Where Harvard MBAs Live & Work

Source: LinkedIn Member Profiles as of 1/16/14

If you want to work for one of the world’s most elite and prestigious organizations, a Harvard Business School MBA is your ticket to entry.

McKinsey & Co., the global consulting company, leads all employers of HBS grads, with 573 MBAs. That’s considerably more than the next major employer of Harvard MBAs, surprisingly IBM, with 361 MBAs from Harvard, according to an analysis of LinkedIn member profiles by Poets&Quants. This is an especially rare look at HBS employment because Harvard, unlike most schools, does not report how many of its graduates are hired by the firms that recruit there.

As you’d expect, consulting looms large in the mix of top HBS employers. Four of the top five employers are consulting shops, and many of the MBAs at IBM are in consulting roles. The Boston Consulting Group boasts 343 HBS MBAs, Bain & Co. has 307, and Deloitte has 242.

High tech firms are prominent as well. Search giant Google has 228 employees who list a Harvard MBA on their resume, while Microsoft has 185, Hewlett Packard has 114, and Cisco boasts 111.

The finance industry is well represented, with the most Harvard MBAs at Goldman Sachs (213), followed by Morgan Stanley (107), J.P. Morgan (82), and Merrill Lynch (70).

Of course, many MBAs are scattered throughout the financial services landscape at smaller private equity, venture capital and hedge funds all over the world. Those firms–given their smaller size–don’t show up among the major employers. But a breakdown of Harvard grads by industry demonstrates the school’s strong position in finance: 5,673 MBAs claim it as their industry, more than any other category than “entrepreneurship” where the largest single chunk of HBS MBAs work (7,253).