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The old MBA recruiting playbook is dead. Here’s how top admits are getting ahead this summer.
MBAGuide
Joined: 24 Jul 2019
Last visit: 02 Sep 2026
Posts: 2,541
Own Kudos:
Given Kudos: 29
Location: India
Concentration: Operations, Marketing
Schools: Insead Sept'18 (A$$) ISB '19 (A)
03 Aug 2026, 00:28
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Every year I read ISB/IIM applications during ding reviews where everything is in order, strong GMAT, credible work experience, decent extracurriculars, and the application still does not make it through.
When I do a ding analysis with these candidates, in my experience the answer is almost always the same place. The goals. Most of the times, the person had not actually thought about why they wanted it.
The Real Problem With ISB/IIM Goals Strategy
Ask the average ISB applicant why they want an MBA and you will get one of two answers,
"Because it is the natural next step in my career. Most people are doing it."
Or: "Because it pays better."
Neither of these is wrong. Both of them could be fatal in an application.
When hundreds of applicants in the exact same professional situation are writing about the exact same goal for the exact same reasons, the only thing that separates one from another is the quality of the thinking behind it.
Adcom is not looking for the best product manager or the most impressive solutions delivery consultant. They are looking for someone whose reasoning about their own future is so specific, so grounded, and so genuinely theirs that reading it feels like meeting a real person rather than processing a career plan.
When sdcoms feel a person's drive coming through the page, they want to root for that person's success. Because someone with that level of clarity and conviction is set to do something meaningful in the domain they care about. That is the person ISB wants in its classrooms.
Most goals essays never create that feeling.
I am going to help you a little. I am sharing some Profile Types that consistently get this wrong (A real winning example is at the end of the post)
Some backgrounds struggle with goals more than others:
1. The IT professional pivoting to product
This is the most common and amongst most disappointing goals narrative if not approached correctly. Someone from an IT or business analytics background who wants to move into product management and describes their goal as wanting to "build interesting products." What interesting means, they cannot yet say. What problem they want to solve, for whom, and why they specifically are positioned to solve it, is absent.
The product goal is not wrong. But the thinking behind it is unfinished. If you are in this situation, the work to go several levels deeper into what you actually want to build and why your specific background makes you the right person to build it.
Read: Product Management Goals in the Age of AI: Why these Goals Fall Flat : Harvard
2. The early-career finance professional pitching investment roles
A commerce graduate with two years of starter-level finance experience targeting investment banking or private equity roles at ISB is a common mismatch that signals to adcom that the applicant does not understand how recruiters think. Strong commitment to a finance career requires demonstrated evidence, CFA levels cleared, specific deal exposure, a coherent investment thesis, internships maybe and so on. Without those signals, the goal reads as aspiration rather than a solid pathway.
Read: How to Build a Career in Venture Capital: A Deep Dive : INSEAD
Can You Switch to IB Without Finance? : LBS
3. The operations professional (Example. defence, merchant navy, manufacturing and similar)
These applicants often have extraordinary raw material such as genuine leadership under pressure, exceptional work ethic, cross-cultural operational experience, but arrive at the goals conversation with no idea where they fit in a civilian corporate career.
A significant part of my work with these profiles is coaching them on the possibilities, because top-tier consulting firms actively look for this kind of talent for the intrinsic leadership and no-nonsense execution traits it produces. The goal that works for these profiles is almost never the one they walk in with.
4. The impact sector professional
Highly motivational work, genuinely human stories, real grassroots exposure, but a persistent blind spot around the business relevance of what they have done. Philanthropy is funded by profits. Impact organisations run on financial sustainability.
The applicant who can connect their grassroots work to the commercial and financial mechanisms that make it possible, and articulate what MBA-level business education will add to that, is compelling. The applicant who only speaks to the human outcomes without the business layer struggles to make the case for why ISB specifically is the right vehicle.
5. The consulting goal, still the most overused
I have said this in multiple pieces and I will say it again: the world does not need more generic consultants any more than it needs more people who can describe problems without building solutions.
Consulting is a vast domain. Most applicants who write consulting goals do not know what practice they want to join, what type of client problems they want to work on, or how their past experience positions them for a specific consulting function. With AI reshaping what consulting actually does, Adcom is going to evaluate the consulting goal with increasing scepticism unless the applicant can demonstrate the kind of intellectual specificity and problem-solving conviction that a generic consulting aspiration simply does not contain.
Read INSEAD: Stop Pitching MBB Goals Like Everyone Else : INSEAD
What a Goals Narrative Looks Like When It Is Actually Working
A goals essay or discussion that works creates an almost inevitable feeling, that given everything this person has experienced and understood, this goal is the only logical next chapter.
