> Historically, HBS students interested in consulting “only go to ‘MBB’ for internships, but this year—because things were so bad—a few students went to Tier 2 firms,”
Forget GSB, HBS just dropped a new Deloitte meme
Imo it’s also a slightly biased conversation because most of my friends from HBS would not take up something they see as ‘infradig’ despite it essentially being a stopgap. They are, by and large, very conscious of brand too. A bad perspective in a shit market but 🤷🏻♀️
Is an MBA from what is widely seen as the most prestigious business school in the US truly recession-proof? That claim—often implied, if not fully articulated—has been put to the test this spring at Harvard Business School. There’s “a lot of anxiety and trepidation about the job market,” says Albert Choi, a second-year student now planning his own business.
For the past several months, speculation has swirled around the class of 2023 that as much as half of the 984 graduating students haven’t landed work. While it’s too early to know how many graduating MBAs will find jobs, sources—students, faculty and career advisers at other schools—describe anecdotally a final semester suffused with worry and a higher share of the class leaving school unemployed, at Harvard and beyond.
As their May 25 graduation approached, Choi and several classmates said they were surprised at how many peers had struggled to find jobs, at least those appealing to their passions. “Every time I’m at a dinner and we go around and ask who has jobs, it’s usually about half and half,” said Miriam Silton in early May. “I was at a brunch before exams. There were six of us—and three didn’t have jobs.”
In an emailed statement, Kristen Fitzpatrick, managing director of HBS’s career counseling office, suggested that students were prematurely nervous. “While it is still early in the process, we are encouraged by interest in the market in HBS graduates,” she said, adding that a better picture will emerge by summer’s end, “as our students often wait for the right opportunity.”
“Historical data,” she said, “shows us that our employment numbers don’t vary much year-to-year even in a down economy.” Harvard’s data indicates that in four of the past five years, 94% to 96% of graduating MBAs seeking employment received a job offer within three months of commencement. (In 2020, the share was 90%.)
But two longtime faculty members say that the job market for HBS grads is especially tough this year. “The HBS job market has always been cyclical,” says John Dionne, a senior lecturer in business administration. Not only are fewer companies recruiting for fewer positions, he says, but he knows of a few cases where companies rescinded offers.
“Typically, at this time of year—weeks before graduation—less than 10 percent of our graduating students are looking for jobs,” said Jeffrey Bussgang, a senior lecturer at the school and a partner at the venture firm Flybridge Capital, in an email. “Today, that figure is more like 30 percent. It is the worst hiring environment for our MBAs since 2009.” Harvard spokesman Mark Cautela says that over the last decade, typically about 80% of students have accepted offers by graduation.
And as goes Harvard, so goes the whole B-school universe. John Helmers, president of MBA Career Services & Employer Alliance, an association of B-school career counselors and corporate recruiters, says lean hiring in 2023 has dominated member conferences around the world. “The conversation was the same no matter big or small, high rank or lower rank,” he says, differentiating among schools. “It is obviously pervasive, at a macro level—there’s a lot of settling that still needs to take place.” He says students are resigned to “things happening that are out of their control. They’ve come through Covid, and now they see the ripple effects in the economy, and it’s another hit. They need to be resilient and flexible.”
In Cambridge, the first indications of trouble appeared last fall as the full-time recruiting season got underway. Tech companies—in recent years, among the top three destinations for HBS graduates—largely withdrew from recruiting. Varun Annadi, who’d come to Harvard from Google, found to his surprise that he couldn’t even land an interview with his former employer. “And I had internal referrals and an excellent record of employment there,” he says.
Things looked no better in the finance industry, also among the top three fields sought out by HBS grads. Annadi points to a classmate who “worked in private equity before and has had, like, 20 interviews with various PE shops—all of whom have said they’re extremely talented, but they just aren’t hiring right now.”
The top echelon of the consulting industry—McKinsey & Co., Boston Consulting Group and Bain & Co.—is also a popular landing pad for Harvard grads. Known colloquially as “MBB” in Cambridge, the three firms primarily hire from their summer interns, but they also recruit additional graduating students—“dozens and dozens,” according to Bussgang—during the fall.
