McKinsey is making job applicants spar with a fake AI client
The Verge Jay Peters
McKinsey is making some applicants talk to a fake AI client in interviews. Humans still judge them, which says a lot about how weird hiring has gotten.
Based on reporting by The Verge, Jay Peters — read the original for the full story.
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McKinsey & Company is adding a strange new test to parts of its hiring process: some entry-level candidates will have a 10-minute conversation with an AI simulation of a client, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The point, at least on paper, is practice under pressure. The WSJ says the simulation is meant to cover 80% of the situations McKinsey consultants run into in daily work. It is not trying to act like a truly unhinged client, which is probably a relief for everyone involved.
This is not a fully automated judgment machine, either. The AI won’t score the candidates. Human interviewers will be in the room, watching how people handle the situation and making the call themselves.
For now, the test is being tried out with undergrads applying for business-analyst jobs in some offices. That makes it feel less like a grand reinvention of recruiting and more like McKinsey doing what consultants do best: turning a nervous job interview into a structured simulation and calling it a process improvement.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is corporate hiring doing what it always does when it gets bored: adding a layer of theater and then insisting it is rigor. A fake AI client is a neat trick, but the real headline is that humans still have to sit there and interpret the performance, which means the algorithm got the costume and the manager kept the job. The broader pattern is obvious: AI is excellent at generating new hoops for people to jump through.
Read more about this at: The Verge
