How important is the 'prestige' of your job matter for admissions into top MBA programs?

if you want to get into a top tier MBA, ie M7, you need have a great resume and some great brand names on your resume. If you are in banking or consulting you better be going to a top tier firm. F100 places well but usually from product management groups at brand names (Pepsico, Coke, JnJ). Also big 4 isn't that great for top tier MBA. But if you like accounting you an get some awesome, awesome jobs after your B4 experience and CPA.

I'm really not sure, but I honestly think things like your GMAT matter more

Company brand definitely helps, but it doesn't necessarily have to be MBB/Goldman Sachs (though they do comprise a good chunk of the student body at most of these schools).

Plenty of Big 4 Accounting, Fortune 200 (preferably from rotational leadership programs-but plenty of financial analysts and project managers as well), 2nd-tier consulting firms, etc. populate the M7- top 10. I'd say that your stats and career progression can make up for any lack of prestige of your firm, to a point. As long as the company is known, you should be set. Working at a Disney, Coca Cola, AT&T, KPMG, Deloitte, etc...shouldn't put you at a big disadvantage. For starters, people with those backgrounds perform well in Ops and quant related classes, and are not that hard for career development offices to work with and place for recruiting purposes.

One of my buddies from HBS did a rotational program at Goodyear, for example. If the brand is not that well known, however, then you need to have superb stats, and a fast track career progression to seem like a big fish in a small pond. You'll still find a solid (though smaller) number of people from startups and lesser known companies who otherwise bring something else to the table.

I work at a no-name industrial equipment manufacturer, $10M in revenue but we're projecting 50-100% growth over the next year. I'm applying in the fall. Isn't direct experience at a high-growth PE-backed portfolio company better experience than say consulting if I wanted to get into a good school to make a career change into PE?

think prestige of your company matters quite a bit, as

(i) it gives a general sense of the quality of applicant (or at least perception of quality of applicant). ultimately, top employers and top business schools screen for many of the same things

(ii) it is an indicator of "hirability" post-MBA (i.e., people with strong brand names pre-MBA have leg up when applying for post MBA positions)

i am not making the argument that it matters more or less than gmat score or gpa. in general, if you are looking at top bschools, GMAT/gpa score alone can keep you out if you are not above a min threshold, but will not get you in

here's a example of Wharton's top pre-MBA employers -

http://poetsandquants.com/2011/08/07/top-feeder-companies-to-whartons-m…

think the figures speak for themselves, but please let me know if you disagree

Generals2 I'd caution you on thinking that raw numbers = prestige matters. Certainly companies of 50,000 people will push more kids into bschool than a regional manufacturing business - not because of the prestige factor, but just sheer numbers.

I do think prestige matters somewhat. It is good signaling that you're capable of navigating/surviving what is considered to be one of the more successful companies around. It also shows you can jump through the hoops to land said job. However, it isn't the end all be all. Knowing your story, executing well on your interviews, doing well on the GMAT, etc are far more important.

It's important. Your undergraduate prestige is also critical.

A Wharton AdCom said that ugrad prestige doesn't matter necessarily, and that for example someone that took hard courses in a hard program and got a B average is a stronger candidate than someone that took easy courses at an ivy league and got A's, ceteris paribus.

Where you work pre-MBA is almost certainly going to be a factor in bschool admissions.

Take two fictional applicants with similar backgrounds of top tier Ivy > BB IBD > PE > Bschool application. Each has a 3.7+ with economics degree and 750+ GMAT. It'd be pretty hard to distinguish which candidate has the early upper hand wouldn't it?

Now, maybe we break it down a little.

Harvard > GS TMT > KKR > Bschool application

Yale > BAML Industrials > non-branded MM PE > Bschool application

Now which candidate has the upper hand all else equal?

It's just a tool they use to distinguish between a remarkably similar pool of applicants. When you're staring at a group of Ivy educated 26 year old males with 700+ GMATs who all had roughly the same career experiences/progressions and same future career goals you need something tangible to distinguish between them.

There are a ton of factors that go in MBA admissions, the importance of which change slightly depending on the candidate.

You only need look at any admissions report to see that company prestige matters and that the same names appear over and over in lists of incoming classes. However, my one caveat is that so long as the company is well known and your job interesting enough, you have a decent to good chance. It signals to adcom that you can sit in front of a major employer and interview well, and that you've been pre-screened by a major company willing to invest in you. The key word is "interesting", though-which is why I think the Big-4 folks are a bit underrepresented relative to bankers/consultants (but enough still get in). One of my buddies is applying to the M7 and has a resume that screams "Lifetime Accountant". I had to get her to tone it down a bit because adcoms will see it and tell her she needs a CPA rather than MBA, and because accounting resumes tend to put the reader to sleep. I imagine that working on huge deals at BBs or Consulting on business strategy out of Bain for F500s is more attention grabbing than managing a general ledger. And yes, prestige is positively correlated w/ the former. Gross oversimplification, I know, but I think the idea of doing "sexy" work strikes a chord w/ Adcoms.