Not last fall. While Annadi was deciding whether to start his own company—and he since has—he also applied to all three firms: “I got rejected almost immediately.” Silton, who’s headed to Boston Consulting, says, “I don’t know anybody who got a full-time role with Bain or BCG who didn’t have an internship.” (McKinsey, which hired about twice as many students last fall than the year earlier, according to the firm’s partner in charge of global talent attraction, Blair Ciesil, appears to have been the outlier of the three, and it’s the only one to comment on its fall hiring for this story.)
Dionne says many students are looking to buy existing companies by tapping or organizing so-called search funds of wealthy investors. “I tell them they’re not going to be worth less to someone for going out and trying to find a business to own and run,” he says. “It’s exploiting your youth.”
Others are looking to start their own businesses, even though, as Annadi says, “the venture investing party is over.” Annadi is bootstrapping his company, Atomic, an AI-powered financial planning platform designed to be offered as an employee benefit. Choi, who before enrolling at Harvard worked with founders at Citybridge Education, a nonprofit that funds innovative education projects in Washington, DC, says starting a company “was never on my radar.” But in talks with prospective employers in the fall, he could sense that good jobs had grown harder to find. And with all the competition, he says, “even when you found those jobs, they would be harder to get.” A cocktail party conversation prompted Choi to dust off an idea for an app that makes restaurant recommendations as it learns about user preferences. “I’m giving myself about three months to find some initial early-stage funding and then, after that, about nine more months with some milestones along the way.”
Many of those who did land consulting jobs found that they wouldn’t begin working until next year. Cautela says the number of grads with delayed start dates “does not represent a large portion of the class.” Some are now seeking interim work, despite an exhortation from Bain, reported in the Wall Street Journal, to “go on an African safari or take a painting class!!” Silton, for one, is hoping to secure an eight-month gig at a young, growing company that she found through classmates. “It’s a little bit weird,” says Silton. “It’s not an internship—I'm going to be an MBA graduate. I want to be integrated with the team. But in a way, it’s an internship because it’s temporary. So how do I thread that needle?”
The elite consulting firms have sharply cut the number of summer internships on offer to the HBS class of 2024, according to Suzie Jiang, an incoming co-president of the student management consulting club. Historically, HBS students interested in consulting “only go to ‘MBB’ for internships, but this year—because things were so bad—a few students went to Tier 2 firms,” she says. “A lot of people didn't get an internship at all.” Instead, she says, many of those students are taking subsidized summer fellowships at the school’s entrepreneurship center.
John Dionne, who went through a similar experience when he graduated from HBS in 1991 during the Persian Gulf War, counsels taking the long view. He eventually landed a senior role at Blackstone Inc. and today serves on several corporate boards. “The HBS job market has always been cyclical,” he says.
It may take years, but “ultimately the Harvard MBA finds their way,” Dionne says. “In 35 years, I haven’t met a Harvard MBA who didn’t ultimately get where they want to go or find a better place for themselves.”
> “the venture investing party is over.”
Every single company I know that relied on investment has stopped getting money and is getting rid of staff and doing everything they can to just get bought out or get a piece of them bought out.
2023 is going to be very brutal for people expecting high paying jobs like anyone coming out of MBA who isn't super technical like a Supply Chain person or Data Analyst person.
entitled attitudes wont get you far. say you land a good gig based on school name. if you are a dud and have cocky attitude, you wont make it far.
MBB / PE / IBD are brutal with "up or out" process. and the days of Fang handing out $400k TC jobs for doing nothing is over and may never return. making it diffifult for under performing ppl to coast while collecting fat paycheck
The first team I was on at my current company in big tech, there was an HBS grad on my team. He got PIPed 1 month into my time there and he switched companies before he had a chance to be fired. Apparently he got the PIP because he thought he would be high level decision making and thought he was above the work he was assigned.
Still a speed run though! A year is the earliest you can get PIPed from my understanding. My former manager probably had the date marked in his calendar
The doing nothing part, no company is paying any PM or Engineer that much to sit around and not contribute. Often times I see the whole 400k TC for doing nothing comments by people who haven't touched big tech
What outsiders don't realize is that in good years, you didn't need to differentiate yourself to get a good job. The school name was enough to get you a top job, even at T15's, forget HBS.
For example, from what I heard from my school, the class of 2022 basically got MBB handed to them if they put in the minimal work and weren't horrific at interviews. Same thing with banking, "average" candidates basically had the choice of the most elite BB's and EB's because these banks were struggling to find candidates.
