Bain & Company to hire record number of MBA interns over 2018

17 January 2018 Consultancy.uk

Bain & Company have announced plans to take in more MBA interns than ever before. Students from the likes of Harvard, INSEAD, London Business School, and the IE Business School are among those likely to be picked for internships with the top three management consulting firm.

Interns on Bain’s summer associate program are immersed in the responsibilities of a full-time consultant; working with clients, from Fortune 500 companies to start-ups, across a range of sectors. Bain has seen its intern intake grow to record levels for the last five years consecutively, with 90% of these placements ending in offers for full-time employment at the firm. As a result, a third of full-time MBA hires at Bain can trace their roots at the firm back to their own time in the 10-week summer associate program.

In spite of the huge intake from the scheme previously, Bain will maintain its on-campus recruitment of second-year Master of Business Administration students in 2018. Overall, it expects to bring in around 500 MBAs who will eventually take up full-time positions – building on numbers from a record year of MBA recruitment in 2017.Bain & Company to hire record number of MBA interns over 2018Competition for top talent has heightened recently, with both a STEM and soft-skill shortage as large portions of the ageing Western workforce approach retirement being intensified, as border controls in the UK and US stand to be tightened thanks to continued geo-political instability. Bain’s move to encourage higher rates of MBA engagement looks to be extremely savvy then, giving them early access to the next generation of highly skilled workers.

Bain’s Global Head of Consulting Recruitment, Keith Bevans, said of the coming intake, “We are the only one of three management consulting firms that make a consistent, concerted effort to hire second year MBAs. Our competitors didn’t hold second-year recruitment events on-campus in 2017. Our business is strong enough that we need to hire second-year MBAs and our largest summer intern class ever as well.”

In the United States in particular, the summer internship has been used a key proving ground for future hires. Bevans mostly sources students from the world’s top-20-ranked business schools, which include Harvard, Wharton, Kellogg, Chicago Booth in America, as well as INSEAD, London Business School, and IE Business School beyond the borders of the US.

Bevans, himself an MBA graduate from Harvard, has spent 20 years working at Bain, and is now a Partner at the firm’s Chicago office. According to him, MBA students can mark themselves out for an internship at Bain by presenting themselves as having a passion for problem solving. Bevans said, “I trust that if you have a degree from a top institution, you’ve got the raw potential to be successful here. The best business schools help their students understand what opportunities are out there, what they’re really good at, what they like, and where the best overlap of those things is for them to be successful in next stage of their career.”

While the emphasis remains on MBA, there are also an increasing number of opportunities for candidates from Master’s in Management programmes, as well as specialised Master’s degrees. In 2017, Bain was listed as one of the 100 top graduate employers in the UK, alongside the Big Four, as well as Accenture, McKinsey, IBM and BCG.

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