Every year, more than a million people apply to McKinsey, and only a small share of them will join the firm.
Everyone else still leaves the process carrying out the impact we've had on them: a memory formed over a few weeks of interviews and emails that stays with them for years, sometimes as a client, a colleague at another company, or simply someone who remembers what it felt like to apply.
That's the case for treating candidate experience as something worth getting right in its own right, not only as a step toward hiring the small number of people we ultimately welcome to the firm.
Feedback we can actually trust
In 2023 we launched a global Candidate Experience Survey, built directly into the recruiting process: candidates are invited automatically at the end of their interview journey, whatever the outcome. Given the timing of the survey, most respondents didn't get an offer. This group may have the least reason to be generous to us and the most reason to be honest, which is part of why we give their feedback particular weight. As Abby Zandri, Lead Expert for Global Talent Attraction Early Careers, put it: "The best candidate experiences feel personal, transparent, and consistent. The survey gave us a way to move from assumptions to evidence."
The interviewer gets graded too
Feedback now flows in both directions. Interviewers receive input on how candidates experienced them, not just how candidates performed. Most firms won't do this for senior people volunteering their time between client engagements, which is exactly why it's the part of the process almost nobody measures. As one candidate put it: “Meeting the interviewers was a real highlight. Everyone I spoke with was open, engaging, and willing to share their own experiences at the firm. It felt like more than just a skills check.” It's what happens when every interview is treated as a relationship, not only an assessment.
Where we kept AI out of the room
Two tools now sit behind the scenes of recruiting. An AI agent drafts responses to candidates' routine questions, which recruiters still review before anything goes out, so nothing falls through the cracks. A Candidate Experience Dashboard tracks signals of how candidates are experiencing the process in near real time, so recruiters can step in personally if something looks off. Neither tool talks to a candidate directly. Both exist to buy recruiters back the time for the conversations that need a person. What candidates noticed, in the end, were the recruiters who had more time for them, not the tools working quietly in the background.
One global question, many local answers
Part of what makes this hold together is that we assigned clear ownership for candidate experience end to end—one line of accountability connecting effort across the whole recruiting process, rather than leaving each stage or office to work it out on its own. What we standardized globally is the instrument itself: the same survey questions, asked the same way, everywhere we recruit, so every office works from the same evidence. What stays local is the response: teams decide for themselves which specific changes to make, whether that means adjusting interview scheduling, investing in more interviewer training, or something particular to their own candidates' feedback. In our experience, that's different from how a lot of standardization efforts go, where the fix itself gets dictated centrally and ends up being something no single office owns.
This work was recognized with Gold in the Best Candidate Experience category of the Brandon Hall Group's 2026 Human Capital Management Excellence Awards. For our team, the recognition reinforces something we'd already concluded on our own: keeping the survey questions consistent across every office, while leaving the response to local teams, is what makes the feedback usable at a global scale.
What carries over
A few principles run through all of this, and we think they travel well beyond recruiting:
- Survey everyone your process touches — not only the people who have reason to flatter you.
- Be generous with your own test prep—coaching access distorts these numbers more than ability does.
- Track feedback on the people running the process, not only the people going through it.
- Free people to focus on the moments that need judgment. Let automation handle the repetitive tasks around them.
- Standardize the survey questions. Leave the response to the people closest to the problem.
Looking back on our own two years of this work, the biggest lesson has been that candidate experience is built through hundreds of small decisions rather than one major initiative. Some involve technology. Many do not. The changes candidates notice most are often the simplest: clear communication, thoughtful preparation, engaged interviewers, and timely follow-up.
For our Talent Attraction team, listening to every candidate, whatever the outcome, and acting on what we hear has become part of how we work. We continue to revisit the feedback, test improvements, and learn from the results.
Not every candidate will become a colleague, but every interaction has real impact on the person living it — and multiplied across a million people a year, that impact is what actually reaches the world.