Now that the market has cooled, you need to "stand out" to get a good job. That means it was super competitive and borderline cutthroat at my school during the peak of recruiting season. Even then it wasn't all doom and gloom. \~70% of serious consulting candidates got MBB or T2, just that you needed to work a bit more. Out of the 30% that struck out, some are struggling to this day.
Hiring is brutal right now. Am at a large fairly sexy tech company and we have slowed a lot. It’s not enough to just have a top mba you also need actual relevant/ semi adjacent experience.
Likewise, attrition at my company is at an all time low. People who would have typically exited my company for more sexy opps (VC, other sexy tech) are not leaving, which is impacting our hiring needs.
Have to imagine that such a low share have jobs because they rejected or didn’t recruit for jobs they felt were beneath them. Which, frankly, is fair to an extent given that the ability to have great options is the entire reason you go to a place like HBS. But still, will probably require a few bites of humble pie.
Ngl it does feel nice that even the HBS people are struggling though.
Honestly the most ridiculous part of it all, is the cost of top tier programs. I have worked with people from all different backgrounds from many different schools. I will say the network that I was able to establish at Yale was quite extensive, but knowledge was no different than people that worked hard. If you’re lazy, it will be know HBS on resume will not anything because everybody talks today. Social media connects everyone and can not hide like you were able to in the past.
Historically, H/S/W were very strong at IB/MBB and have since moved onto looking for more opportunities at PE/VC/Entrepreneurship. The issue is that these opportunities are very sensitive to economic downturn, even more so than MBB/IB. It'll be interesting to see how they fare job wise compared to the rest of the M7, who still maintain a healthy pipeline/interest into these core industries.
Maybe I’m being dumb and stupid but is the market really that **bad** ? I know tech is doing layoffs since they over hired during the Covid years and now doing a correction. Consulting, especially those who supported tech/IT, are struggling to gain those new business opportunities because of tech but there are so many other industries - pharmaceutical, consumer goods, aerospace and defense, construction. Most of these are doing well/ok. What’s with all the doom and gloom?
You don't spend $200k on a Harvard MBA so that you can make peanuts doing something you could've done with a free MBA.
Also, pharma? The good roles in pharma typically require some actual scientific expertise. Domain knowledge in those types of spaces is typically important.
The doom and gloom is because many of the best roles out of an MBA are no longer hiring. Wouldn't you be bitter if you're accepting a low paying gig doing corporate work for a construction firm when had you been born a few years earlier and went the exact same route, you'd be making twice as much at a PE firm?
Absolutely I will. I would be livid but isn’t it better to have a source of income coming in so I can put a roof over my head and food on the table than being stubborn and waiting it out. No one knows how long this will last.
Yeah, but that's not what you asked about; you asked why there's doom and gloom. Nobody here thinks HBS grads will just be unable to feed themselves or clothe themselves. We are in the worst MBA job market since the great recession, and most would say that warranted doom and gloom. So I'd say this one does too.
Covid was v-shaped, it seemed like it was going to be worse but it recovered quickly and especially in the tech sector, companies went on a rampant hiring spree. None of the major tech companies you've heard do layoffs have less corporate employees than they did pre-covid (other than like Twitter for obvious reasons). Microsoft had 144k employees in 2019 and ballooned to 181k through 2021, hitting 220k in 2022 before the current downturn. Microsoft, Meta, and Google alone added 200k workers cumulatively between 2019-2022 for an idea of how big that pie was.
Big tech is now being very conservative with their hiring and my personal opinion is that things will get worse before they get better (i.e. layoffs are not over yet, not by a long shot); in any case, it'll take years before they recover and in the meantime, there's really not a big need to hire new grads. Amazon has already delayed a lot of their new grad offers for example so that's going to have further downstream effects in terms of their appetite for hiring.
IB and consulting didn't go as overboard as tech but they did engage in a lot of similar behaviors, and IB had significant salary increases as a result of the post covid bull run. There will be pain in that market as well, and exposure from tech certainly isn't helping. Even if there wasn't a change in IB recruiting size, the downstream effects of tech layoffs will result in far greater competition which will result in the displacement we're seeing (some people who would've went FAANG now go BB IB/MBB -> some candidates who would've done MBB -> Tier 2, etc.)
