There is no clear cut-off period of how recent your McKinsey PEI examples should be. As a rule of thumb, the more current your example is, the better.
Why?
Firstly, as an interviewer, I am interested in your current skillset and abilities. Therefore, I am not really so much interested in your actions and decision-making rationale several years ago as opposed to several weeks or months ago.
And hopefully, you developed yourself further over the last couple of years, so that your actions and decision-making rationale were different today, given the possibility that you would be in the same situation again.
Secondly, it also reflects badly on your CV and more recent activities, if you cannot come up with examples from these contexts. Clearly, McKinsey chose the three dimensions Leadership, Personal Impact and Entrepreneurial Drive not for fun, but because those dimension are a strong predictor of a consultant’s success. What you are implicitly saying to your interviewer when choosing examples from several years ago is that in your more recent past, you were involved in activities in which you could not develop yourself further in those three dimensions. But since those dimensions are critical to McKinsey, not having been exposed to such situations will immediately raise big concerns for your interviewer!
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