The MBAs At Google, Apple & Facebook

As Wall Street hiring of MBAs has fallen in recent years, much of the slack has been taken up by the high tech firms. These days, it’s a rare business school that doesn’t ship a contingent of MBA students to Silicon Valley to both shop its graduates and learn from leading companies in the tech field.

Much of the newfound interest in tech is a function of growth: Google, Apple, Amazon and their ilk are among the fastest growing and innovative companies in the world. Their appetite for hiring young talent is immense and so are the career opportunities for freshly minted MBAs.

The attraction is mutual. As Read McNamara, managing director of the career management center at Vanderbilt University’s Owen School of Management, sees it, “A lot of interest has to do with the environment of tech firms. It’s viewed by MBAs as youthful, dynamic, high energy, and flexible. MBA students see young people rise very quickly through the ranks of these companies, and they see people being given tasks and turned loose. That’s very enticing.”

INTEREST IN TECH OFTEN HAS TO DO WITH ENTREPRENEURIAL INTENTIONS LATER

Amazon, a voracious recruiter of MBA talent in recent years, is now the top employer of Owen MBAs. The commerce giant, which has a fulfillment center ten miles outside Nashville, made offers to 15 grads last year and landed 13 of them. “A lot of the internet among students headed to tech is with the eventual intention of starting their own businesses down the road,” adds McNamara, who now makes four trips to the San Francisco Bay Area to forge better relationships with tech companies for Owen’s students.

Business school employment reports clear show the trend. One school after another is reporting that an increasing percentage of their MBAs is taking jobs in the tech sector. But those one-year snapshots of the MBA job market are only somewhat helpful. It’s also interesting to see which schools have been successful with the leading tech firms over several years.

That’s one of the reasons we analyzed the member profiles on LinkedIn to come up with a list of MBAs from the top 25 U.S. business schools who are employed by nine of the world’s leading tech players, from Google, Apple and Amazon to IBM, Intel and Samsung. We’ve also looked at MBA employment at some of the super hot companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Linked.

MORE OFTEN THAN NOT, GEOGRAPHY IS DESTINY

Though hardly definitive, searches of LinkedIn’s database provide a fascinating and fairly accurate glimpse at what you could call the “market penetration” of a school’s MBAs in any one firm. Sure, not everyone has a profile on LinkedIn, though people who fail to list with the world’s number one professional network are certainly in the minority at this point. It’s also possible that LinkedIn’s search algorithm could be slightly askew and count undergraduate business majors from schools such as the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School which boasts a large undergrad program. In any case, we think the results are worth a look–and we think you’ll find them quite compelling.

When it comes to MBA hiring in tech, geography is often destiny. The location of the University of Washington’s Foster School in Seattle has a lot to do with the fact that Microsoft employs more MBAs from Foster (889 by LinkedIn’s count) than any other business school. UC-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business has 135 MBAs at Intel, outdistancing every other rival. In contrast, Dartmouth Tuck, which annually graduates about the same number of MBAs as Haas, has just a dozen MBAs at Intel.

Or take a look at how many alums work for Dell from the University of Texas’ McCombs School of Business: a whopping 528 grads. McCombs’ Austin campus is just a 21-minute drive to Round Rock, home to Dell’s corporate headquarters. With nearly identical sized classes, Tuck has 15 MBAs at Dell, according to LinkedIn. But then, Tuck is nearly 2,000 miles away from Round Rock–not 19 miles as Austin is.

It’s also no accident, however, that Duke University’s Fuqua School has 47 MBAs on the payroll at Apple, not all that far off from Stanford’s 55 MBAs, even though Stanford is in Apple’s backyard. How come?  Well, it helps that Steve Job’s successor, CEO Tim Cook, who graduated from Fuqua’s evening Executive MBA program in 1988.

And guess which school dominates the MBA crowd at Facebook, where Harvard MBA Sheryl Sandberg is chief operating officer? Harvard, of course. By LinkedIn’s count, there are 38 HBS grads at Facebook–slightly more than the 35 from Berkeley, the 32 from Stanford, or the 30 from Wharton.

ONE SURPRISE: AT GOOGLE, KELLOGG MBAs OUTNUMBER STANFORD MBAs 

When it comes to the top three tech firms that MBAs most want to work for today–Google, Apple and Amazon–it pays to go with brand and geography. LinkedIn data shows that the single biggest chunk of MBAs at Google comes from UC-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, with 286 grads on the payroll. Surprisingly, given both its location in Philadelphia and its more primary focus on finance, Wharton is next, with 267 alums. Then comes Harvard Business School, with 226 MBAs, including Gretchen Howard, a 2002 alum who is director of global brand solutions and innovation.

Another shocker: Even Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management has more MBAs at Google than nearby Stanford: 170 to 162. At least, that’s what LinkedIn’s member profiles show.

After the University of Washington’s dominance in MBA employees at Amazon (there are 372 Foster grads), the University of Michigan’s Ross School shows up as a favorite. Some 177 Ross alums work for Amazon, followed by 124 from Kellogg, 120 from Wharton, and 104 from Harvard Business School. As for Apple, the only business school in triple digits is UC-Berkeley, with 129 MBAs. Harvard, with its substantially larger class sizes than Stanford, actually has more MBAs at Apple: 77 HBS grads vs. 55 GSB grads. In fact, even Texas’ McCombs and Kellogg has more alums at Apple than Stanford, 72 and 68, respectively.

IBM REMAINS A MASSIVE EMPLOYER OF MBA TALENT

Size matters–so does longevity. The single biggest tech employer of MBAs is good, old IBM in Armonk, N.Y. The company has been recruiting MBAs for so long in so many disciplines that it has thousands on the payroll. According to LinkedIn, some 361 MBAs from Harvard work for Big Blue, more than any other single tech company. IBM also has more than 200 MBAs on its payroll from each of the following schools: Wharton, Kellogg, Fuqua, Stern, Kenan-Flagler, and McCombs. It has more than 100 MBAs each from Booth, Sloan, Columbia, Johnson, Ross, Anderson, Tepper, and Goizueta.

Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems are also big MBA employers. HP boasts 114 Harvard Business School MBAs, including CEO Meg Whitman, a 1979 alumnus, and Executive Vice President for Human Resources Tracy Keough, a 1994 HBS alum. But there are also more than 100 MBAs from Wharton, Kellogg, and Haas at Hewlett-Packard. And at Cisco, where CEO John Chambers has an MBA from Indiana University, there’s more than 100 MBAs from Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Kellogg, and Haas (see table below).

MBAs From Top 25 Schools Who Work

For The Leading Tech Companies

Source: LinkedIn member profiles as of Jan. 24, 2014

(See following page for MBAs at more tech companies, including Intel, Dell, Facebook and Yahoo)

MBAs From Top 25 Schools Who Work

For The Leading Tech Companies

Source: LinkedIn member profiles as of Jan. 24, 2014

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