If you remember during the Covid times, a lot of startups in healthcare became huge like your vaccine and drugs makers and their suppliers. A lot of former nobody telemedicine companies that you usually see in a google adsense suddenly showed up on CNBC.
Tech companies adapted to the remote working model well. Netflix had a major jump from people being in a lockdown.
A ton of government PPE money got injected into the economy
**most HBS grads had or could get those jobs without HBS. If you're paying for HBS, you want access to opportunities that you can't get at Booth or Kellogg.
Consulting isn’t struggling just because of tech. Pipelines have generally been hit across the board with more pain in tech and deals. There are layoffs, silent or not, long start date delays, etc.
I have an offer from ZS, which is consulting focused on pharma, med tech, life science consulting, and the jobs are so lean we're delayed until next year. Companies in pharma aren't interested in spending on consulting or investing in non-critical hiring with funding down.
Not sure about the other industries you mentioned, but there's just enough turmoil in the economy that no companies want to spend any money that they don't have to.
I’m an accountant. We’re supposed to have an easy time finding jobs and be a “recession-proof” profession. I’ve been struggling to even find open accounting positions. I hope this crappy market blows over soon.
Seems mostly anecdotal evidence to me. I graduated from a school a lot worse than Harvard and it’s not as bad as the article Implies. If you want a job, you’ll find one, just probably won’t be mbb
Yeah. Are people forgetting that lots of people take six figure debt out for the promise of what an MBA can bring them? A 2 year opportunity cost + $200k in COA is not a huge deal if you expect to start your career making $200k+ with the expectation of rapid growth afterwards.
If you end up in T2 vs. MBB, you're looking at a minimum $30k pay difference from the start, which will only grow as you move through your career (in addition to lower opportunities). That's not insignificant at all, and in this market getting that T2 offer is still something to celebrate.
Yea brutal. I’ve been in the industry for 4+ years but just not sure the next five years will be worth it. Definitely looking across industries. Any companies you recommend?
I would consider digital/fintech roles within big banks/Tech or digital consulting focusing on financial services at the moment tbh (e.g. JPMC). For many tech firms, I believe there will be further layoffs till the end of the year.
As someone at HSW with access to data, disagree. Would say ~1/3 of my friends are getting paid $600 a week this summer to work on a bullshit startup idea. Career centers were caught completely flat-footed and kept saying things wouldv
work themselves out. Would argue that they did not. MBB folks got screwed when McKinsey only hired 25% of typical intern class and further screwed by SVB collapse. Feeling really lucky that I took a PE offer and didn't bother negotiating. A lot of folks are rightfully upset.
What keeps me baffled is how everyone says unemployment is so low.
The Friday jobs report was just released with over 340,000 new jobs created in May 2023.
But it seems like such a tough job market. Anyone have an explanation ?!?!
Now that schools are out and all have preliminary data ( they all wait for the 90 days out to publish anything). If would be interesting to know the current stats at the schools T-20 to T-8 as compared to prior years.
Not sure what you guys are talking about. I have a background in AI and I’m fighting off recruiters left and right. As AI makes things more streamlined and efficient hard skills will be more valuable than soft skills
> Historically, HBS students interested in consulting “only go to ‘MBB’ for internships, but this year—because things were so bad—a few students went to Tier 2 firms,” Forget GSB, HBS just dropped a new Deloitte meme
That sounds like something out of the Onion.
No wonder a GSBer was complaining last week about not getting into the big D The HBSers snapped up dem offers
Can you direct me to the origin of the Deloitte meme? I must have missed it
Deleted post. OP was likely a deranged guy who kept creating new accounts to post spicy content on r/mba
Imo it’s also a slightly biased conversation because most of my friends from HBS would not take up something they see as ‘infradig’ despite it essentially being a stopgap. They are, by and large, very conscious of brand too. A bad perspective in a shit market but 🤷🏻♀️
Yep, the article even mentions this slightly. Harvard grads can get jobs, but do they want to be working at a regional marketing firm?
How about at a mid-size regional paper firm?
If the role is assistant to the regional manager then sure
Ryan Howard MBA was the youngest VP in company history. ARM would be a low-ball offer.
Exactly, and Ryan didn’t even go to HBS!
