High Noon For HBS Round One Applicants

For nearly 4,000 hopeful applicants to Harvard Business School, it’s high noon.

The school will begin sending out interview invitations to round one candidates tomorrow (Oct. 6) and on two other days, Oct. 8th and Oct. 14th.

The Oct. 14th date also will be the bad news day when HBS issues its first dings of the 2015-2016 admissions season. All first round applicants who have gotten rejections from the school will be notified on that single day next Wednesday. The school said that all undergraduate candidates for its 2+2 program also will be notified of either an interview invitation or a rejection on Oct. 14th.

INVITES SPREAD OUT TO AVOID ONLINE CONGESTION

Dee Leopold, managing director of MBA admissions and financial aid, cautioned candidates not to read into the day they receive an invite. “The day on which you receive an interview invitation does not signal ANYTHING about your candidacy,” she wrote in a blog post. “We spread out the invitations over three days in order to avoid congestion in the online sign-up stage.”

The invitations will contain detailed instructions about the sign-up procedure for interviews to be held between Oct. 26 and Nov. 20. “Not all dates will be available in all locations. In addition to on-campus interviews, we will be interviewing in New York City, Palo Alto, London, Paris, Shanghai, Tokyo, Dubai, Mumbai, Sao Paulo, and Santiago,” added Leopold. “Candidates who cannot travel may be accommodated via Skype.”

Typically, some 40% of Harvard’s applicant pool now applies in the first round which had a Sept. 9th deadline.

SOME 1,000 ROUND ONE INVITES EXPECTED

In total, about 1,000 invitations will go out for round one applicants, with as many as 75% sent on the first day and the remaining invites dispatched in the final two days. Over all three rounds, HBS is expected to invite roughly 1,900 candidates to interviews with its admission officials.

“In the past, most invites go out on the first day, that would be tomorrow, of the three on which they send invites, with maybe 10% to 25% of the invites going out on days two and three,” says Sandy Kreisberg, founder of HBSGuru.com, an admissions consulting firm. “Well, that is the way it happened last year. Don’t sue me if it changes.”

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