What Corporate Recruiters Say

Each year, the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) conducts a comprehensive, global survey of employers who hire recent MBA graduates and other graduate business students.

In the GMAC Corporate Recruiters Survey, we ask, among other things, what employers look for in new MBA hires, how they make hiring decisions, and what qualities they value most in MBA employees. Pasted below are some of the highlights from the 2011 survey results based on responses from 1,509 participants representing 905 companies in 51 countries worldwide. We hope it will help you understand why employers hire MBA graduates and what they expect from MBAs, so you can make sure you are well prepared when you start to look for post-MBA employment.

Satisfaction with MBA employees and the skills they bring to the company remain high. Almost all employers (99%) report satisfaction with their MBA employees, including 79 percent who are very or extremely satisfied.

Most employers report that compared with other employees at the same job level, employees with an MBA degree demonstrate higher or much higher abilities in many areas, including:

• Managing strategy and innovation
• Strategic and system skills
• Knowledge of general business functions
• Managing decision-making processes
• Learning, motivation, and leadership

While business schools will provide you the fundamentals of the business management knowledge as well as technical or quantitative skills, don’t forget that communication skills are as important to your job prospects as all the other skills you learn in your MBA program. Make sure you develop good leadership and presentation skills; you could have the best budget-management skills, but if you can't communicate well with your colleagues and clients, your skills will be of no use to an employer.

Also, make sure that you pursue jobs in industries and companies where you are confident you will be a good fit. The CultureMatch section of the CareerLeader® online self-assessment will help you determine the industries, jobs, and companies with the right fit for you.

In search of new candidates, the vast majority of employers used employee referrals (76%) or their own companies’ websites for job postings and resume submissions (76%). Six in ten companies (69%) recruited graduate business school students on-campus. Companies in the United States were more likely to recruit on-campus than firms in other parts of the world, which accounted for more than half (55%) of their recruitment effort. More than one-third of employers (35%) reported using social media for candidate sourcing and job advertising.

With current employee referrals being used by the vast majority of employers, access to business school’s alumni networks—one of the many perks b-school Career Management offices provide to MBA students—may become crucial in getting a job.

Employers place a premium on graduates with MBA and work experience. The vast majority of employers that hire graduating MBA students expect that new MBAs will have some prior work experience and look for candidates with an average of three and a half years of experience. Gaining work experience will increase your chances to get a higher-level position and a better compensation.

While in school, consider internship opportunities. Some companies recruit interns on-campus (51%) while others offer graduate business student internships through other means (27%). Once you decide on a career path and begin to look for the right school for you, make sure that as part of your school search, you find out if a school offers internship opportunities at companies in your desired field.

Want to know more? Read profiles of business school alumni in specific industries to learn how they landed their jobs and launched their careers.