What are job recruiters looking for in their MBA hires? What skills are they looking for? What skills are hardest to find?

1,251 job recruiters at 547 companies were surveyed for the 2016 Bloomberg Job Skills Report about the skills they seek in job candidates and the b-schools that provide the best job candidates based on those skills.

14 Top Skills

The report shows which of the 14 skills are hardest to find and which are the most important for each of the following industries: consulting, consumer products, energy, financial services, manufacturing, chemicals, healthcare, pharma, transportation, retail, and technology.

A few examples:

• In the energy industry, analytical thinking is the most important skill, and entrepreneurship and risk taking are the least important skills.

• For this same industry, leadership skills are the hardest to find, and entrepreneurship is easiest (or less difficult).

• In finance, communication skills are most important, and global mindset is least important.

• Strategic thinking and communication skills are tied as hardest to find in the finance sector, and entrepreneurship is ranked as least difficult to find.

• Across all industries, strategic thinking is hardest to find, and quantitative skills are easiest. Communication skills are most important across all industries, and entrepreneurship is least important.

The Sweet Spot

The report talks about “the sweet spot,” referring to the skills that are declared as both highly desired and hardest to find. Sweet spot skills across all industries are leadership, strategic thinking, communication skills, and creative problem solving.

The report shows the top 3 schools for each skill set within each of the following industries: consulting, consumer products, energy, financial services, manufacturing, and technology. We’ll give a few examples here within the consulting industry, but you can check the actual report for the full listing.

• The top 3 schools with graduates with strong communication skills in the consulting industry were USC Marshall, UVA Daren, and UT-Austin McCombs.

• For strategic thinking in consulting, the top 3 were UT-Austin McCombs, Michigan Ross, and Chicago Booth.

• For creative problem solving in consulting: UC Berkeley Haas, Michigan Ross, and Northwestern Kellogg.

Methodology

The data for this survey came from the Employers Survey which was part of the Bloomberg’s 2015 MBA rankings. Respondents needed to be recruiters with recent MBA recruiting experience. They chose their top 5 most important skills and the 5 hardest to find skills from a list of 14 skills. Then they were asked to identify which schools they had the most experience recruiting in the last 5 years (up to 10 schools). Then they rated each school on how its graduates performed on each specific skill.

Alumni ratings are excluded from this report.

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Related Resources:

• The Quick Guide to Admissions Resumes [free guide]
• Why Applicants Should Consider A School’s Soft Skills Training
• B-Schools That Rank for Landing Jobs in Investment Banking