Incoming MBB FT Hires

Your offer will not be rescinded. The McKinsey layoffs mainly affected back-office people. This economy is definitely affecting current consultants though, as many in MBB are stressed right now. Here is what's going on:

1. Firms are not selling as much work as they did previously, so there are a lot of people on the bench (basically people who are unassigned to a project). They grew rapidly in 2021, so they hired a lot of laterals (experienced hires) and hired large start classes for class of 2021 & 2022 graduates. Because the firms are oversaturated with people, they may eventually decide to "counsel out" some of them for "performance issues." They don't like to announce layoffs publicly, so they are basically giving a bunch of people their equivalence of PIPs (performance improvement plans- basically 'get better of you're fired') as a paper trail so they can justify firing them in a few months. I put "performance issues" in quotes because a lot of times people get unlucky and it just doesn't work out. 

2. Not as many people are leaving: because tech and PE are hiring less, people aren't leaving at the rates they used to, so the firms are going to have to force people to leave. Not everyone can get promoted. Let's pretend that in an average 2-year analyst period, 35% of the start class leaves, 50% gets promoted, and 15% gets counseled out. In a hot economy (2020 & 2021), business is booming and tech/PE is hiring like crazy, so 60% leave, everyone else gets promoted (nobody gets kicked out) and the firm needs to bring in experienced hires to make up for the hot growth. In a bad market, very few can find a good exit, so only 20% leave. The same 50% get promoted, but that leaves 30% extra people. Unfortunately, they may end up firing some of those 30%. This is a very simplified explanation, I'm not on the hiring team of MBB lol.

So in summary as an incoming hire you don't need to worry. If anything the economy will pick up as you become tenured- great timing!!