The feeling comes from one of a few genuine triggers:
The applicant has identified a specific gap in their own capability that the MBA fills, not "I want to develop leadership skills" but a precise and honest account of where their current toolkit runs out and what they need to be able to do the work they can see in front of them.
Or they are at the cusp of a real opportunity in an evolving industry and the timing of the MBA is not arbitrary but connected to a window that exists now and may not exist in three years.
Or they have had an epiphany, a moment where something they experienced or witnessed crystallised into a conviction about what they want to do with their professional life, and that moment is described with enough specificity and emotional honesty that the reader believes it.
A Goals Narrative That Actually Works, An Example
Let me show you what the difference looks like in practice.
One of the most compelling goals essays I have worked on came from an investment analyst who had worked across Kyrgyzstan, Uganda, Tanzania, and Uzbekistan, and had grown up in a farming family in Punjab.
He had watched farmers in remote Kyrgyzstan during one of his on site visits struggle to access financing for livestock diversification, being rejected by local banks and trapped in predatory microloans. He had seen the same pattern in East Africa. And he had seen it at home in India, so he physically set up a guidance booth during the Punjab farmer protests, with his cousin, to help local farmers use futures contracts on NCDEX to protect their produce prices. The first farmer who trusted them was his maternal uncle. That year, twenty-five farmers across three villages earned an additional 2,000 euros each and began repaying debts they had carried for years.
The goal that emerged from those experiences was specific: to build a fairer financing model for marginal communities, one that replaced high-interest debt dependency with equity-oriented, performance-based capital combined with genuine business advisory support.
What made that essay work was not the nobility of the goal, but the evidence that this person had already been living it and that the MBA was not a pivot toward something they had just discovered but the next instrument in a pursuit they had been building for years across four countries and their own family's kitchen table.
Adcom could not dismiss that goal as aspirational. The person had already started.
Before you open the application, before you think about word counts or essay structure, sit with this question:
If someone asked me why I want this specific future, not the MBA, but the actual work I want to do on the other side of it, could I answer with something that is genuinely mine? Something rooted in what I have seen, what I have felt, what I know from having lived it?
If the answer comes easily and it is specific and it surprises you a little with its honesty, you are ready to write.
If the answer sounds like something you could have read in a career guide, you have more thinking to do first.
The essay can wait. The thinking cannot.
Best wishes
Aanchal Sahni (INSEAD MBA alumna, former INSEAD MBA admissions interviewer)
Founder, MBAGuideConsulting
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aanchal-sahni-83b00819/ |WEBSITE: https://mbaguideconsulting.com/| Message(WA): +91 9971200927| email- [email protected]
When I do a ding analysis with these candidates, in my experience the answer is almost always the same place. The goals. Most of the times, the person had not actually thought about why they wanted it.
The Real Problem With ISB/IIM Goals Strategy
Ask the average ISB applicant why they want an MBA and you will get one of two answers,
"Because it is the natural next step in my career. Most people are doing it."
Or: "Because it pays better."
Neither of these is wrong. Both of them could be fatal in an application.
When hundreds of applicants in the exact same professional situation are writing about the exact same goal for the exact same reasons, the only thing that separates one from another is the quality of the thinking behind it.
Adcom is not looking for the best product manager or the most impressive solutions delivery consultant. They are looking for someone whose reasoning about their own future is so specific, so grounded, and so genuinely theirs that reading it feels like meeting a real person rather than processing a career plan.
When sdcoms feel a person's drive coming through the page, they want to root for that person's success. Because someone with that level of clarity and conviction is set to do something meaningful in the domain they care about. That is the person ISB wants in its classrooms.
Most goals essays never create that feeling.
I am going to help you a little. I am sharing some Profile Types that consistently get this wrong (A real winning example is at the end of the post)
Some backgrounds struggle with goals more than others:
1. The IT professional pivoting to product
This is the most common and amongst most disappointing goals narrative if not approached correctly. Someone from an IT or business analytics background who wants to move into product management and describes their goal as wanting to "build interesting products." What interesting means, they cannot yet say. What problem they want to solve, for whom, and why they specifically are positioned to solve it, is absent.
The product goal is not wrong. But the thinking behind it is unfinished. If you are in this situation, the work to go several levels deeper into what you actually want to build and why your specific background makes you the right person to build it.
Read: Product Management Goals in the Age of AI: Why these Goals Fall Flat : Harvard
2. The early-career finance professional pitching investment roles
A commerce graduate with two years of starter-level finance experience targeting investment banking or private equity roles at ISB is a common mismatch that signals to adcom that the applicant does not understand how recruiters think. Strong commitment to a finance career requires demonstrated evidence, CFA levels cleared, specific deal exposure, a coherent investment thesis, internships maybe and so on. Without those signals, the goal reads as aspiration rather than a solid pathway.
