Half of HBS 2023 MBA Class has not landed a job yet

From BBG:

There’s “a lot of anxiety and trepidation about the job market,” says Albert Choi, a second-year student now planning his own business. For the past several months, speculation has swirled around the class of 2023 that as much as half of the 984 graduating students haven’t landed work. While it’s too early to know how many graduating MBAs will find jobs, sources—students, faculty and career advisers at other schools—describe anecdotally a final semester suffused with worry and a higher share of the class leaving school unemployed, at Harvard and beyond.

Two longtime faculty members say that the job market for HBS grads is especially tough this year. “The HBS job market has always been cyclical,” says John Dionne, a senior lecturer in business administration. Not only are fewer companies recruiting for fewer positions, he says, but he knows of a few cases where companies rescinded offers. “Typically, at this time of year—weeks before graduation—less than 10 percent of our graduating students are looking for jobs,” said Jeffrey Bussgang, a senior lecturer at the school and a partner at the venture firm Flybridge Capital, in an email. “Today, that figure is more like 30 percent. It is the worst hiring environment for our MBAs since 2009.” Harvard spokesman Mark Cautela says that over the last decade, typically about 80% of students have accepted offers by graduation.

In Cambridge, the first indications of trouble appeared last fall as the full-time recruiting season got underway. Tech companies—in recent years, among the top three destinations for HBS graduates—largely withdrew from recruiting. Varun Annadi, who’d come to Harvard from Google, found to his surprise that he couldn’t even land an interview with his former employer. “And I had internal referrals and an excellent record of employment there,” he says. Things looked no better in the finance industry, also among the top three fields sought out by HBS grads. Annadi points to a classmate who “worked in private equity before and has had, like, 20 interviews with various PE shops—all of whom have said they’re extremely talented, but they just aren’t hiring right now.”

The top echelon of the consulting industry—McKinsey & Co., Boston Consulting Group and Bain & Co.—is also a popular landing pad for Harvard grads. Known colloquially as “MBB” in Cambridge, the three firms primarily hire from their summer interns, but they also recruit additional graduating students—“dozens and dozens,” according to Bussgang—during the fall. Not last fall. While Annadi was deciding whether to start his own company—and he since has—he also applied to all three firms: “I got rejected almost immediately.” Silton, who’s headed to Boston Consulting, says, “I don’t know anybody who got a full-time role with Bain or BCG who didn’t have an internship.”