I worked at bain..

The main purpose these companies provide is to rubber stamp decisions and claim that experts made them

Not my experience over a decade or so, but sorry it was yours. Sounds awful.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it

Is it more or less difficult than counteracting Dunning-Kruger?

(for the record...former salary, several years ago)

No-one ever got fired for appointing McKinsey, and it's pretty easy to provide a positive RoI when the person hiring you is spending other people's money. These consultants certainly provide value to someone, but whether that translates into an overall net positive for the organisation that engaged them is an open question.

> it is likely delivering some value to someone who is willing to pay for it.

I'm suddenly curious whether / how many of McKinsey's actual customers have a child in an MBA program that McKinsey recruits from. Get your company to spend money for a particular consulting firm, and then use that relationship with a particular consulting firm to get a leg-up for your kid?

Are there processes in place at the large consulting firms to prevent this sort of quid pro quo?

i'm sure it's happened somewhere...I'm not sure but from what I've seen, incredibly hard to game recruitment. Even if you do, the kid won't survive long -- it's up or out every ~2 years.

Seems like a lot of work for not much payoff.

What is encouraged is treating everyone leaving whether regrettable/non-regrettable with a great deal of love and care -- placement services are pretty good. There is a good chance those ex-McK folk are future clients.

And those ex-McKinsey executives are not only primed to hire their former colleagues, but assuming they've been doing a good job, they're McKinsey advertisements at their current job.

Now that's a good deal for McKinsey.

yep. that's 100% a strategy.