McKinsey cuts join white‑collar wave
- McKinsey & Co. has begun cutting jobs in non-client-facing divisions, with reports saying as much as 10% of some support teams could be eliminated over the next 18 to 24 months. - The firm’s workforce has already fallen from 45,100 at the end of 2023 to about 40,000, after a pandemic hiring surge that added roughly 9,000 employees in three years. - The cuts land as consulting rivals and Big Four firms also trim staff, turning a McKinsey pullback into a wider white-collar warning sign. (finance.yahoo.com)
McKinsey & Co. is cutting jobs in non-client-facing divisions, extending the white-collar retrenchment from tech into elite consulting. (finance.yahoo.com) Yahoo Finance, citing reports, said some McKinsey support units could lose as much as 10% of staff over the next 18 to 24 months. The firm has not publicly detailed the full scope. (finance.yahoo.com) McKinsey’s headcount has already dropped sharply. Business Insider reported the firm had about 45,100 employees at the end of 2023 and roughly 40,000 by May 2025. (finance.yahoo.com) That reversal followed a pandemic-era expansion. McKinsey had roughly 34,000 employees in 2020, then added about 9,000 over the next three years before demand cooled. (finance.yahoo.com) The firm has said the earlier drop reflected its performance-management system rather than formal layoffs. Business Insider reported that about 3,000 staff received poor performance ratings in February 2024 and were told to improve quickly or leave. (finance.yahoo.com) McKinsey’s latest cuts are landing in a consulting market where clients are delaying projects, spending less, and pushing firms to prove value more directly. Yahoo Finance said Accenture, KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, Deloitte, and Bain have all announced layoffs or cuts since 2023. (finance.yahoo.com) Artificial intelligence is also changing the mix of jobs inside the firm. McKinsey global managing partner Bob Sternfels said in January 2026 that client-facing roles were growing by 25% while non-client-facing roles had shrunk by about 25%. (finance.yahoo.com) Sternfels said McKinsey had 40,000 human employees and 25,000 AI agents at that point, and he expected those totals to be roughly equal by the end of 2026. He said the firm saved 1.5 million hours in search and synthesis work last year. (finance.yahoo.com) The result is a narrower path into firms that once looked insulated from the broader labor slowdown. At McKinsey, the signal is not that consulting has stopped hiring, but that support roles, staffing models, and promotion math are being reset at the same time. (finance.yahoo.com)
