This was an excellent revision to a thread started 2 years ago. How does recruitment look like now for consulting.

I was going through INSEAD's career report, and they do still have a huge chunk of their total pool move into consulting.

Still wanted to verify , has the recession changed the outlook towards recruitment in this sector. Is looking at an MC career in London for an non EU passport holder still a possibility.

I wanted to update this thread in regards to ranking schools by their strength in MC - particularly among MBB. I ran some numbers using data over the past 4 years (2007-2011) This accounts for how schools performed when the market was both great (2007,2008) and horrid (2009,2010) for Management Consulting. Thankfully, based on the economy, recent press released from top consulting firms, and other sources, it appears that recruiting is once again on the rise and 2011 stands poised to be a big year again.

This ranking was derived using the following methodology:
1. (50%) # of MBB hires from the school divided by # of total students seeking employment.
2. (50%) # of MBB hires divided by the proportion of consulting industry students in from the school seeking employment.
An index score was then assigned to each school so that we can see how far apart they are in relation to each other . Top school = 100

*Note: HBS, Stanford, and Stern are highly protective of their recruiting #'s and refuse to give them out. It is assumed that HBS/Stanford are the best MC schools, but its hard to know w/o any hard #'s. I have no clue about Stern - my guess is they would be in the 10-15 rank range...

Here is how they stacked up relative to one another:

1. HBS/Stanford/Wharton - 100
4. MIT - 87
5. Kellogg - 83
6. Columbia - 80
7. Chicago - 67
8. Tuck - 66
9. Ross / Haas - 47
11. Darden - 41
12. Duke - 29

In a perfect world we would be able to figure out how many people WANTED to go into MBB. Since that is not possible, the next best thing we can go off of is # MBB hires / # of students that actually went into the consulting industry, and the classic #MBB/ total students seeking employment. GMAT/GPA/Undergrad school is already built into the calculation because it is assumed that the higher schools on this list naturally have higher GMAT/GPA, etc.

How is INSEAD in terms of US recruiting? If you leave the US, do P1/2 in Singapore, then P3 Fonty, P4 in US and finish in Fonty will you be competitive in terms of m/b/b here in the US? Based on the 2010 #'s it was something like 14 of 237 accepted positions in the US. I'm not sure if this is due to those just wanting international flavor or just poor recruiting outside Europe and Asia. Any comments?
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Just to chip in that we were shown some recruiting figures during pre-term here that showed that the growth in consulting recruiting at Stern over the past few years has continued through to the most recent class.

The obvious choices for consulting are there for all to see, but outside the top few on each continent (in Europe I would say Insead and LBS in that order) I think the differences become marginal. At any of the top schools I imagine you'll have a good chance, and as many have said before once you've got an interview you're competing with peers all across the board, not in your school. Beyond that I think it's mostly down to the environment you want to be in and personal preference.

For me Stern is a good fit for a few reasons. I'm a career switcher and I know I will thrive more in a group that is largely in a similar position to me, rather than in among a bunch of sponsored consultants. That's a loss on the networking side, but not by too much as there are many alumni around and being in NYC has obvious advantages. It's also definitely a growth area within the school and for me that's a positive thing in and of itself - it has some momentum with recruiters and among the staff in the Office of Career Development which can only be helpful. There are also specific things such as the Industry Mentoring Initiative with Deloitte that could be really helpful for a career switcher - I'll be applying for that and if successful will be happy to report back.

I'm not saying Stern's the best for consulting and you will undoubtedly find more people from the big firms at other schools (how that translates into recruitment is another matter), but I do think it's under-represented as a strong and growing area at the school. I feel like the opportunities are definitely there and it's up to me to maximise them. At the end of the day that's all you can ask of a school, at which point you need to focus on by far the biggest variable: how you conduct/develop/present yourself, regardless of what school you end up at.