For what it's worth, there are a handful of people at Booth from big four accounting firms (and even further down firms like BDO). All in though, ye I would say prestige matters, but definitely something that can be overcome.

Sorry for digging an old topic out, but does anybody have an idea for how MasterCard Worldwide would look to MBA adcoms? I know it is an industry leader in payments alongside Visa and AmEx, but do you guys think it would be considered a strong brand name? Trying to assess whether it would be a good decision to start my career with their rotation program and any insight would definitely help.

It certainly wouldn't hurt. It's both a well known brand and a company that isn't overrepresented in MBA classes, which may help your application stand out. Depending on how well you do in the Rotational program and how you spin the job into your story/career goals you could potentially build yourself an MBA business schools ">M7 worthy resume. You'd certainly get a look from most general management programs assuming your other stats are in order. Barring any superior offers I'd snatch this one up in a heartbeat; it's def. not a bad way to start your career.

@khayembii I’m not sure that you guys really are disagreeing that much. No one with any actual knowledge is saying that you can’t get in without a name brand employer. That’s obviously wrong. However, as much as AdComs like to pontificate about wanting “different” and “unique”, their actions don’t reflect that. GSB probably gets three times as many entrepreneurs/small business people/whatever than it has spots in its class. They still make up a tiny percentage of admits compared to MBB/BB/other elite things. Sure, a few exceptional ones will get in, but that’s because they are truly exceptional.

AdComs read tons of applications in a given day. Of course they’re looking for something interesting, but at the same time, the first document they go to is the resume and academic numbers. Bottom line is that no matter how interesting you are, if you don’t have a name that jumps out on your resume, it will raise some questions with the reader. Now, if it turns out the name he/she doesn’t recognize was a company recently sold to Google for $25M, and now you’ve founded a small VC firm and have already invested in SnapChat, you’ll probably overcome that issue.

Unfortunately, if you’re employee #4 at an interesting, but struggling start-up (aren’t most start-ups struggling in some way), you might not overcome that issue. You won’t overcome that despite some probably pretty awesome experiences, but that’s just how it goes. I think what @TheGrind is saying is that it helps to have a name associated with “sexy work” on your resume because it gives you immediate credibility with someone who looks at like 25 apps per day.

Also, I don’t know why we’re discussing start-ups, because they’re a totally different breed of applicant. This post is much more relevant for guy thinking about taking a F500 job as opposed to a F100 job, or a Tier 3 consulting vs. Tier 2 consulting, or whatever. In those cases, you are essentially falling into a bucket below other potential applicants, because you’re already at a less selective/prestigious/high quality experience place (as AdComs see it).

Honestly, I just think it’s too utopian to think that AdComs (at top schools) really, really dig into your profile. At the same time, it’s too short-sighted to think that they immediately dismiss you if you don’t have one of 20 employers on your resume.

Old Man Marley doesn't care about where you worked.

This point has already been made, but what U.S. Americans should know is that in the rest of the world including Canada, England, Australia Big 4 and Accounting are held in very high regard. A lot of CEO's and bankers are former accountants and have the ACCA designation.

U.S. Americans = Americans who have no knowledge of what goes on abroad. You know where I learnt this! (Miss Teen SC)

ACCA = CPA

Don't remember the specifics, but Poets & Quants did a story on feeder companies to Stanford and discovered that students with MBB, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and J.P. Morgan/Chase on their resumes made up roughly 1/3 of the class out of ~500 people. Of course these already tend to be high achieving people with Ivy/top undergraduate backgrounds, stints at PE MFs and killer ECs. And this is before you factor in the Amazons, Googles, military, etc...

I got into a M7 full time program, while working in operations at a Top BB bank (doing some global project management work, but nothing WSO would find impressive). High gmat score will make up for a lot. I tend to think its better to have a worse job title at a brand name company when it comes to Bschool admissions, than to have a cool job at worse known company. It seems like business schools favor some guy doing mid office work at goldman, over someone doing front office M&A at some MM firm.

I think so. These schools love the idea of attracting the talent from "top" firms. It's not uncommon to see lists of companies from where students hail in their brochures. It probably helps with keeping placements at 90%, since your pre-MBA resume will impact the quality of your recruiting process-if it doesn't determine your recruiting experience outright, consulting and banking notwithstanding.

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Prestige brand name doesn't matter in HBS admissions. They're HBS, they can afford to take about 100 people per class from non "prestigious" backgrounds.

Don't know about Stanford.

A school like Wharton or Columbia which are in struggles for rankings, your undergrad school and employer prestige matters a lot.

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What difference does the timeframe that you worked for a prestigious company make? For example, if your first job out of school was at a F50 company, but then you moved to a small boutique consulting firm after 12-18 months, would the F50 experience still be a plus in your application?

Keep in mind that the fact that M7 schools are for a big part filled with students from 'prestigious companies' is partly a self-selecting process. Working for a prestigious company often implies elite undergrad, good GPA, et cetera ...