Cassi Moye
Former BCG Recruiter
Consulting has a long history of being known as an exclusive club, where most members gained access through elite MBA programs or top-tier undergraduate institutions. But that’s changing.
Today, the path to consulting is more flexible and diverse than ever, especially for candidates with experience in other industries. As client demands evolve and consulting firms seek to bring more industry and functional depth to their teams, many are expanding their hiring practices to include experienced hires: professionals with real-world industry expertise who are looking to pivot into consulting.
If you’re a high-performing professional considering a move into consulting, whether at McKinsey, BCG, Bain (MBB), or another firm, this guide will show you what that transition looks like and how to navigate the consulting experienced hire recruiting process. We’ll discuss:
- What a consulting experienced hire is
- How to know if consulting is right for you
- How different consulting firms recruit experienced hires
- 6 Steps to pivot from industry to consulting
- 6 Resources to help you make the pivot to consulting
Let’s get started!
Contents
What Is A Consulting Experienced Hire?
A consulting “experienced hire” or “experienced professional” is someone who joins a consulting firm after gaining experience in another industry. Experienced hires may be former engineers, marketers, finance professionals, lawyers, entrepreneurs, military officers, or healthcare professionals. The key to landing a consulting role as an experienced hire isn’t about where you came from, but the depth of industry and/or functional knowledge you can bring to a team.
Unlike traditional MBA or undergraduate candidates, experienced hires enter consulting with a few (or many) years of work experience on their resumes. In addition to subject-matter expertise, they bring leadership skills and client-facing experience and may enter at a slightly more senior level, such as associate, consultant, or even manager, depending on the firm and their background.
The key differentiator is that instead of being trained from scratch, experienced hires are expected to ramp up quickly, apply their industry knowledge to client challenges, and integrate into fast-moving teams with minimal hand-holding. You’re not expected to be a consulting expert on day one, but you do need to demonstrate the foundational skills and mentality that make great consultants successful.
How To Know If Consulting Is Right For You
The pivot to consulting can be a transformative career move, but it’s not right for everyone. The consulting recruitment process takes a lot of time and effort, so before diving into resume rewrites and case interview preparation, consider whether this path aligns with your goals, strengths, and lifestyle.
Characteristics That Make Consulting a Good Fit
Curiosity & Problem-Solving Skills: Consultants are endlessly curious. If you are passionate about dissecting problems, identifying inefficiencies, and asking “why?” you’ll likely enjoy the day-to-day flow of consulting.
Strong Communication Skills: Consultants must be able to organize information and communicate effectively, whether to a client, CEO, or their team.
Comfort with Ambiguity: Consulting engagements can shift quickly. If you can roll with the punches and thrive in fast-paced environments, you’ll probably do well in this business.
Stamina: Consulting is not a 9-to-5 job. Long hours and regular travel (though less now post-COVID) are part of the gig.
Coachability: You’ll be asked to receive feedback, early and often. The best consultants embrace a feedback-driven culture and grow quickly.
Consulting Might Not Be a Fit If . . .
- You thrive in predictable, routine environments.
- You prefer working independently vs. collaboratively.
- You dislike frequent feedback or ambiguity.
- You value work-life balance over rapid growth and exposure.
Skills Consulting Firms Look for
Structured Thinking: Can you take a difficult problem and break it into smaller parts that are more easily solved? That’s a raw skill consultants must have.
Analytical Agility: While you don’t have to be a data scientist, you should be comfortable with manipulating data, looking for trends, and identifying insights that will inform your problem-solving.
Leadership Without Authority: Consultants influence without having direct reports. Presence, persuasion, and clarity are essential to the consulting toolkit.
Client-Facing Polish: You’ll likely be interacting with senior clients from the jump, so professionalism is key.
Execution: Consultants don’t just strategize, they deliver results.
If these traits resonate with you, consulting could be your natural next step. For a deeper look at the day-to-day reality, check out our article on the pros and cons of a consulting career.
How Different Consulting Firms Recruit Experienced Hires
While consulting firms all value problem-solving, client-readiness, and leadership potential, their approaches to recruiting experienced hires vary in meaningful ways. Some firms are more structured and formal in how they evaluate talent, while others are more flexible and relationship-driven. Below, we break down how some of the major players approach consulting experienced hire recruiting, what they look for, and what to expect.
BCG Experienced Hire Recruiting
The BCG experienced hire recruiting process is known for being especially welcoming to professionals with deep industry expertise, particularly in healthcare, energy, consumer goods and services, and tech. They’re often open to candidates without MBAs, provided they can demonstrate structured thinking and client-facing polish.
Key characteristics of BCG’s experienced hire process:
Tailored recruiting paths: BCG often hires for specific practice areas or geographies, especially if your background aligns with a team’s needs.
Emphasis on coachability: BCG appreciates candidates who are sharp, but humble, and eager to learn the consulting way of working.
Strong networking culture: Internal referrals and informational interviews can move the needle more than simply submitting online.
Expect a combination of behavioral and case interviews, with an emphasis on real-time collaboration and logical clarity.
