McKinsey’s recruitment tests featuring its AI tool for business school graduates reflects a wider trend: new hires will have an AI-augmented career path, requiring new, and sometimes still unknown, skills.
It has always been tough to get an entry-level role at a top consultancy, but the Big Four (Deloitte, KPMG, EY, PwC) have been recruiting fewer new entrants, with some reportedly cutting graduate entries by nearly a third between 2023 and 2025. Top consultancies have frozen starting salaries for the third year running.
AI is on everyone’s mind, as it takes over some of the entry-level work in knowledge-based professions, even though its effects in isolation on graduate hiring overall is yet to be proved. An FT analysis in July 2025 found “other factors, including economic uncertainty, post-Covid retrenchment and offshoring are probably playing an equal or bigger role in falling graduate hiring”.
What does it take to be a standout candidate for a consultancy? Boston Consulting Group’s global people chair Alicia Pittman says the firm is looking for recruits with deep technical expertise, but adds that “what enables real impact is how well people bring technical insight together with business judgment, collaboration and leadership”.
