MBA Jobs: Top Employers at Business Schools in Europe

At the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, 15 companies are listed as having hired two or more MBA graduates from the class of 2013/14. Those firms include those we have already seen – the likes of McKinsey, Accenture, Amazon and Google, for instance - but also extends to Jaguar Land Rover and Shell Foundation.

Just four companies from Oxford’s 2013/14 list of top employers also hired two or more graduates from the class of 2012/13 - Accenture, Amazon, McKinsey and Shell Foundation. 

While HEC Paris’ MBA placement report for 2014 does not contain hiring figures for each firm, it does name Amazon as its “most significant recruiter” (adding that this is a title it has held since 2011) with 10 MBA jobs taken by 2014 graduates. Aside from this, the HEC Paris report lists firms who feature among their leading employers, pointing out that while the likes of Microsoft and the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) are new additions to the 2014 list, consistent suppliers of MBA jobs for its graduates since 2011 have been McKinsey, GE, L’Oréal, Schneider Electric and Johnson & Johnson.

SDA Bocconi’s class of 2014 report shows that just as many of its MBA graduates went into the luxury, fashion and retail industry as they did into consulting or technology/e-commerce – in each case, these sectors accounted for 19% of graduates (it should be noted that the school offers a track in luxury brand management). Financial services, meanwhile, attracted just 13% of the class.  The report doesn’t contain actual numbers of MBA jobs secured with individual companies, but seven firms are listed as their top employers for 2014. These companies include Nestlé and Credit Suisse as well as the Boston Consulting Group and Amazon.

IE Business School’s full-time MBA, known to the school as the international MBA, lists a selection of the program’s top employers, albeit without precise statistics, in its employment reports. For students graduating in 2012/13 and 2013/14, top employers featuring across both lists include some names already seen elsewhere in this article, such as Amazon, Citi and Credit Suisse, as well as a couple we are yet to mention, such as Telefónica, EY (Ernst & Young) and Siemens.     

In its latest employment report, ESADE doesn’t single out the top providers of MBA jobs for its graduates. Instead, a wide range of companies who have engaged with the school’s career services team between 2012 and 2014 are listed. These include many of what we might, by now, refer to as the usual suspects among MBA employers in Europe today.  

The MBA career statistics currently available from IMD Lausanne’s website aren’t specific to an individual cohort when it comes to the top employers of its graduates. Instead, a three-year average is taken to produce a top-10 set of employers, which are then listed alphabetically. These include DuPont and Royal Dutch Shell as well as McKinsey, the Boston Consulting Group, Amazon and Nestlé.

Companies recruiting for the most MBA jobs among IESE’s class of 2014 are listed, in its employment report, as being “top for full-time offers”. This list numbers more than 20, but includes a couple of new names – such as Mango (fashion retail), LATAM Airlines and Novartis (pharmaceuticals) – alongside the big names from the worlds of consultancy and finance, such as McKinsey, Bain & Company, Deloitte and Citi.

Rounding off this investigation into examples of top employers at business schools in Europe is Cambridge Judge.

Just six companies are listed on Cambridge Judge’s website as being the top employers of its MBA class of 2013/14 (a full list of recruiters is also available). However, within these six are a couple of names not previously encountered in this article, with the Fung Group (logistics), Infosys (IT services/consulting) and Schlumberger Business Consulting (consulting arm of the oil and gas firm of the same name) listed just below Google, A.T. Kearney and EY.