Articles

How MBAs Have An Impact On Job Recruiters

2010-08-10

The MBA has, for decades, been regarded as a ticket to lucrative employment and a thriving career, and money to the job recruiters. Even professionals like doctors and lawyers often go to business school to learn the most they can about business. MBAs have also historically meant a transition from one career into another in business that isn't fraught with uncertainty and missteps. MBAs are the elite that get contacted by big companies.

The intermediaries between the business school and actual employment are job recruiters. These are companies interested in employing new graduates. Historically, they've been dominated by banking and financial interests, but since 2003, financial recruitment has been waning (the trend has accelerated since the financial crisis of 2009-2009) and general industry recruitment as well as consultancy recruitment has increased dramatically. Even business-to-business companies that promote from within and are generally closed to outsiders are recruiting MBAs.

So it's clear that possessing an MBA degree will pretty much guarantee interest by corporate recruiters, or so it would seem. The reality is a little different. Having an MBA in and of itself will not help when the graduate receives his or her degree in a tanking economy. There will always be recruiters who go after graduates from the very top business schools (Wharton, Harvard, etc.), but when companies are scaling back their operations, the MBA from even top regional business schools might go begging. To some extent, what a recruiter thinks of your MBA depends on your timing. For the MBAs who started their programs (especially in finance) two years before the housing bubble burst and almost took the world economy with it, their graduation came at the lowest ebb of recruitment this decade. Because the value of an MBA rests, in part, on making lifelong contacts among the cohorts who are hired at the same time, MBAs recipients who are passed over right when coming out of graduate school due to economic considerations are not likely to achieve the same success over the course of their career as those whose timing was more auspicious.

Still, the MBAs from regional academic elites lure job recruiters even in a down market. They just don't lure the ones with huge paychecks to offer. Regional business leaders recruit from regional and academically elite schools year in and year out, especially if the school concentrates its curriculum on local business considerations. And with the growth of recruitment in the consultancy sector (who are again vigorously recruiting MBAs), and of the professional services, technology and outsourcing firms (who are building up their strategy departments, which took a huge hit when the dot.com bubble burst), having an MBA will remain an attraction to a corporation looking to hire management talent.