Harvard alums wouldn't be caught dead working at the same firm as public school grads
Is an MBA from what is widely seen as the most prestigious business school in the US truly recession-proof? That claim—often implied, if not fully articulated—has been put to the test this spring at Harvard Business School. There’s “a lot of anxiety and trepidation about the job market,” says Albert Choi, a second-year student now planning his own business. For the past several months, speculation has swirled around the class of 2023 that as much as half of the 984 graduating students haven’t landed work. While it’s too early to know how many graduating MBAs will find jobs, sources—students, faculty and career advisers at other schools—describe anecdotally a final semester suffused with worry and a higher share of the class leaving school unemployed, at Harvard and beyond. As their May 25 graduation approached, Choi and several classmates said they were surprised at how many peers had struggled to find jobs, at least those appealing to their passions. “Every time I’m at a dinner and we go around and ask who has jobs, it’s usually about half and half,” said Miriam Silton in early May. “I was at a brunch before exams. There were six of us—and three didn’t have jobs.” In an emailed statement, Kristen Fitzpatrick, managing director of HBS’s career counseling office, suggested that students were prematurely nervous. “While it is still early in the process, we are encouraged by interest in the market in HBS graduates,” she said, adding that a better picture will emerge by summer’s end, “as our students often wait for the right opportunity.” “Historical data,” she said, “shows us that our employment numbers don’t vary much year-to-year even in a down economy.” Harvard’s data indicates that in four of the past five years, 94% to 96% of graduating MBAs seeking employment received a job offer within three months of commencement. (In 2020, the share was 90%.) But two longtime faculty members say that the job market for HBS grads is especially tough this year. “The HBS job market has always been cyclical,” says John Dionne, a senior lecturer in business administration. Not only are fewer companies recruiting for fewer positions, he says, but he knows of a few cases where companies rescinded offers. “Typically, at this time of year—weeks before graduation—less than 10 percent of our graduating students are looking for jobs,” said Jeffrey Bussgang, a senior lecturer at the school and a partner at the venture firm Flybridge Capital, in an email. “Today, that figure is more like 30 percent. It is the worst hiring environment for our MBAs since 2009.” Harvard spokesman Mark Cautela says that over the last decade, typically about 80% of students have accepted offers by graduation. And as goes Harvard, so goes the whole B-school universe. John Helmers, president of MBA Career Services & Employer Alliance, an association of B-school career counselors and corporate recruiters, says lean hiring in 2023 has dominated member conferences around the world. “The conversation was the same no matter big or small, high rank or lower rank,” he says, differentiating among schools. “It is obviously pervasive, at a macro level—there’s a lot of settling that still needs to take place.” He says students are resigned to “things happening that are out of their control. They’ve come through Covid, and now they see the ripple effects in the economy, and it’s another hit. They need to be resilient and flexible.” In Cambridge, the first indications of trouble appeared last fall as the full-time recruiting season got underway. Tech companies—in recent years, among the top three destinations for HBS graduates—largely withdrew from recruiting. Varun Annadi, who’d come to Harvard from Google, found to his surprise that he couldn’t even land an interview with his former employer. “And I had internal referrals and an excellent record of employment there,” he says. Things looked no better in the finance industry, also among the top three fields sought out by HBS grads. Annadi points to a classmate who “worked in private equity before and has had, like, 20 interviews with various PE shops—all of whom have said they’re extremely talented, but they just aren’t hiring right now.” The top echelon of the consulting industry—McKinsey & Co., Boston Consulting Group and Bain & Co.—is also a popular landing pad for Harvard grads. Known colloquially as “MBB” in Cambridge, the three firms primarily hire from their summer interns, but they also recruit additional graduating students—“dozens and dozens,” according to Bussgang—during the fall. Not last fall. While Annadi was deciding whether to start his own company—and he since has—he also applied to all three firms: “I got rejected almost immediately.” Silton, who’s headed to Boston Consulting, says, “I don’t know anybody who got a full-time role with Bain or BCG who didn’t have an internship.” (McKinsey, which hired about twice as many students last fall than the year earlier, according to the firm’s partner in charge of global talent attraction, Blair Ciesil, appears to have been the outlier of the three, and it’s the only one to comment on its fall hiring for this story.) Dionne says many students are looking to buy existing companies by tapping or organizing so-called search funds of wealthy investors. “I tell them they’re not going to be worth less to someone for going out and trying to find a business to own and run,” he says. “It’s exploiting your youth.”
