McKinsey Cover Letter: 5 Examples and What Screeners Read

Internship: summer business analyst, third year economics student (216 words)

Dear McKinsey Recruiting Team,

I am applying for the summer business analyst internship in your Chicago office. I am a third year economics and statistics student at a state university, and the two experiences I would bring are a pricing analysis I ran for a local business and a student organization I rebuilt.

Last spring a family owned bakery near campus asked our consulting club why its catering revenue had stalled. I led a team of four. We pulled two years of order records, found that most lost orders came from requests made less than a week ahead, and recommended a short notice menu with fixed prices. The owner tried it for a semester and kept it.

I also chair our finance society. When I took over, attendance had fallen to about a dozen people a week. I replaced lecture style meetings with small group case practice led by older students, and by the end of the year we had a waiting list for the case groups.

I am applying to McKinsey because of the problem solving training I heard described at your campus event, where a business analyst walked us through how she structured her first engagement. That is the skill I want to build first.

Thank you for considering my application.

Sincerely, Maya Fernandes

Undergraduate: full time business analyst, engineering graduate (222 words)

Dear McKinsey Recruiting Team,

I am applying for the business analyst position in your Atlanta office. I will graduate in May with a degree in industrial engineering, and I want to spend the first years of my career learning to solve problems across industries rather than inside one.

During my co-op at a regional manufacturer, the plant manager asked me to find out why one packaging line stopped more often than the other three. I timed changeovers for three weeks, found that most stoppages came from a single label format that needed a manual adjustment, and proposed a fixed setting for that format. Unplanned stops on the line fell by about a third over the next two months.

I also led a team of six in our senior design project, building a scheduling tool for the campus health clinic. Halfway through, the clinic changed its booking system, and I had to rescope the project with the client rather than deliver something they could no longer use.

Your posting talks about working with clients to implement change, not only recommend it. The co-op taught me that the recommendation was the easy part and getting the night shift to trust the new setting was the hard one. I would like to learn that second part properly.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely, Jordan Whitfield

MBA: associate, former operations manager (222 words)

Dear McKinsey Recruiting Team,

I am applying for the associate role in your New York office. Before business school I spent four years in operations at a national grocery distributor, the last two running a warehouse of about 180 people.

The work I am proudest of is a problem nobody had asked me to solve. Our warehouse missed delivery windows most often on Mondays, and the standard answer was more weekend overtime. I mapped the order data and found that Monday orders from three large customers arrived late on Sunday nights. I renegotiated cut-off times with those customers instead, and late Monday deliveries fell from about one in five to one in twenty within a quarter, without adding overtime.

At business school I lead the operations club and spent the summer at a healthcare company, sizing a home delivery service for prescriptions. My recommendation was to launch in two regions first, and the leadership team approved the pilot.

What draws me to McKinsey is the chance to work on operations problems across many industries, with colleagues who will challenge how I structure them. My strongest instinct is to go to the data before I accept the obvious answer, and I would like to sharpen it on harder problems than one warehouse can offer.

Thank you for considering my application.

Sincerely, Daniel Achterberg

PhD: associate, chemistry doctoral candidate (203 words)

Dear McKinsey Recruiting Team,

I am applying for the associate position in your Boston office. I am completing a doctorate in chemistry, and I want to move from solving one research problem for five years to solving many problems for clients.

My research is on battery materials. In my third year a collaborator at a national laboratory asked whether our material could survive faster charging. Answering it meant designing a test plan with two other groups, deciding which experiments to drop when our instrument time was cut, and presenting the results to an industry sponsor who needed a yes or no answer, not a paper.

Outside the lab I organized a graduate student consulting group that takes short projects from local startups. I recruited twelve students across five departments and ran our first engagement, a market sizing for a water testing company.

The part of consulting I am most drawn to is the moment I described above, when a client needs a clear answer from incomplete data. I have learned to state what we know, what we do not and what I would do anyway. I would welcome the chance to do that at McKinsey.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely, Priya Raman

Experienced hire: senior product manager moving into consulting (201 words)

Dear McKinsey Recruiting Team,

I am applying for the experienced hire consultant role in your digital practice. For seven years I have worked in product at two financial technology companies, most recently leading a team that rebuilt the account opening process for a mid-sized bank.

When I joined that project, about half of the people who started an application abandoned it. We tested each step and found that most dropped off at identity verification, which asked for documents many customers did not have to hand. We moved verification to the end and allowed a photo upload. Completed applications rose from about half to about three quarters over the next quarter, and the bank used the same approach in its branches.

I have also learned how hard change is inside a large organization. The new process needed sign-off from compliance, operations and the branch network, and my most useful work was translating between them.

I want to join McKinsey to work on these problems across many banks and insurers rather than one product at a time. I bring a practical view of what makes digital change stick and a habit of testing before deciding.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely, Elena Kowalczyk