Recruiter Q&A

Noble StaffordBain & Co. Vice President, RecruitingChicago In this special episode of the Clear Admit MBA Admissions Podcast, recorded live at the Clear Admit MBA Fair, we dive deep into the world of strategy consulting with Noble Stafford, Vice President of Recruiting for Bain & Company’s Chicago office. Stafford first joined Bain in 2013 as a consultant and returned in 2022 to spearhead Chicago’s recruiting initiatives. Between his tenures at Bain, Noble honed his expertise at Russell Reynolds Associates, a global executive search firm, where he excelled in both client-facing and internal team management roles. Read more

It’s never too early to start thinking about recruiting…or is it? We spoke with Keith Bevans, Global Head of Consultant Recruiting at Bain & Co., and Lauren Birnie, Vice President, Head of Firmwide MBA Recruiting at J.P. Morgan to discuss just that. Clear Admit and the MBA recruiting reps from Bain and J.P. Morgan came together on April 28, 2021 to discuss what these sought-after employers look for, and what their hiring processes entail. Topics covered include: How does your MBA recruiting process work? What will the impact of COVID mean for hiring this year? What tips/advice do you have Read more

Bain & Company—widely considered one of the most elite consulting firms in the world—is a coveted post-MBA destination for students at top business schools in every part of the globe.  Our guest today, Keith Bevans, is a partner in Bain & Company's Chicago office and also heads Bain's global consultant recruiting efforts.  The latter involves managing the team that identifies and attracts talent to Bain's offices and ensures that the next generation of leaders continue to make Bain "The best firm to work for." Keith Bevans, Partner and Leader of Corporate Recruiting, Bain & Co. While Bain primarily targets top-20 schools for MBA recruiting, it hires from more than 60 schools around the world and is committed to finding the best talent wherever it can.  Bevans is a Bain lifer.  He started as an associate consultant out of MIT, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering. He left Bain to get his MBA at Harvard Business School but returned upon graduation and has been there ever since. For much of his career, he has been a client-facing partner in the firm’s Performance Improvement practice, with a focus on processes to improve effectiveness and efficiencies. Read more

For business school students gunning for a career in consulting post-graduation, Bain & Company is on an exclusive shortlist of the most elite consulting firms in the world. Considered the third “B” in “MBB”—the acronym used to refer to McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and Bain—the Boston-headquartered firm boasts 53 offices in 34 countries around the world. Bain employs more than 7,000 people and counts as its clients leading Fortune 500 companies, as well as nonprofit and government organizations. And business continues to be booming. Keith Bevans, Bain global head Read more

Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business today became the latest leading business school to share details from its Class of 2017 MBA Employment Report, revealing an all-time high average first-year base salary and signing bonus of $158,194. To get there, the mean base salary climbed to $127,986 from last year’s $123,934, and the mean signing bonus increased 4 percent to $30,208. The median salary and signing bonus, meanwhile, remained constant year over year, at $125,000 and $25,000 respectively. Eighty-five percent of the Class of 2017 received a signing bonus, down from 87 percent of the Class of 2016. Strong Read more

Bain & Company—widely considered one of the most elite consulting firms in the world—is a coveted post-MBA destination for students at top business schools in every part of the globe. Headquartered in Boston with 53 offices in 34 countries around the world, Bain employs more than 7,000 people and counts as its clients leading Fortune 500 companies, as well as nonprofit and government organizations. And business is booming. According to Keith Bevans, global head of consultant recruiting, the company has grown at a rate of 15 percent a year for the past 20 years, with no slowdown in Read more

MIT Sloan School of Management late last week released its 2016 MBA Employment Report, revealing slightly slipping salaries year over year and slightly lower percentages of graduates heading into consulting and technology than in prior years. The pharmaceutical/healthcare industry drew the third largest percentage of graduates—5.8 percent—knocking investment banking out of the top three for the first time—perhaps ever. Investment banks drew just 4.7 percent of the 2016 class, down from 6.1 percent last year, 6.8 percent in 2014 and 8.1 in 2013.   Read more

Stacey Eryn Chin, a recent graduate from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, headed off to work as a consultant for McKinsey in its San Francisco office. Prior to business school, Chin held roles that ranged from education and youth leadership development to venture philanthropy and social enterprise. “I loved the work I was doing before business school,” she recalls, noting that she managed lots of teams and got to tackle ambiguous problems, all of which she found really energizing. What she lacked was exposure to the private sector. “That, in a nutshell, is what made me excited to come to business Read more

Recent NYU Stern School of Business graduate Carla Giugale, 26, was younger than many of her business school classmates and came from a nontraditional background to boot. An art history major in college, her work experience prior to Stern consisted of two years teaching fourth graders at an elementary school in Brooklyn, NY, as part of Teach for America. But rather than let those be barriers to landing a coveted job at a top consulting firm upon graduation, she took advantage of the opportunities Stern and her New York City location presented to augment her business school education Read more

A self-professed “Navy brat,” Olivia Anglade grew up in Seoul, Korea, went to Stanford as an undergrad with an Army ROTC scholarship, picked up a master’s degree in engineering while at Stanford, and then set off to serve her country in exchange for the education she’d received. “I can do this,” thought Anglade. “Serve my country, have school taken care of, have a guaranteed job when I’m done and apply the skills I learned at school.” And so she did—commissioning in the Army as a project manager for construction units mostly in Hawaii. “My soldiers were carpenters, electricians and plumbers, and we built stuff,” she recalls. When a 2010 earthquake struck in Haiti, where Anglade’s family is from, it was a pivotal moment, she says. “That’s when my professional expertise as a builder and my personal background collided. I had always thought I would work in Haiti, and there was now no excuse—I could actually apply my skills to helping the country.” She transitioned out of the Army and worked as a contractor for USAID in construction for two years in the disaster-ravaged island nation. “It was an incredible opportunity for me to understand the history of Haiti and the infrastructure and to apply my own expertise in rebuilding the country,” she says. Read more

Jake Doroshow, 28, graduated from Stern in May 2016 and started a job at Goldman Sachs as a private wealth advisor in July. An undergraduate finance major who spent his pre-MBA career first at BlackRock and then at First Niagara Bank, thought he might like to stay in the finance industry. But he also knew he loved working with clients and wanted more direct work with people, which maybe could manifest itself in a consulting role, he reasoned. Jake Doroshow, NYU Stern MBA ’16 That said, Stern’s proximity to Wall Street and its strength in finance definitely played into Read more

It’s first-year internship recruiting season at business schools across the United States. As students scramble to line up interviews with potential employers, they confront a complex process made even more complicated by the demands of their first-year core coursework and other campus commitments. Last week, Clear Admit spoke with Stacey Oyler, a Clear Admit admissions consultant and former McKinsey & Co. MBA recruiter, to shed light on this process. After joining McKinsey, Oyler initiated a formal recruiting process for the firm on the campus of Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. Her familiarity with the school—she worked previously as the Assistant Director of Admissions at Tuck—and its approach to the recruiting process allowed her great insight into how McKinsey could approach potential new-hires. For example, “one unique thing about Tuck is that they have a bid list,” said Oyler. “You [as a student] are given a certain number of points that you can use towards bidding on interviews.” Oyler said about 50% of McKinsey’s total number of interview slots were reserved for bid students. “Of the remaining 50% we got to choose who we wanted to see.” Read more