McKinsey Doubles MBA Hires At Duke

McKinsey & Co., the largest single recruiter of MBAs from top schools, significantly expanded its hires this year at Chicago Booth, Duke Fuqua, Michigan Ross and Berkeley’s Haas School. The global consulting firm’s got its largest supply of recently minted MBAs from Chicago Booth and Columbia Business School where it brought 39 MBAs from each school aboard, according to an analysis by Poets&Quants.

McKinsey’s hires from Booth were up 62.5% from the 24 Chicago MBAs it employed last year. The firm’s hires from both Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and Berkeley’s Haas School more than doubled, to 15 from 7 at Duke and to 16 from 7 at Haas. The only business school whose McKinsey hires went down this year was Wharton which reported sending 38 MBAs to the firm versus 44 last year. Harvard and Stanford do not release information on their largest MBA hirers.

Rivals Bain & Co. and Boston Consulting Group, meantime, found Northwestern University’s Kellogg School an attractive hunting ground. Bain hired 24 Kellogg MBAs, up from 17 last year, while BCG brought aboard 30 Kellogg MBAs this year, the highest number for any top reporting business school. Bain also hired 18 MBAs each from both Wharton and Chicago Booth and a dozen from Columbia.

The biggest beneficiary of Deloitte Consulting’s increased recruiting of MBAs this year was Duke’s Fuqua. That school sent a whopping 35 MBAs to Deloitte, nearly a six-fold increase over the half dozen MBAs Deloitte hired form Fuqua last year. Deloitte also hired 20 MBAs from Michigan’s Ross School, up from 11 in 2010, and nine from Berkeley’s Haas School.

Most B-schools do not yet have their 2011 employment reports on their websites so this is an early glimpse of the most important employers of the top MBAs. This data was recently reported by the schools to Bloomberg BusinessWeek which asked schools to list their top hirers for the Class of 2011 (see tables below for the results). When the schools publish their full employment reports, we’ll update the story and the tables.

Yet, just counting the MBA recruits by the largest employers from ten top schools, provides a valuable look at the companies that literally make the market for the degree. McKinsey had 248 MBA hires from just ten schools, not including Harvard or Stanford, two favorite hunting grounds. BCG came next with 150 hired MBAS, while Bain & Co. was third with 109 and Deloitte Consulting was fourth with 92 MBA hires.

From the ten schools, Amazon hired more MBAs than any of the big financial service players. Amazon took away 62 MBAs this year, compared to 57 by Goldman Sachs and 54 by J.P. Morgan Chase. Microsoft hired 38 MBAs from these schools, while Google picked up 34 MBAs. In all cases, these are highly conservative numbers because these companies also recruit and hire at schools at which they were not listed among the top ten employers this year.

Among the big prestige finance players, Goldman Sachs seemed to heavily favor Wharton and Columbia. Goldman hired 24 MBAs from Wharton this year and 18 from Columbia, far eclipsing its hires from other business schools. Goldman, for example, hired six from Chicago, five from Duke, and four from Dartmouth’s Tuck School. J.P. Morgan Chase found lots of talent at Wharton, too, hiring 14 from the school, its highest number of hires among the schools reporting this data. Every other school was in single digits: Columbia (9), Chicago (8), Michigan (7), Tuck (5), Duke (5), and Virginia’s Darden School (5).

Among the big tech firms, Amazon continued its MBA hiring binge. The e-commerce giant hired 17 MBAs from the Univeristy of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and 15 from Wharton. Google employed 11 MBAs from Wharton, 10 from MIT Sloan, eight from Berkeley’s Haas School, and five from Kellogg. Apple hired seven from Duke’s Fuqua School and six from Kellogg. Microsoft employed 16 Wharton MBAs this year, 10 Darden MBAs, seven Sloan grads, and five from the Haas School.

(See next page for table of the top consulting firms and where they hired the most MBAs in 2011).

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