Effective business interviews - Tips and tricks from a former McKinsey Partner
Before founding Skimle I was a Partner at McKinsey and did more than 1000 interviews. Here I share my interview guide and top tips.
Interviews are important
Being effective in conducting interviews is a must-have skill for all consultants working at McKinsey, Bain or BCG, but equally important for all knowledge workers and executives. On the surface level interviews are about collecting information, but actually they are much more: a way to build trust, a way to pave road for change by making people feel heard, a way to originate ideas together, a way to truly push one's own thinking by testing it with others, and much more. Sometimes interviews flow naturally, sometimes they feel a bit forced, and in any case the pressure of making the discussions valuable and effective while the clock is ticking is always there.
While working at McKinsey's Helsinki office I did over 1000 interviews, including expert interviews in due diligence projects, stakeholder interviews, leadership interviews and basic fact finding discussions with client and internal experts at all levels. Some were with Finnish counterparts, but due to my global role I got to interview people from around the world. All the interviews were different, but during my 18 years I did start to pick out patterns in what makes great and mutually rewarding discussions. From my initial list of dozens of tips, I decided to narrow down to the five most valuable tips for acing interviews with business stakeholders.
1. Connect with the interviewee - minds
Most business executives and experts live busy lives where your interview slot is just a tiny wedge in their back to back calendar. While you know exactly why you are talking with them and what you want to get out of it, they might have little clue.
You need to make sure the interviewee has the full context, else the discussion is fruitless. What I like to do is
Send a context setting message a few days in advance: who you are, why are we discussing, what do we do with the results
Send the full interview guide or list of key questions 24 hours beforehand
Take time in the beginning of the interview to introduce yourself and the context
Explicitly ask how much they know of the context and for any questions they might have and so on before proceeding
Sometimes the context setting takes a large chunk of the allotted time, but it is always worth it. If you try to proceed without being on the same page, you will get superficial answers at best.
2. Connect with the interviewee - hearts
Stating the facts might work with AI systems, but is not enough when it comes to humans. Once you are connected with the interviewee and have established the context, start building deeper rapport.
This can mean different things including
Basic small talk, tailored to the cultural context of the interviewee. In Finland where I come from, small talk is barely existing whereas in other cultures (I've noticed…) people want to talk about small things like the weather in the beginning.
Opening up and bringing your personality to the game by expressing genuinely how you feel, for example “I feel a bit nervous as you are the first CFO I am talking with, so bear with me!” if that is the case
Finding common ground and similarities, reacting to what they say upfront and figuring out what really excites them
Bringing a friendly and relaxed mindset to the discussion from the start. People always mirror each other, so if you are able to bring a positive frame to the discussion you will always encouter positive interviewees.
The risk of skipping deeper rapport is to come off as robotic. Nobody wants to give thoughtful answers to someone they do not feel at least some connection with. You want to come of as someone who is a “respectful peer” - not arrogant, not junior, and definitely not disinterested.
3. Release your agenda and let them lead
The number one mistake juniors make in consulting is coming to the interview with a detailed interview guide… and then running through it no matter what. The mantra I tell people is to “release your agenda” - even if you have a set of questions written down, it's much more valuable to let the interviewees guide you to topics they want to talk about. If they run out of steam you can always return to your list.
Practically I would recommend
Be upfront with the questions (e.g., share them beforehand or show them in the beginning) but stress that there are just possible topics
In the beginning, use open ended questions like “Hearing this overall context, what are the things I really should understand?”
When you notice the interviewee lights up and becomes passionate, stop going through the list and start going deeper with follow-up questions
Use silence as your weapon. This is a Finnish person's secret weapon, as we are very comfortable with long silences - but also a skill anyone can pick up.
Listen actively and show that you follow. This ranges from nodding and short remarks to occasionally synthesising the discussion and playing it back with your own words.
Be genuinely curious. Evolution has trained people to spot what other humans are up to. If you are just running through a list to tick off all topics, it shows… and your interviewee will stop answering genuinely. Make sure to cultivate true curiosity and bring that attitude to all discussions!
The belief I have, and which has proven true time after time, is that the interviewee will lead you to the insights as long as they understand what you are after (tip #1) and trust you (tip #2). You need to trust the process!
4. Go for the quote and push for the insight
After you've established context, connected on an emotional level and let the interviewee lead you to the right things, you will start to arrive at genuinely interesting topics. Think of them as gold nuggets - the insights and quotes that matter.
Once you are approaching a gold nugget, make the most of it
Ask interviewees to give examples and stories to bring colour to their statements
Ask for quantitative data to supplement the quote - “you say this is a common problem… would you say it happens 50%, 75% or 100% of the time?”
Feed them imagery and metaphors to see if they work. This is my secret trick - using visual language to summarise the discussion, and asking if it was accurately captured and what their own mental image of the matter is. The quotes you get when people share their mental models and analogies are true gold!
Keep probing for depth or “peeling the onion”. Often first layer of the onion comes automatically, the next by asking simply “tell me more”, and the next one by asking an open ended follow up question. Thereafter you have to be more pointed, and then understand when you have exhausted the topic and need to move further.
In an 60 minute interview there are normally 5 to 10 minutes that really matter… those moments when you are discovering genuine insights. Once you hit these gold nuggets, slow down and dig deeper - there is more gold to be found from that spot so don't move forward too soon!
5. Be systematic with your notes
Anyone who has been at McKinsey recognises the subtle hand sign of “hey, make notes!”, used when the partner or manager notices the team is not capturing the richness of the discussion. Always make sure you are capturing the notes during the discussion, either by hand or when possible with transcription or AI note taking.
But having the raw notes is not enough, you need to
Transcribe the notes (or audio recording) to the full text notes to ensure you have all the relevant quotes and insights captured
Analyse the notes and determine key themes raised during the interview
Label the themes so that you can pull together insights across multiple interviews touching the same topic
Keep a track of the best quotes for each category, so that you can play them back in your reports
Find the 2-3 most important takeaways and immediately share them with your team to keep everyone on the same page
This final piece of turning the interview outputs into valuable insights can be the most tricky one, and we've dedicated a full post on how to analyse interview transcripts. Right after the interview is over I often felt that “hey, I can remember all the facts” and “it's these 3 things we need to keep in mind”… but in practice without discipline you loose 80% of the insights gathered during the discussions. Some omissions do not matter, but others can be dangerous!
What I wish I had while at McKinsey
In all honesty, while I was great at interviewing, I was quite poor at systematically managing my notes. We often had just text files, shared documents and messy collections of quotes instead of a true repository of insights to pull from when we would do the analysis. Partly this is due to lack of time (sometimes I would do six or more interviews back-to-back…), partly due to lack of tools made for this.
It is this gap that made me excited about founding Skimle - could we build a tool that would be the “Excel for qualitative analysis”? Could we build something that would help the analysis of interviews and texts be as systematic and credible as “hard numbers” and modelling?
It's still early days for AI-assisted high quality qualitative analysis… but if you want to test an AI-assisted workflow for sorting your interview notes and finding insights, you can try Skimle for free.
