Bain & Company Will Hire A Record Number Of MBA Interns In 2018

The big three management consulting firm is stepping up its MBA recruitment drive

Bain & Company is set to hire a record number of MBA interns this summer, for the fifth year in a row, according to Bain’s global head of consulting recruitment Keith Bevans.

Interns on Bain’s summer associate program will be immersed in the responsibilities of a full-time consultant; working with clients, from Fortune 500 companies to startups, across a range of sectors.

The majority (90%) will be offered full-time job offers at Bain. In fact, a third of full-time MBA hires at Bain come from its 10-week summer...

ate program.

Even so, Bain will sustain its on-campus recruitment of second-year MBA students in 2018. Overall, it will hire around 500 MBAs into full-time positions—maintaining numbers from a record year of MBA recruitment in 2017.

“We are the only one of three management consulting firms that make a consistent, concerted effort to hire second year MBAs,” Keith explains. “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 between the first and second year of an MBA program often shapes a candidate’s future career path.

While an internship at Bain is not a prerequisite to a career at Bain—two-thirds of Bain’s full-time hires do not come from the summer associate program—it’s still a key proving ground for future hires, and those who get offers need to take them seriously.

“If you have an offer to join Bain for the summer and you turn it down, it’s very likely that you won’t find your way back in for full-time hiring,” Keith warns.

Keith, himself an MBA graduate from Harvard and a partner at Bain’s Chicago office, has been working at Bain for over 20 years. He mostly recruits from the world’s top-20-ranked business schools—schools like Harvard, Wharton, Kellogg, Chicago Booth, as well as INSEAD, London Business School, and IE Business School outside the US.

He continues to value MBA hires but, increasingly, he’s seen more opportunities open for candidates from Master’s in Management programs and specialized master’s degrees.

“In the US, a lot of schools that have those programs, like Yale, also have MBA programs—we’re meeting those students when we go to campus anyway.

“In Europe, there are people on those programs who have been out in the workforce for a long time—we do look at them differently.”

What can MBA students do to land an internship at Bain?

“We’re looking for bright minds that have a passion for solving really hard problems,” Keith explains.

“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.”