Preparing for your McKinsey personal experience interview, Bain personal experience interview, or BCG personal experience interview? Use the SCR method (short for situation complication resolution framwork) to best sell personal experience.
When you use the SCR Method, you first describe the situation in which you were in. Then you describe the complication that you faced in that situation and finally you explain how the complication was resolved by yourself and what impact you had on the solution. Whenever you face difficult CV questions use the SCR method. The video features an SCR Method example. Gabriel Goldbrain will demonstrate how you can use this method effectively to tackle those challenging CV questions which you will face in your first round interviews and second round interviews at management consulting firms like McKinsey, BCG, Bain and the likes.
Present your soft skills and focus on elements like personal impact, inclusive leadership, courageous change, and entrepreneurial drive. These are essential aspects that interviewers from McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and other MBB firms look for in candidates during their first round interviews and second round interviews. Whether you're preparing for a consulting interview or a job interview, mastering the SCR Method is your key to success in presenting your soft skills and demonstrating where you made your difference. Succeed selling your experience in a convincing way. Join Gabriel Goldbrain and learn how to enhance your CV presentation and impress your interviewers. Don't miss out on this valuable resource for improving your personal experience interview part!
Video transcript:
Imagine you're in a recruiting interview with McKinsey. You talk about your CV and the previous role you had, and then, boom, comes the killer question. The interviewer asks you: What was your personal impact? What difference did you make in that role? In today's video, we will cover two things. First of all, how you master personal experience interviews at McKinsey or any other firm. Secondly, how you use the SCR method to demonstrate in which situations you made the difference.
Before we start, I'm Gabriel Goldbrain, and I developed the success training. In this training, we exactly practice things like the SCR method so that you never again sell yourself undervalue. Check out my website www.gabrielgoldbrain.com to find out more and apply for my training. Let's go.
Now, let's talk about four things that particularly McKinsey, and also other top management consulting firms love to see in candidates. And that's why they center a lot of questions around these aspects. The first of these aspects is personal impact, the second one is inclusive leadership, the third one is courageous change, and the fourth factor they like to see in candidates is entrepreneurial drive.
So now, what does personal impact mean? Personal impact means what did you personally do to achieve a goal, to achieve something. What did you do, not someone else, you personally? What was your impact? What was the result of your actions? This is what you have to sell in this point.
When it comes to the second point, inclusive leadership, which questions will run through the mind of your interviewer? Then, questions might be: How did you lead? How did others feel about things you proposed, decisions you made? What concerns did others have with the ideas you developed, with the decisions you made? How did you finally convince them to go ahead?
Number three, courageous change. This is about tough situations you got in. How did you master these situations? What did you do? What concerns did you have? How did you feel? Which data and facts did you have? Which assumptions were tough to take? And how did you deal with the situation? Where did you have to show flexibility to overcome the critical situation? And then finally, how did the situation evolve? This is what an interviewer might think about when they want to assess which capabilities you have for courageous change.
Number four, an assessment on your entrepreneurial drive. Many people confuse this with entrepreneurial experience, but actually, that is not what McKinsey is looking into particularly. It's more about your attitude. How do you deal with failures? Which things did you achieve outside of your comfort zone in an organization? Maybe in a student organization, maybe not even in a startup or in an internship or in a previous job. It's just about to see that character trait, how you deal with failures, what do you do to overcome obstacles? How creative are you? What risks do you take, calculated risks? How much gut feeling do you take and how much do you take data into consideration? Can you learn from data? Can you improve? Can you minimize entrepreneurial risks by analyzing data? That is what top management and strategy consulting firms like to assess when they reason in an interview about entrepreneurial drive. And you have to exactly demonstrate where you, in the past, showed these things.
Before we continue with the SCR framework, I want to show you my summary slide on the previously discussed four points which particularly McKinsey, but also any other top management consulting firm will look for in candidates. You will find the slide on my website www.gabrielgoldbrain.com.
Now, let's continue with the SCR framework. So what does SCR stand for and what is it useful for? SCR stands for Situation, Complication, Resolution. And that means whenever you're being asked about which personal impact you made, you first give a short description of the situation which you were in. Then, you describe the complication you had in this situation, and then you let the interviewer know how you resolved this situation. And this is a very nice format to present in a concise way how you came from a complicated situation to the solution and what your personal impact was to resolve that matter. You will also find a summary slide on the SCR framework on my website www.gabrielgoldbrain.com. Don't forget to share and like my video with your peers who also strive for a Consulting career.