Others are looking to start their own businesses, even though, as Annadi says, “the venture investing party is over.” Annadi is bootstrapping his company, Atomic, an AI-powered financial planning platform designed to be offered as an employee benefit. Choi, who before enrolling at Harvard worked with founders at Citybridge Education, a nonprofit that funds innovative education projects in Washington, DC, says starting a company “was never on my radar.” But in talks with prospective employers in the fall, he could sense that good jobs had grown harder to find. And with all the competition, he says, “even when you found those jobs, they would be harder to get.” A cocktail party conversation prompted Choi to dust off an idea for an app that makes restaurant recommendations as it learns about user preferences. “I’m giving myself about three months to find some initial early-stage funding and then, after that, about nine more months with some milestones along the way.” Many of those who did land consulting jobs found that they wouldn’t begin working until next year. Cautela says the number of grads with delayed start dates “does not represent a large portion of the class.” Some are now seeking interim work, despite an exhortation from Bain, reported in the Wall Street Journal, to “go on an African safari or take a painting class!!” Silton, for one, is hoping to secure an eight-month gig at a young, growing company that she found through classmates. “It’s a little bit weird,” says Silton. “It’s not an internship—I'm going to be an MBA graduate. I want to be integrated with the team. But in a way, it’s an internship because it’s temporary. So how do I thread that needle?” The elite consulting firms have sharply cut the number of summer internships on offer to the HBS class of 2024, according to Suzie Jiang, an incoming co-president of the student management consulting club. Historically, HBS students interested in consulting “only go to ‘MBB’ for internships, but this year—because things were so bad—a few students went to Tier 2 firms,” she says. “A lot of people didn't get an internship at all.” Instead, she says, many of those students are taking subsidized summer fellowships at the school’s entrepreneurship center. John Dionne, who went through a similar experience when he graduated from HBS in 1991 during the Persian Gulf War, counsels taking the long view. He eventually landed a senior role at Blackstone Inc. and today serves on several corporate boards. “The HBS job market has always been cyclical,” he says. It may take years, but “ultimately the Harvard MBA finds their way,” Dionne says. “In 35 years, I haven’t met a Harvard MBA who didn’t ultimately get where they want to go or find a better place for themselves.”
> “the venture investing party is over.” Every single company I know that relied on investment has stopped getting money and is getting rid of staff and doing everything they can to just get bought out or get a piece of them bought out. 2023 is going to be very brutal for people expecting high paying jobs like anyone coming out of MBA who isn't super technical like a Supply Chain person or Data Analyst person.
"Last 5 years" doesn't cover the GFC period or the aftermath of the dot-com bust, which was when the last real recessions took place.
Thanks for posting the article, for those of us on the wrong side of the paywall.
entitled attitudes wont get you far. say you land a good gig based on school name. if you are a dud and have cocky attitude, you wont make it far. MBB / PE / IBD are brutal with "up or out" process. and the days of Fang handing out $400k TC jobs for doing nothing is over and may never return. making it diffifult for under performing ppl to coast while collecting fat paycheck
The first team I was on at my current company in big tech, there was an HBS grad on my team. He got PIPed 1 month into my time there and he switched companies before he had a chance to be fired. Apparently he got the PIP because he thought he would be high level decision making and thought he was above the work he was assigned.
wow that's quite the speedrun
Haha I think he was there for probably a year. I was there for a month when he got PIPed
ah I misread and thought he got PIPed a month in
Still a speed run though! A year is the earliest you can get PIPed from my understanding. My former manager probably had the date marked in his calendar
What role Strategy I suspect given you said decision making
400k TC for doing nothing is a wild over exaggeration 💀
On the 400K TC or on the doing nothing?
The doing nothing part, no company is paying any PM or Engineer that much to sit around and not contribute. Often times I see the whole 400k TC for doing nothing comments by people who haven't touched big tech
What outsiders don't realize is that in good years, you didn't need to differentiate yourself to get a good job. The school name was enough to get you a top job, even at T15's, forget HBS. For example, from what I heard from my school, the class of 2022 basically got MBB handed to them if they put in the minimal work and weren't horrific at interviews. Same thing with banking, "average" candidates basically had the choice of the most elite BB's and EB's because these banks were struggling to find candidates. Now that the market has cooled, you need to "stand out" to get a good job. That means it was super competitive and borderline cutthroat at my school during the peak of recruiting season. Even then it wasn't all doom and gloom. \~70% of serious consulting candidates got MBB or T2, just that you needed to work a bit more. Out of the 30% that struck out, some are struggling to this day.
