The Role Of The MBA Admissions Consultant Explained

A couple of years ago we saw a question on an open forum: When does it make sense to hire an MBA consultant to assist you in the MBA application process?

Immediately, our eyebrows raised and our hands flew up like Hermione Granger on the first day of Hogwarts. We live and breathe admissions, and MBA admissions are near and dear to our hearts and expertise. MBA admissions consultants have been around for decades, and still, there’s some confusion about what they do and how they can help applicants reach their goals.

MBA Admissions Consultants: What Do They Do?

You are very mistaken if you are expecting to offload the heavy lifting to a professional who writes your essays, scripts your interviews, and creates your resume. A great MBA admissions consultant is going to transform your experience applying to MBA programs, but you will be shouldering the responsibilities.

An admissions consultant is a partner in your application campaigns. They will work with you to craft the best version of your story so the admissions committee will take notice. They get to know your academic, professional, and philanthropic background to create a storyboard that you are unable to piece together. Most importantly, they work side by side with you to help deliver applications on time, choose the best recommenders, and teach you how to be more confident in your qualifications.

Does everyone use an MBA admissions consultant?

The quick answer is no. Not everyone uses an admissions consultant to apply for an MBA, nor should they. We’d love to tell you everyone should consider an admissions consultant, but it’s not necessarily the case. Our expertise and guidance are best utilized by a handful of applicant types, otherwise, admissions consultants may not add value to your admissions campaign.

7 Types of Applicants Who Should Consider an MBA Admissions Consultant

Our admissions consultants have identified seven types of applicants that truly embody our best client types.

Competitive ethnic demographic

The competitive ethnic demographic varies by school, but in general international students, particularly those from China, India and Pakistan, face serious hurdles in the application process because there are so many students who apply from these geographies, while non-US students at most top MBA programs represent less than 40% of the class. This <40% is made up of ALL non-US students, with representation sought from all corners of the world. Therefore, Chinese, Pakistani or Indian students make up only a small fraction of that total but an outsized chunk of the applicants, which isn’t good for their odds.

India and Pakistan are associated with more male applicants and more engineer-by-education applicants, so the uphill climb is even steeper for these guys. The single biggest challenge for students coming from a competitive ethnic demo is differentiating themselves. They need to make sure their essays *show* rather than tell their unique strategic positioning:

How are they a leader?
How are their ambitious and unique career aspirations synched with their prior professional and educational success (and thus imminently achievable)?
How is their story arc different from the masses who apply with similar backgrounds (family circumstances, career aspirations, differences in professional paths chosen/risks taken, civic engagement, etc).

Super high GMAT and impressive academic credentials won’t be enough to gain admission when coming from a competitive demo, top MBA programs reject IIT grads turned bulge-bracket bankers with 780s every year. It also helps to have a second set of eyes for this demographic to make sure that the stories are different from the crowd. For instance, for Indian and Pakistani applicants, mountaineering essays and essays that demonstrate compassion for street animals are overused tropes that all AdComs have read a million times. When preparing an application, it helps to have somebody look over it who has seen many others from your same demographic before.

Competitive professional demographic

Yes, this too will vary by school. For instance, if an investment banker or private equity applicant is applying to Wharton, they are going to be up against lots of similarly-professionally-pedigreed talent. Oftentimes the competitive demographic and ethnic demographic challenges are overlapping concentric circles (e.g., Caucasian or Asian male finance professionals). CPG marketers applying to Kellogg may face similar headwinds, as do overrepresented demos in the professional services space in general – esp. sponsored consultants & bankers. Every top school is going to have a ton of people from Bain and JPMorgan apply, many of whom have similar GPAs from similar universities, similar GPAs, and similar GMATs.

What is going to set successful candidates apart is the *strategic positioning* in the essays. The applicant needs to have a watertight story about what they want to achieve post-MBA short and long term that’s both ambitious but also doable given their prior successes, well-demonstrated leadership, global lens, and essays that sparkle with individuality. In addition to being over-represented in the applicant pool, bankers, consultants, and engineers are also not known for their creative writing ability, and it may help to have a second set of eyes to make writing less dry and more individualized and memorable.

The non-traditional applicants

Lots of people use business school to pivot careers, often switching to conventional roles in finance or consulting from a non-business background pre-MBA. Some big buckets of non-traditional applicants include: military, healthcare professionals, lawyers, dual degree seekers (MD + MBA, JD + MBA, MPH + MBA, etc.), non-profit work, economic development, Peace Corp, etc.

These people often are coming from backgrounds where there aren’t very many people headed to b-school so it can be harder for them to find the winning “recipe” associated with a candidacy like theirs. Ultimately, the winning recipe focuses on what they DO have:

for military, it’s often the leadership component in super-high-stakes scenarios
for non-profit work, it’s often a lot of accountability and a diversity of experience by a young age

Every good program is going to dedicate a significant number of spaces to “non-traditional” applicants every year. Life would be too boring without them!