Read: How to Build a Career in Venture Capital: A Deep Dive : INSEAD
Can You Switch to IB Without Finance? : LBS
3. The operations professional (Example. defence, merchant navy, manufacturing and similar)
These applicants often have extraordinary raw material such as genuine leadership under pressure, exceptional work ethic, cross-cultural operational experience, but arrive at the goals conversation with no idea where they fit in a civilian corporate career.
A significant part of my work with these profiles is coaching them on the possibilities, because top-tier consulting firms actively look for this kind of talent for the intrinsic leadership and no-nonsense execution traits it produces. The goal that works for these profiles is almost never the one they walk in with.
4. The impact sector professional
Highly motivational work, genuinely human stories, real grassroots exposure, but a persistent blind spot around the business relevance of what they have done. Philanthropy is funded by profits. Impact organisations run on financial sustainability.
The applicant who can connect their grassroots work to the commercial and financial mechanisms that make it possible, and articulate what MBA-level business education will add to that, is compelling. The applicant who only speaks to the human outcomes without the business layer struggles to make the case for why ISB specifically is the right vehicle.
5. The consulting goal, still the most overused
I have said this in multiple pieces and I will say it again: the world does not need more generic consultants any more than it needs more people who can describe problems without building solutions.
Consulting is a vast domain. Most applicants who write consulting goals do not know what practice they want to join, what type of client problems they want to work on, or how their past experience positions them for a specific consulting function. With AI reshaping what consulting actually does, Adcom is going to evaluate the consulting goal with increasing scepticism unless the applicant can demonstrate the kind of intellectual specificity and problem-solving conviction that a generic consulting aspiration simply does not contain.
Read INSEAD: Stop Pitching MBB Goals Like Everyone Else : INSEAD
What a Goals Narrative Looks Like When It Is Actually Working
A goals essay or discussion that works creates an almost inevitable feeling, that given everything this person has experienced and understood, this goal is the only logical next chapter.
The feeling comes from one of a few genuine triggers:
The applicant has identified a specific gap in their own capability that the MBA fills, not "I want to develop leadership skills" but a precise and honest account of where their current toolkit runs out and what they need to be able to do the work they can see in front of them.
Or they are at the cusp of a real opportunity in an evolving industry and the timing of the MBA is not arbitrary but connected to a window that exists now and may not exist in three years.
Or they have had an epiphany, a moment where something they experienced or witnessed crystallised into a conviction about what they want to do with their professional life, and that moment is described with enough specificity and emotional honesty that the reader believes it.
A Goals Narrative That Actually Works, An Example
Let me show you what the difference looks like in practice.
One of the most compelling goals essays I have worked on came from an investment analyst who had worked across Kyrgyzstan, Uganda, Tanzania, and Uzbekistan, and had grown up in a farming family in Punjab.
He had watched farmers in remote Kyrgyzstan during one of his on site visits struggle to access financing for livestock diversification, being rejected by local banks and trapped in predatory microloans. He had seen the same pattern in East Africa. And he had seen it at home in India, so he physically set up a guidance booth during the Punjab farmer protests, with his cousin, to help local farmers use futures contracts on NCDEX to protect their produce prices. The first farmer who trusted them was his maternal uncle. That year, twenty-five farmers across three villages earned an additional 2,000 euros each and began repaying debts they had carried for years.
The goal that emerged from those experiences was specific: to build a fairer financing model for marginal communities, one that replaced high-interest debt dependency with equity-oriented, performance-based capital combined with genuine business advisory support.
What made that essay work was not the nobility of the goal, but the evidence that this person had already been living it and that the MBA was not a pivot toward something they had just discovered but the next instrument in a pursuit they had been building for years across four countries and their own family's kitchen table.
Adcom could not dismiss that goal as aspirational. The person had already started.
Before you open the application, before you think about word counts or essay structure, sit with this question:
If someone asked me why I want this specific future, not the MBA, but the actual work I want to do on the other side of it, could I answer with something that is genuinely mine? Something rooted in what I have seen, what I have felt, what I know from having lived it?
If the answer comes easily and it is specific and it surprises you a little with its honesty, you are ready to write.
If the answer sounds like something you could have read in a career guide, you have more thinking to do first.
The essay can wait. The thinking cannot.
Best wishes
Aanchal Sahni (INSEAD MBA alumna, former INSEAD MBA admissions interviewer)
Founder, MBAGuideConsulting
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aanchal-sahni-83b00819/ |WEBSITE: https://mbaguideconsulting.com/| Message(WA): +91 9971200927| email- [email protected]
