A.T. Kearney Is Now Kearney 2026: What the Firm Sells

What Kearney says it is, and the three networks it sells

The firm's about page opens with one sentence that carries most of the facts a reader wants: "For 100 years, Kearney has been a leading management consulting firm and trusted partner to three-quarters of the Fortune Global 500 and governments around the world. With a presence across more than 40 countries, our people make us who we are."

Three claims sit in there. A hundred years of trading, which checks against a 1926 founding. Three-quarters of the Fortune Global 500 as clients, which is 375 of the 500 companies if taken literally. And more than 40 countries, which is a country count rather than an office count.

Below that sentence the firm groups its work into three named networks, each with its own published definition. Kearney Foresight is described as the intelligence arm, built to "anticipate change, uncover emerging opportunities, and lead with confidence". Kearney Innovate is the growth arm. Kearney Activate, in the firm's words, "delivers business value through technology".

Underneath the three networks sit eleven services the site lists separately. They are the practices a client actually buys.

The right-hand column is our plain reading of each practice, and the firm words these differently on its own pages.

The 1926 firm that turned into McKinsey and Kearney

The firm publishes its own history, and it is the most unusual thing about it. In the words of that page: "In 1926, James O. McKinsey founded a firm of 'accountants and management engineers' in Chicago."

That is the same James O. McKinsey. His first client was Armour and Company, a Chicago meatpacker that had recently changed hands. McKinsey was a University of Chicago accounting professor with one radical idea for the period, which was that a budget is a management tool rather than a tally of expenses.

He then hired a partner to do the part he was poor at. Kearney's own account is blunt about it: McKinsey was "analytically brilliant, but less of a people person", so he brought in Andrew Thomas Kearney, who "could talk to anyone" and knew marketing and operations. The page calls the result "a partnership that would launch two of the consulting industry's leading firms".

James McKinsey died in 1937. Two years later the firm split, with one group staying in New York and the other staying in Chicago under Tom Kearney. The Chicago group traded as McKinsey, A.T. Kearney, and Company.

So the two firms a candidate thinks of as rivals are the two halves of one 1926 practice, separated by a death and a disagreement about culture. Kearney says so itself, on its own site, which is the only reason this page can say it.

What the firm sold in 1947, and what it bought back in 2006

Two transactions shaped the firm more than any strategy did, and both are in its own timeline.

The first was the name. When the New York McKinseys announced a Chicago office in 1947, two firms with the same name became a problem. Kearney's history says the outcome plainly: "The McKinseys bought the sole right to use the McKinsey name, and from then on, Tom's firm operated as A.T. Kearney and Company. By 1959, it had expanded to employ around 70 people."

The second was the firm itself. In 1995 Electronic Data Systems, an IT services company, bought A.T. Kearney in a deal the firm describes as half cash and half stock. It worked for a few years and then stopped working. By the early 2000s, in the firm's telling, "costs rose, trust faltered", and a group of leaders proposed buying the company back.

They had to convince "the firm's 177 global partners in 26 countries" to do it. The buyback completed in 2006. At that point the firm says it "had 2,500 people and 47 offices", and that revenue then "surged by 50 percent".

Those are the only headcount figures Kearney publishes anywhere we can find: around 70 in 1959, past 1,000 in the 1980s, 2,500 in 2006. From 70 to 2,500 is a factor of about 36, since 2,500 divided by 70 is 35.7. The firm publishes no current figure at all, which is normal for a private partnership and worth knowing before an interviewer asks how big the firm is.

Where procurement made A.T. Kearney its name

Ask what Kearney is known for and the honest answer is the supply side of the business. The firm's own history dates that reputation to the 1980s, when it says revenue first passed 100 million dollars, headcount went past 1,000, and the firm became "the leader in strategic sourcing".

Two later dates mark the same track. The firm formed A.T. Kearney Procurement Solutions in 2002, and procurement is still one of the eleven services it lists today. Its Supply Chain Institute and its annual reshoring and services-location indexes come from the same place.

That heritage is why the firm reads differently from a pure strategy house. A procurement or operations project ends in a signed contract or a changed plant, so the work carries through implementation. Tom Kearney's own philosophy, as the firm describes it, was that consultants "had to roll up their sleeves" and help make the change on the shop floor as well as in the boardroom.

Strategy did arrive, and the firm dates that too. By 1990, it says, "more than 40 percent of the firm's revenue came from strategy work". The Global Business Policy Council followed in 1992 and gave the firm a public voice on country risk.

For a candidate, the practical consequence is the case you are likely to get. Cost, sourcing, footprint and supply chain questions are closer to this firm's center of gravity than a pure market-entry puzzle. Our walkthrough of that family is in the Kearney case interview guide.

Who Kearney works for, by its own count

The firm names its clients only in the aggregate, which is the normal practice for the industry and is stated as policy in its client confidentiality page.

What it does publish is the three-quarters claim above, plus governments, plus an industry list that runs down its navigation: aerospace and defense, automotive, consumer and retail, communications, energy and resources, financial services, healthcare and life sciences, industrial goods and services, private equity, public sector, technology, and transportation and travel. Consumer and retail alone breaks into agriculture and food, beauty and personal care, beverages, fashion and luxury, and grocery and retail.

Geography is harder to pin down, and here the firm's own pages disagree with each other. The about page claims more than 40 countries. The locations directory lists postal addresses office by office, each under a local legal entity, Kearney Pte. Ltd. in Singapore, Kearney K.K. in Tokyo, Kearney Australia Pty Ltd in Sydney. Yet the directory as served to us carries neither Chicago nor New York, while other pages on the same site place named employees in both.