If an applicant falls in the non-traditional category, they need to make sure that they articulate how they would add value to class discussion and future employers through their unique perspective. Depending on their background, these candidates sometimes have a slightly harder time with recruiting since employers often prefer “known quantity” employers that are associated with specific technical skills like excel modeling for bankers or MECE thinking/deck construction for consultants. Schools want to keep recruiting employers happy since they want to have excellent employment metrics (e.g., % of students working full time 3 months post-graduation, average comp 1-year post MBA, diversified industry placement) since these metrics determine their ranking. So you’ll need to prove in your essays that you already have the skills (albeit by building them in a non-traditional environment) to succeed in business and that you are looking forward to business school to help you hone and refine additional technical skills such as accounting, finance, etc. (or wherever your perceived gaps are).

Older applicants

Unfortunate to hear, but in the MBA world, “older applicants” will typically mean someone over the age of 30 (to US schools at least). In general, highly-ranked, full-time MBA programs in the U.S. seek 4-6 years of work experience. Tack on several years for the good European programs like INSEAD, Cambridge, and Oxford which prefer applicants with more leadership experience.

For most U.S. schools, age over 30 is negatively correlated with admission.

Candidates who are successful post-30 are able to articulate how their age and work experience is a feature, not a bug. They tacitly answer the question of why they didn’t go to business school 5 years ago in their essay (e.g. was on a rocket at work, was launching my own business, was the primary breadwinner for my extended family who lived overseas, etc.). If you are older and don’t use your essays to show how you’ve made the most of your time since undergrad, you run the risk of looking “passed over” at work and appearing as if you are applying to b-school to get away from a bad situation or one where you have stagnated. A good consultant can make sure that an older applicant is mindful of these sorts of red-flags in their application and doesn’t succumb to any of the older applicant’s common pitfalls.

Reachers

In general, in order to have a good shot at a highly-ranked program, you need to have GMAT/GPA/Employment metrics that meet or exceed a school’s mean in addition to flawlessly-executed essays. If you don’t have these credentials, you’re what we consider a reacher.

Some metrics can be explained/counteracted (e.g., an exceptional GMAT score can make up for a below-average GPA or a below-average GMAT can be made up by exceptional undergraduate grades from a highly-ranked undergraduate university or super impressive work experience), but in general AdComs like to de-risk their acceptances by choosing students who have proven professional and academic potential in line with what they already know is successful post-MBA. However, every year there are accepted applications from applicants who fall several standard deviations below the mean for key metrics at every top school. When this happens, the applicant is generally “pointy” in some way:

they’ve built a company from scratch
they’ve overcome serious personal odds
they’ve raised several rounds of capital for a start-up
they’ve built something beautiful in the social entrepreneurship/non-profit space that confers a meaningful benefit to society
they’ve held rarefied roles in business that offer them unique perspectives that would add value to class discussion

An admissions consultant can work with a “reacher” to tell their story so that their impressive “pointiness” outweighs other potential detractors.

People who are humble by nature

This may go without saying, but you need to beat your chest a little bit in the written applications (especially Harvard and Stanford). Schools want leaders! You must prove that you are a leader who has already made an impact beyond your years in order to gain acceptance. That’s not rewarded in every professional context but it’s expected in the admissions process. Obviously, you don’t want to be a jerk and you don’t want to be a brash egomaniac (and a consultant as a sounding board can help you finesse this balance). In general, our experience is that people who choose to work with consultants are generally not the arrogant ones who will sink in a Michigan Ross or Wharton group interview for being peacocking jerks, but rather the ones who need to figure out how to position themselves confidently to stand out from the crowd.

The lone wolfs

People who don’t have alums from their target schools to help them prep for the b-school interview process may find the application process more overwhelming. Interviewing is a skill in and of itself, and b-school interviewing is an entirely different animal all-together. Each school is different and a good consultant will have school-specific insights to share. Some schools use alum interviewers, some use AdCom interviewers, some use second-year MBA interviewers, some do a group roundtable interview and some use a mix of these. But rest assured that no matter who the interviewer is or how the interview is structured, this is not going to be like a traditional job interview.

It’s going to be much softer — much more of a leadership and qualitatively-focused interview than what you’re used to, especially if you work in finance or engineering. You need to have good answers prepared for the most common questions that show that you can be simultaneously direct and engaging and provide specific examples to demonstrate your value, impact, clarity of thought, humility, and humanity. You’ll also need to have some good school-specific questions for the interview to show that you’ve done your homework and it can help to have an MBA as a sounding board to work through those. You may have many top-tier MBA grads in your personal and professional network who can sit down with you and have mock interviews based on their own experience. If you don’t have this sort of network to help you prepare, an MBA admissions consultant, especially one who went to one of the schools that you are interested in and knows the process firsthand, can be helpful for preparation.

In Conclusion

This is not an exhaustive list, but they illustrate several different types of candidates who may find a consultant valuable. Excellent MBA admissions consultants will integrate with you and work with you every step of the way from the beginning to matriculation.

Admissionado is a results-driven MBA admissions consulting agency. We have a lust for smart ideas and tactics that – quite simply – work. We embrace a two-person specialty approach to consulting, leveraging the talents of strategic business geniuses with masters of writing. Browse through our website to get a sense of our style, our process, our team, and our case studies. We’re a no-nonsense crew, committed to delivering a boutique experience that stretches potential and earns admit letters.