McKinsey Experienced Hire Recruiting
The McKinsey experienced hire recruiting approach is highly structured and selective. The firm, like all consulting firms, values problem-solving skills. In addition, they look for:
- Personal impact – the ability to bring someone around to your way of thinking
- Entrepreneurial drive – taking initiative and moving a project forward in an ambiguous environment or will out perfect data.
- Inclusive leadership – working comfortably with and valuing the contributions of people from different backgrounds and with different ways of thinking than your own.
You don’t need a consulting background or an MBA, but you do need to prove you can perform at the same level as their core hires.
What to expect from McKinsey’s process:
The Solve assessment: This online problem-solving game is used to evaluate analytical agility. It replaced the Problem-Solving Test (PST).
PEI interviews (Personal Experience Interview): These are more intense than standard behavioral interviews. Expect to deeply unpack leadership moments, challenges, and influence.
Rigorous case interviews: These follow a predictable structure but reward creativity, insight, and communication finesse.
McKinsey often hires experienced professionals into Associate roles, though more senior candidates may enter at the Engagement Manager level with the right background.
Check out our article on transitioning to consulting as a McKinsey experienced hire for one consultant’s experience with the McKinsey experience hire recruiting process.
Bain Experienced Hire Recruiting
Bain has a smaller, more selective experienced hire pipeline compared to BCG and McKinsey, and they prioritize cultural fit. Bain’s team-oriented nature means they look for collaborative, low-ego, high-energy candidates.
Here’s what makes Bain’s process unique:
Focus on personality and values: Bain leans heavily on whether you’d thrive in their team-driven, highly collegial environment.
Flexible interview process: Some experienced hires will encounter modified interviews, like fewer cases or more focus on leadership or domain-specific strengths.
MBA not required: As with the other MBBs, an MBA can help, but isn’t essential.
Bain is an especially strong fit for candidates who want to grow in a mentorship-heavy culture where feedback and development are part of the firm’s fabric.
Deloitte Experienced Hire Recruiting
Deloitte recruits high volumes of experienced hires across a diverse range of roles from strategy to operations and from tech to human capital. This variety makes them especially attractive for professionals with specialized functional backgrounds.
What to expect:
Role-specific hiring: You’ll often apply to a specific job posting (e.g., Life Sciences Strategy Manager), and your experience must align clearly with the role.
Behavioral-heavy interviews: These may feel more like industry interviews, focusing on past experience and impact, with limited or no casework depending on the group.
Broader definition of consulting: Unlike MBB, Deloitte may place you on implementation-heavy or client-embedded projects.
Deloitte can be a great choice if you’re pivoting from industry but still want to leverage deep functional or technical expertise.
Accenture Experienced Hire Recruiting
Accenture’s consulting experienced hire recruiting spans a wide range of business units, hiring professionals at scale across Strategy, Interactive, and Technology. They’re known for being operationally focused and tech-forward, often recruiting candidates who want to blend strategy with implementation.
Highlights of the Accenture process:
Fast-moving pipeline: Accenture’s high-volume hiring means the process can be quick but also competitive and sometimes impersonal.
Project-based evaluation: Your ability to contribute to specific client needs is key. Tailor your resume and interview answers accordingly.
Open to hybrid backgrounds: If you’ve found success in product, digital transformation, or IT strategy, you’ll likely be a good fit.
Accenture is particularly well-suited for candidates with hybrid business-technical experience or those who want to work on digital-first, innovation-driven projects.
6 Steps To Pivot From Industry To Consulting
Making the leap from industry into consulting isn’t just about polishing your resume or learning how to solve a case. It’s about repositioning your experience through a consulting lens and understanding what firms are really looking for. Below are 6 key steps to set yourself up for success.
1. Consider Whether Consulting Is Right for You
Although we touched on this earlier, taking a hard look at whether consulting is truly the right fit is the critical first step before making the leap. Be honest with yourself. Consulting offers fast-paced, high-impact work, but it comes with trade-offs like intense hours, frequent feedback, and rapid-fire project changes.
Ask yourself:
- Do you enjoy ambiguity and learning quickly?
- Are you open to travel and demanding clients?
- Do you want to work across industries and functions or go deep in one?
If you’re energized by variety, growth, and collaboration, consulting might be the right fit. If you’re more focused on long-term ownership or deep subject-matter immersion, other paths may suit you better.
New to consulting? Our article What Is Consulting & What Do Consultants Do? offers a great overview of the industry landscape and is perfect for experienced professionals exploring a pivot.
2. Assess Your Skills Through a Consulting Lens
Your industry experience is valuable, but consulting firms want to see how it translates. Focus on the following characteristics:
Problem-solving
- Did you lead a process redesign that improved efficiency or cut costs?
- Have you tackled a high-priority issue with limited time or resources, like rescuing a failing product launch or navigating a supply chain disruption?
- Have you created a new workflow, dashboard, or policy that made measurable impact?
Leadership
- Did you manage a project team and deliver results under pressure?
