Amazon is Top Recruiter of Recent MBA Graduates for Seventh Year, As Big Tech Scoops Up Top Business Talent
Amazon is the first tech giant since IBM to show that its appetite for recent business school graduates exceeds deep-pocketed accounting and consulting firms
Key Insights:
- Amazon has been the #1 MBA recruiter for seven years running, a position traditionally held by financial services and consulting firms.
- The company is also the top recruiter of recent MBA graduates when we look at the past decade cumulatively.
- Other companies competing for recent MBAs include consulting firms, banks, the U.S. military, and other tech companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Cisco.
- Despite being a relative newcomer to recruiting MBAs in large numbers, Amazon’s rapid growth has made it the third largest recruiter of recent MBAs in the past 30 years, right behind McKinsey and Deloitte.
For years, Amazon has been a company to watch, growing from a hot tech startup focused on selling books online to a company with the market heft to change the standards of the whole retail industry. It’s now one of the most valuable brands in the world, focused on e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence.
When the acute stage of the pandemic hit in 2020, many Americans consigned themselves to staying at home, ordering necessities and luxuries online. This pandemic-induced change in shopping habits boosted Amazon’s sales over brick-and-mortar competitors.
In addition to selling everything under the sun, Amazon was well-positioned to continue operating its tech and retail businesses even as competitors initially struggled under pandemic constraints.
Amazon was among the first companies to voluntarily send workers home in March 2020. This helped put it ahead of the curve compared to companies that only shifted work habits due to mandatory government stay-at-home orders.
The relative ease for tech workers to work from home alongside the change in shopping habits pushed Amazon to become the #1 employer for recent college graduates who earned their bachelor's degrees in 2019 and 2020.
Another look at the data reaffirms that Amazon’s hiring spree is not limited to undergraduates. Amazon is the #1 employer of MBA graduates in the first year after earning the advanced business degree. Perhaps an even greater testament to Amazon’s size and growth, before and during the pandemic, is that it has been the top employer for recent MBAs for the past seven years.
2012
- Deloitte
- McKinsey & Company
- U.S. Air Force
- U.S. Army
- Amazon
2013
- Deloitte
- Amazon
- McKinsey & Company
- U.S. Air Force
- U.S. Army
2014
- Deloitte
- Amazon
- McKinsey & Company
- U.S. Air Force
- U.S. Army
2015
- Amazon
- Deloitte
- McKinsey & Company
- Boston Consulting Group
- U.S. Air Force
2016
- Amazon
- McKinsey & Company
- Deloitte
- Boston Consulting Group
- U.S. Air Force
2017
- Amazon
- McKinsey & Company
- Deloitte
- Boston Consulting Group
- Bain Company
2018
- Amazon
- Deloitte
- McKinsey & Company
- Boston Consulting Group
- Bain Company
2019
- Amazon
- Deloitte
- McKinsey & Company
- Boston Consulting Group
- Bain Company
2020
- Amazon
- McKinsey & Company
- Boston Consulting Group
- Deloitte
- Bain Company
2021
- Amazon
- Lockheed Martin Corporation
- The Boeing Company
- Fidelity Brokerage Services
- Abbott Laboratories