An employer’s views on a particular business school can help or hinder an MBA graduate’s chance of getting hired.
While a school’s reputation isn’t the only thing employers consider when evaluating candidates, it does play a role. “It’s definitely part of the mix, if you will,” says Natasha Stough, Americas director of campus recruiting for EY, a global professional services firm formerly known as Ernst & Young.
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A majority of employers — 79 percent — surveyed last fall by the Graduate Management Admission Council said their companies anticipate bringing MBA grads on board in 2017.
U.S. News spoke with recruitment professionals at several different companies that regularly take on MBA grads — EY, Deloitte and IBM — about how much of a role a business school’s reputation plays in their hiring processes.
Some large companies looking to hire MBA grads have a deeper familiarity with particular MBA programs than just name recognition.
“We absolutely spend a lot of time kind of cultivating relationships with MBA schools,” says Mike Schade, vice president of human resources for IBM Global Business Services North America. Schade says this means , among other things, liaising with both career services offices and professors to learn more about the school’s curriculum and how well it meets IBM’s needs.
Stough says in addition to a school’s curriculum, she and her colleagues at EY will consider a business school’s admissions criteria to see how well they mesh with the hiring criteria her organization uses.
For instance, Stough says EY tends to look for MBA candidates with four or five years of work experience. So an MBA program that wants its students to have this amount of work experience before enrolling might produce graduates that are a better fit for the company.
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Maribeth Bailey, national managing director of talent acquisition for Deloitte Consulting LLP, expressed a similar sentiment. “I think the school is important,” she says. “We expect very high-caliber graduates from top programs because of their rigorous admissions criteria.”
Deloitte hires approximately 700 MBAs annually, mainly into its consulting practice.
Adam J. Samples, regional president of Atrium Staffing in New Jersey, says graduates of top-ranked schools tend to see a quicker return on investment for their MBA. That’s because these grads are often the ones hired by large companies that will pay higher salaries to freshly minted MBAs.
But several experts agreed that prospective MBA students should consider which business schools are strong not just overall but in the specialty area that they want to study.
“Students should look at the schools with the best reputations and programs for their areas of interest,” says Bailey. “That might not be the elite schools.”
U.S. News MBA Recruiter Survey Results
U.S. News incorporates recruiter assessment data into its Best Business Schools rankings. Recruiters and other company contacts are asked to rate full-time MBA programs on a scale from 1 (“marginal”) to 5 (“outstanding”). These data are collected by Ipsos Public Affairs.
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The three highest-rated schools in the recruiter survey results, which all received an average score of 4.5, are Harvard Business School, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago . These schools are also the top three in the 2018 U.S. News Best Business Schools rankings.
There were 19 schools, out of a total of 130 included in the survey results, with average recruiter scores of 4 or better.
The state with the most schools appearing in the survey results was New York. Of the 16 Empire State schools included in the results, the Columbia Business School received the highest average score — 4.1.
The map below shows the top-ranked MBA program in each state and the District of Columbia, based on an average of MBA recruiter survey data collected in 2014, 2015 and 2016. States with fewer than two schools appearing in the survey results were excluded from the map.
RNP denotes a program that is ranked in the bottom quarter of the rank-eligible full-time MBA programs. U.S. News calculate d a rank for the program but has decided not to publish it.
There are two schools shown in Indiana because Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business and the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business tied for the highest score — 3.5 — among schools in that state.
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U.S. News Data: Employer Views of MBA Programs originally appeared on usnews.com