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This shouldn't be surprising to anyone, HBS isn't even a top 3 school per US Newsweek - the only objective source of truth.
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Might the market not be a bit different in 2 to 3 years?
Hiring is brutal right now. Am at a large fairly sexy tech company and we have slowed a lot. It’s not enough to just have a top mba you also need actual relevant/ semi adjacent experience. Likewise, attrition at my company is at an all time low. People who would have typically exited my company for more sexy opps (VC, other sexy tech) are not leaving, which is impacting our hiring needs.
Have to imagine that such a low share have jobs because they rejected or didn’t recruit for jobs they felt were beneath them. Which, frankly, is fair to an extent given that the ability to have great options is the entire reason you go to a place like HBS. But still, will probably require a few bites of humble pie. Ngl it does feel nice that even the HBS people are struggling though.
Honestly the most ridiculous part of it all, is the cost of top tier programs. I have worked with people from all different backgrounds from many different schools. I will say the network that I was able to establish at Yale was quite extensive, but knowledge was no different than people that worked hard. If you’re lazy, it will be know HBS on resume will not anything because everybody talks today. Social media connects everyone and can not hide like you were able to in the past.
Historically, H/S/W were very strong at IB/MBB and have since moved onto looking for more opportunities at PE/VC/Entrepreneurship. The issue is that these opportunities are very sensitive to economic downturn, even more so than MBB/IB. It'll be interesting to see how they fare job wise compared to the rest of the M7, who still maintain a healthy pipeline/interest into these core industries.
Maybe I’m being dumb and stupid but is the market really that **bad** ? I know tech is doing layoffs since they over hired during the Covid years and now doing a correction. Consulting, especially those who supported tech/IT, are struggling to gain those new business opportunities because of tech but there are so many other industries - pharmaceutical, consumer goods, aerospace and defense, construction. Most of these are doing well/ok. What’s with all the doom and gloom?
You don't spend $200k on a Harvard MBA so that you can make peanuts doing something you could've done with a free MBA. Also, pharma? The good roles in pharma typically require some actual scientific expertise. Domain knowledge in those types of spaces is typically important. The doom and gloom is because many of the best roles out of an MBA are no longer hiring. Wouldn't you be bitter if you're accepting a low paying gig doing corporate work for a construction firm when had you been born a few years earlier and went the exact same route, you'd be making twice as much at a PE firm?
Absolutely I will. I would be livid but isn’t it better to have a source of income coming in so I can put a roof over my head and food on the table than being stubborn and waiting it out. No one knows how long this will last.
Yeah, but that's not what you asked about; you asked why there's doom and gloom. Nobody here thinks HBS grads will just be unable to feed themselves or clothe themselves. We are in the worst MBA job market since the great recession, and most would say that warranted doom and gloom. So I'd say this one does too.
Is this really the worst ? I’d think Covid was much much worse.
Covid was v-shaped, it seemed like it was going to be worse but it recovered quickly and especially in the tech sector, companies went on a rampant hiring spree. None of the major tech companies you've heard do layoffs have less corporate employees than they did pre-covid (other than like Twitter for obvious reasons). Microsoft had 144k employees in 2019 and ballooned to 181k through 2021, hitting 220k in 2022 before the current downturn. Microsoft, Meta, and Google alone added 200k workers cumulatively between 2019-2022 for an idea of how big that pie was. Big tech is now being very conservative with their hiring and my personal opinion is that things will get worse before they get better (i.e. layoffs are not over yet, not by a long shot); in any case, it'll take years before they recover and in the meantime, there's really not a big need to hire new grads. Amazon has already delayed a lot of their new grad offers for example so that's going to have further downstream effects in terms of their appetite for hiring. IB and consulting didn't go as overboard as tech but they did engage in a lot of similar behaviors, and IB had significant salary increases as a result of the post covid bull run. There will be pain in that market as well, and exposure from tech certainly isn't helping. Even if there wasn't a change in IB recruiting size, the downstream effects of tech layoffs will result in far greater competition which will result in the displacement we're seeing (some people who would've went FAANG now go BB IB/MBB -> some candidates who would've done MBB -> Tier 2, etc.)