That was quite a bit of theory. Now let's look into an example of the SCR framework. We will use the example of how Goldbrain saved the 1 billion IPO of a chemical company. So, what was the situation? Let's start with the situation. Goldbrain was the director of strategy in a big chemical company which planned to do an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. The preparations had been ongoing for about 1,5 years and were fully on track. So basically, Sarbanes-Oxley Readiness was almost completed, financial statements were ready, the Red Herring was pretty much advanced, and also the audited financial statements were done.
What complication did Goldbrain find in that situation? The problem was that the shareholders did not properly inform the bank, so the bookrunner, they did not prepare yet for the IPO. So, they were not ready and this became clear during a big meeting where all stakeholders gathered and we presented the progress of the IPO preparations. So in that meeting, a lot of voices from the banks came up who wanted to cancel the IPO.
So, how could Goldbrain resolve this critical situation? Goldbrain made it pretty much clear that the project is on track. He laid that out in the presentation, and he also challenged the banks and asked them "Why can you not get ready within that short time frame?". And finally, Goldbrain got the buy-in from the banks. We agreed on a plan, and so they immediately started with the preparations, and we followed a very strict plan which we developed in the subsequent weeks to make the IPO happen. And that way, Goldbrain saved the IPO and a 3x return for its private equity shareholders.
So, the SCR method is a very handy tool to sell your successes. But keep in mind that even though you presented your personal impact with the SCR framework, the interviewer may ask follow-up questions to see how much you really did. So they may ask you things like, 'Okay, can you tell me a little bit more about the plan which you developed with the banks? What did you do there?'. Okay, and so we first set up a weekly stakeholder call where the project team reported to everyone what is the progress, and secondly, where the banks reported about the progress of their road show where they would do the road show, where the CEO and the CFO would have to go, and how much money they had collected up to that date. The interviewer may ask a few more follow-up questions, but then finally, I mean, he will realize the guy, he sold himself quite well using this SCR framework. So, they will say, 'Yeah, this Goldbrain, yeah, he's not talking shit, this guy, he really made an impact.'
Then let's take the interviewer's position. What takeaways might he have in his four categories which are personal impact, inclusive leadership, courageous change, and entrepreneurial drive? So, under the personal impact, he may say, 'Oh yeah, Goldbrain, this guy, he avoided the cancellation of the IPO. He made it happen that the shareholders could get a 3.4x return on their investment. He made 40 millionaires in the top management of the company. Yeah, he had personal impact, he just doesn't talk, he shows it and it's proven, you can read it in the books.
Then on inclusive leadership, what may remain in the memory of the interviewer? The interviewer may think, 'Yeah, Goldbrain, he managed to accelerate stakeholders which were kind of a roadblock to the process. He assured an IPO by setting up structures to make sure that everyone was on the same page with a stakeholder call, so everyone knew where we stand and now all the stakeholders were on the same page which made the IPO successful.'
When it comes to Courageous change, the interviewer may keep two points in mind. First, Goldbrain stood up when it mattered. He stood up against doubts of the leading book Runner and all the other Banks and also to the concerns of some C level members. Secondly, he was self-conscious about the progress of the substreams of the sub-module and that everything went well and pretty much on track. And based on that information, he could go in bold because the others, they just had shallow arguments, and so he showed courageous change. Basically, you could say Goldbrain, he got balls.
Finally, Entrepreneurial Drive, what will the interviewer remember in that category? It will be at least one thing that Goldbrain pragmatically overcame the communication hurdle with the banks and that Goldbrain showed the can-do and whatever-it-takes attitude to get the IPO done.
I summarized this small example of the SCR framework in two slides, both of which you get from my website www.gabrielgoldbrain.com. If you like my videos and don't want to miss any videos on other consulting firms like the Boston Consulting Group, like Carney, like Bain, like ATK, or other leading management consulting firms, make sure you subscribe to my channel, share my videos with your colleagues, like it. Thanks for watching. Wait, wait, wait, before I forget, I have two more videos that you must see. The first video is about the McKinsey Hiring process which shows you where 99% of the candidates fail. The second video is about 10 types of market-based cases which you may encounter during case interviews at leading management consulting firms.
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