McKinsey Solve is the digital assessment McKinsey uses to screen candidates before the case interview rounds. It presents interactive problems set in a simulated natural environment — building a stable ecosystem, protecting a species, working through a data-driven case — and it records how the candidate works, not only what they submit. It replaces the written aptitude test that firms once used at this stage, and it is a screen rather than a substitute for interviews.
McKinsey’s own careers site is the only source guaranteed to describe the version you will sit, and the invitation you receive states the format and duration for your sitting.
Where it sits in the process
Solve is normally issued after an application passes résumé screening and before the first case round. Passing it moves you to interviews; it does not shorten them or replace them. Candidates who treat it as a formality and candidates who treat it as the hardest stage both tend to misallocate their preparation.
The assessment is used across intakes and office groups, but which exercises appear, how long they run, and whether it is used at all can vary by region and recruiting cycle. Your invitation email is authoritative. Anything you read elsewhere, including this page, describes a general shape rather than your specific sitting.
What it measures
The published rationale for building the assessment this way is that traditional aptitude tests measure a narrow band of ability and are highly coachable. A simulated environment allows the assessment to capture process — the sequence of actions, the information the candidate chose to look at, the point at which they changed approach, and how they responded when an early decision turned out to be wrong.
In practical terms, the assessment is looking at:
- Critical thinking. Whether you identify the actual constraint in a problem rather than the most visible one.
- Decision making under incomplete information. Whether you act on what is available or stall waiting for certainty.
- Metacognition. Whether you notice that a plan is failing and revise it, rather than continuing and hoping.
- Situational awareness. Whether you hold multiple interacting constraints in view at once.
- Systems thinking. Whether you anticipate that changing one element changes others.
None of that is business knowledge, which is the point. The setting is ecological precisely so that a candidate with a biology degree gains nothing over one without.
The exercises
The assessment has changed since it was introduced, and it is likely to change again. Two exercise types have been in general use in recent cycles.
An ecosystem or environment-building exercise. You are given a location with defined conditions — terrain, temperature, water, available food — and a set of species with specifications. The task is to assemble a group that will sustain itself, respecting rules about what eats what, what each species needs, and how many can be supported. Success depends on reading every specification before placing anything, and on recognising that the chain has to close: a predator with no viable prey collapses the arrangement regardless of how well the rest fits.
A data-driven case exercise. A longer, more analytical exercise built around a case scenario with supporting data. It asks the candidate to identify what a dataset shows, perform calculations, and draw conclusions, typically through structured questions rather than free-form response. This exercise sits much closer to conventional case work than the ecosystem exercise does, and it rewards the same arithmetic discipline the interview rounds will.
Earlier cycles used other scenarios — defending a plant from invasive species, managing a disaster, controlling the spread of disease, planning a migration. Candidates still encounter descriptions of these online. Treat them as evidence of the assessment’s range rather than as a syllabus.
What preparation actually transfers
The content does not transfer. The process does.
Read the whole brief before acting. The most common avoidable failure is a constraint violation: a rule that was stated, not read, and then broken. Spend the first minutes reading the objective and every specification available, and note the constraints explicitly. This feels slow and is not.
Establish the objective function. Every exercise has something it is optimising and something it merely requires. Confusing the two produces a solution that is impressive on the wrong dimension. Ask yourself what would count as success before you start moving pieces.
Budget the time and hold the budget. The exercises are long enough to lose track in. Decide roughly how long each phase gets, and when a phase overruns, submit something workable rather than perfecting one part and leaving another empty. An incomplete answer scores worse than an imperfect complete one.
Practise reading data quickly and accurately. The case exercise rewards exactly the skills the interview does: reading axis labels and units before extracting a value, doing arithmetic that you can check, and noticing when a result is implausible. The case maths techniques guide covers this directly, and it is the single most transferable preparation available for the assessment.
Rehearse revising. Since the assessment records changes of approach, a candidate who never revises is not demonstrating one of the things being measured. Practise noticing “this is not working” early and acting on it, in any timed problem-solving context.
What not to do
Do not hunt for leaked scenarios and memorise solutions. The scenarios rotate, and the assessment captures process data, so an unexplained sequence of correct actions is not the strong signal it might appear to be. The effort is better spent on the skills that also serve the interview rounds.
Do not treat a poor feeling about your performance as a result. The exercises are built to be uncomfortable and are not scored the way they feel.
Do not neglect the case rounds while preparing for the screen. Solve is a gate; the interviews are the decision. Candidates who arrive at the case rounds having spent their preparation on assessment practice are consistently the ones who struggle there.
Preparing for the interviews behind it
Because Solve is a screen, the right sequencing is to give it enough attention to pass and to spend the bulk of preparation on the rounds it leads to. The case interview hub sets out that sequence, and the McKinsey firm profile covers the interview format that follows, including the personal experience interview McKinsey runs alongside the case.
Other firms run their own screens with different designs — BCG’s Casey online case experience is conversational rather than scenario-based, and Pymetrics, SOVA and the other aptitude formats measure different things again. If you are applying to several firms, it is worth knowing which screen each uses before you plan around them.