- Have you rallied colleagues around a strategic shift, persuaded resistant stakeholders, or coached junior teammates?
- Did you lead a cross-functional initiative where you had to align marketing, finance, and product teams around a shared goal?
Analytical thinking
- Have you built a model to forecast demand, assess ROI, or evaluate performance metrics?
- Have you used customer, operational, or financial data to uncover an insight and make a recommendation that changed your company’s direction or drove value?
- Have you developed KPIs or dashboards that gave leadership better visibility into a key issue?
Client-facing experience
- Did you lead or contribute to meetings with C-suite executives or external clients?
- Have you presented recommendations or updates to a board, steering committee, or client decision-maker?
- Have you represented your team in vendor negotiations, client onboarding, or high-stakes presentations?
The goal is to translate your career successes into transferable stories. Consulting firms don’t need you to speak their language, but they do need to know you can think like a consultant.
3. Write a Consulting-Ready Resume
A standard corporate resume won’t meet the mark. Consulting resumes are punchy, results-driven, and highly structured. Consider these key tips when writing your experienced hire consulting resume.
Lead with Outcomes: Don’t just list responsibilities. Instead, highlight what changed because of your work. Consulting resumes are results-driven. Start each bullet with a strong action verb and immediately follow it with the outcome. Focus on the “so what?” behind your role.
Use Metrics Where Possible: Consultants think in numbers, and your resume should reflect that. Quantifying your accomplishments adds credibility and makes impact easy to assess. If you can attach a percentage, dollar figure, or time savings to a result, do it. Not every bullet has to have a metric, but most should.
- Example: Reduced process time by 30% by redesigning the internal reporting workflow and introducing automated data consolidation across three teams.
Avoid Industry Jargon: Consulting firms value clarity over technical complexity. Replace niche or internal terms with plain language that highlights transferable skills. Assume your resume will be read by someone outside your current field because it probably will be.
Keep It to One Page: Even with years of experience, consulting resumes are typically one page. It forces you to prioritize what matters most: results, leadership, and relevance. Recruiters spend seconds skimming each resume, so don’t bury your best work on a second page.
For step-by-step guidance, check out our articles on how to write a standout consulting experienced hire resume and cover letter.
4. Learn How to Ace Case and Behavioral Interviews
Consulting experienced hire recruiting interviews are rigorous but highly coachable.
Case interviews: You’ll be presented with a hypothetical business challenge, like declining profits, new market entry, or pricing strategy, and asked to work through it in real time. Interviewers aren’t looking for a “right” answer. Rather, they want to see how you break down the problem, ask clarifying questions, make assumptions, and structure your thinking. Practice out loud, so your logic is clear, collaborative, and easy to follow.
Behavioral interviews: Firms want to assess your leadership, teamwork, and resilience. You’ll be asked to share real stories from your past experience and walk through how you handled specific situations. McKinsey’s PEI is especially in-depth, so expect to go deep on one story. Be ready to reflect, structure your response clearly, and explain the “why” behind your actions and not just what you did.
Use frameworks wisely: Frameworks are meant to help you structure your thinking, not to be memorized and recited. The best candidates adapt frameworks to fit the specific case, showing flexibility and real-time problem-solving rather than relying on a rigid script.
Practice under pressure: Simulate real interview conditions by doing timed mock interviews with a mentor or peer who is equally strong or stronger at casing. Prioritize detailed feedback over quantity of practice cases and use the feedback to improve your performance.
Check out our article on the consulting experienced hire interview for a deeper dive on how to ace it.
5. Apply Strategically, Not Broadly
Don’t shotgun your resume across every firm. Each firm has its own culture, recruiting cadence, and areas of focus. Experienced hire roles are often specific, not general pipelines. Review these tips before hitting the “submit” button.
- Apply to roles where your background aligns with practice area needs.
- Tailor your resume and cover letter to each firm.
- Use your network: a warm intro or referral can dramatically boost your chances.
- Be patient: hiring timelines can be unpredictable.
6. Network Strategically
Especially as an experienced professional, your network can open doors that applications alone won’t.
Where to start:
- Reach out to consultants with similar backgrounds (school, industry, geography).
- Ask thoughtful questions about their transition and the firm’s culture.
- Attend firm webinars or events for experienced hires.
- Don’t ask for a job, ask for insight.
Consulting is still a people-driven business. Demonstrating curiosity, strategic thinking, and polish shows that you’re already operating at a consulting level and helps you stand out.
6 Resources To Help You Make The Pivot To Consulting
Still think consulting is for you? These articles can help you understand the industry, get your application written, and prepare for interviews.
Contents
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In this article, we’ve covered:
- What it means to be an experienced hire in consulting
- How to determine whether consulting is for you
- How top consulting firms approach experienced hire recruiting
- 6 actionable steps to transition from industry into consulting
- 6 essential resources to support your consulting career pivot
Still have questions?
If you have more questions about the consulting experienced hire recruiting process, leave them in the comments below. One of My Consulting Offer’s recruiters] will answer them.
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