So we publish no office count. The firm's own 40-countries line is the figure to quote, and a reader who wants a specific city should open the directory rather than trust a number from a page like this one. The 2006 count of 47 offices is a historical figure and belongs to that year.

Five values that double as the interview criteria

Here is the find that no other page on this firm seems to have made, and it needs two of the firm's pages side by side.

The history page says the firm codified its values decades ago: "They codified Tom and Jim's values, boldness, solidarity, generosity, curiosity, and passion, into firmwide programs." The about page repeats them as the culture, "united by curiosity, generosity, boldness, solidarity, and passion".

The interview page uses the same five words as evaluation criteria: "We gauge your curiosity, capacity for generosity, boldness, solidarity, and passions to see how you align with Kearney's core values."

Same five, in a different order, with one word changed. "Generosity" becomes "capacity for generosity". That is the firm telling you the fit interview scores its own values list, and it is a rare case of a firm publishing its criteria without calling them criteria.

Two of the five have no obvious slot in a standard project story, which is where most candidates lose the fit round.

The right-hand column is ours. Kearney names the five and never publishes how they are observed, so treat the table as prompts we use rather than a grid the firm applies. The fourteen signals with a probe attached to each are on behavioral and fit practice.

How many interviews Kearney now publishes

For most of 2026 this firm published no round count. Our research file recorded that absence on 29 September 2026, after reading three archived careers pages. A fourth page has since appeared, and it answers the question.

The recruiting process page splits the answer by role family.

Three things in that table are worth holding. The firm states that "our general consulting interviews are conducted by consultants", so the people across the table are the ones you would work with. Every family mixes behavioral and case work, and the behavioral half is never the smaller half. And the assessment piece is published as a possibility rather than a step, so it varies by role.

The firm still publishes no duration, no interviewer seniority and no threshold. Its interviewing hub says only that the process varies across regions, and that candidates may request accommodations from the local recruitment contact for disability or religious practice.

What the firm does name, which almost no firm does, is a method. Under the heading "Use the STAR method" it writes: "For behavioral interview questions, use the STAR method (situation, task, action, result) to structure your answers clearly and effectively." It publishes seven tips on that page, and exactly one restricts itself by its own heading, reading "Prepare for the case (for consultant roles only)". Six of the seven apply to every applicant, since 6 divided by 7 is 0.857, and the one carved out for consultants is the analytical one.

The framework instruction that reads like a contradiction

Two sentences on this firm's site pull in opposite directions, and a hurried reader takes away the wrong one.

The case page says: "Try to avoid forcing your solution to fit a standard framework. The only things it needs to fit are the problem, the business, and the objectives." The interview page says to use STAR.

They govern two different exercises. The case instruction is about imposing a template on somebody else's problem, where the template hides the thing that decides the answer. STAR is about giving your own recollection an order, where the alternative is a story that arrives out of sequence.

The rule that follows has three parts.

1. Use the skeleton on the half of the interview that is about your past.
2. Drop it on the half that is about the client's problem, where the only fit that matters is to the problem, the business and the objectives.
3. Say which half you are in when you switch, because the firm never publishes the order of the four or five rounds.

The same case page also sets a tone that fits the values list: "You don't need to be the loudest or the smartest, or come in with all the answers. We just want to see your unique way of thinking." The recruiting process page puts the same idea on the case itself, saying the firm is most interested in the solution you truly believe is best.

What Kearney does not publish about itself

A page about a private firm has to be honest about its holes, and this one has several.

There is no current headcount and no revenue figure. Kearney is privately held and files nothing public, so the only figures are the historical ones in its own timeline. There is no office count we trust, for the reason given above. There is no ranking, no acceptance rate and no pay scale, because the firm publishes none of the three. Our reading of what is publicly known about pay sits on Kearney salary, with its sources and their dates.

There is also no published entry job title. The firm's student page quotes named employees with their titles, and those titles include Associate in Jakarta, Senior Business Analyst in Johannesburg, and Manager in Chicago. That proves the titles exist. It does not tell you which one a graduate is hired into, and we will not infer a ladder from five quotes.

And the firm publishes no interview question. It names a method, publishes seven tips, states a round count and stops. Anyone claiming to list the questions this firm asks is reporting hearsay, and the firm's own pages are the test of that.

How a fit answer gets scored, and whose weights those are

The weights below are ours. They are applied by our own grader, read from the code that scores, and no consulting firm publishes a marking scheme for a behavioral answer.

What changed on this Kearney firm page

6 October 2026. The page was widened. It was published on 30 September 2026 as a guide to Kearney's behavioral interview, and it was attributed the bare brand keyword at 1,300 searches a month. Somebody typing the firm's name wants the firm, so the firm is now the subject and the interview is two of its sections.

Five sections are new and rest on sources read on 6 October 2026: the self-description and the services, the 1926 founding and the split, the two transactions, the procurement heritage, and the client and geography picture. The STAR finding, the five-value table and our scoring weights are carried over from the 30 September version with light trimming.

One claim from that version was corrected rather than carried. It said the firm publishes no number of interviews, which was true of the three careers pages archived in January 2026 and is false of the page the firm has published since. The round count is now in the body, quoted.

The worked STAR answer that the earlier version carried has been dropped. It belonged to a page about one interview, and it does not belong on a page about a firm. The signals and probes it illustrated are on the fit practice page linked above.

The old URL was /blog/kearney-behavioral-interview-questions and now redirects here.