on a good note. With internal roles, they're not much better with follow up than most other companies: don't spin your brain out wondering what happened.