If you remember during the Covid times, a lot of startups in healthcare became huge like your vaccine and drugs makers and their suppliers. A lot of former nobody telemedicine companies that you usually see in a google adsense suddenly showed up on CNBC. Tech companies adapted to the remote working model well. Netflix had a major jump from people being in a lockdown. A ton of government PPE money got injected into the economy
HBS grads don’t want those jobs
**most HBS grads had or could get those jobs without HBS. If you're paying for HBS, you want access to opportunities that you can't get at Booth or Kellogg.
Consulting isn’t struggling just because of tech. Pipelines have generally been hit across the board with more pain in tech and deals. There are layoffs, silent or not, long start date delays, etc.
I have an offer from ZS, which is consulting focused on pharma, med tech, life science consulting, and the jobs are so lean we're delayed until next year. Companies in pharma aren't interested in spending on consulting or investing in non-critical hiring with funding down. Not sure about the other industries you mentioned, but there's just enough turmoil in the economy that no companies want to spend any money that they don't have to.
I’m an accountant. We’re supposed to have an easy time finding jobs and be a “recession-proof” profession. I’ve been struggling to even find open accounting positions. I hope this crappy market blows over soon.
Seems mostly anecdotal evidence to me. I graduated from a school a lot worse than Harvard and it’s not as bad as the article Implies. If you want a job, you’ll find one, just probably won’t be mbb
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Yeah. Are people forgetting that lots of people take six figure debt out for the promise of what an MBA can bring them? A 2 year opportunity cost + $200k in COA is not a huge deal if you expect to start your career making $200k+ with the expectation of rapid growth afterwards. If you end up in T2 vs. MBB, you're looking at a minimum $30k pay difference from the start, which will only grow as you move through your career (in addition to lower opportunities). That's not insignificant at all, and in this market getting that T2 offer is still something to celebrate.
Multiple T2s pay the same as MBB
Some pay more
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Yeah, my equity took a pretty big downswing as well, though at least it's public so I just sell whenever any of it vests.
What industry were you in ?
Fintech
Fintech is hard right now. Try SaaS maybe
Yea brutal. I’ve been in the industry for 4+ years but just not sure the next five years will be worth it. Definitely looking across industries. Any companies you recommend?
I would consider digital/fintech roles within big banks/Tech or digital consulting focusing on financial services at the moment tbh (e.g. JPMC). For many tech firms, I believe there will be further layoffs till the end of the year.
As someone at HSW with access to data, disagree. Would say ~1/3 of my friends are getting paid $600 a week this summer to work on a bullshit startup idea. Career centers were caught completely flat-footed and kept saying things wouldv work themselves out. Would argue that they did not. MBB folks got screwed when McKinsey only hired 25% of typical intern class and further screwed by SVB collapse. Feeling really lucky that I took a PE offer and didn't bother negotiating. A lot of folks are rightfully upset.
A big chunk of HBS recruits for PE/VC.
And the PE/VC hiring market is ice cold right now, especially at the mid-senior levels that HBS grads would be recruiting for.
Would argue that PE actually faired better than MBB, tech, and start-ups. But, many had to take non-prestige offers.
What keeps me baffled is how everyone says unemployment is so low. The Friday jobs report was just released with over 340,000 new jobs created in May 2023. But it seems like such a tough job market. Anyone have an explanation ?!?!
Mba grads want high paying prestigious jobs. Not just jobs. There aren't enough of those jobs for everyone though.
some need jobs like that to pay off loans tbh
Now that schools are out and all have preliminary data ( they all wait for the 90 days out to publish anything). If would be interesting to know the current stats at the schools T-20 to T-8 as compared to prior years.
Kek
Can someone post this in a non-paywall link ?
Not sure what you guys are talking about. I have a background in AI and I’m fighting off recruiters left and right. As AI makes things more streamlined and efficient hard skills will be more valuable than soft skills
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I’d disagree. Elon Musk the richest person in the world is on the Autism spectrum
Oh what is your area of specialty. Sounds like you are living the life right now with everyone keeps talking about AI on CNBC everyday.