11/21/2019 The Bloomberg Job Skills Report 2016

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The Bloomberg Job Skills Report 2016:

What Recruiters Want
By Francesca Levy and Christopher Cannon
February 9, 2016

Every year we survey the recruiters hunting for top MBA talent to figure out
what attributes are most valued in managers and how the latest crop of
business school graduates stacks up. As part of our latest ranking of
business programs, Bloomberg asked 1,251 job recruiters at 547 companies
about the skills they want but can’t find—and which B-schools are doing
the best job of turning out job-ready graduates.

The skills gap

We asked recruiters which skills they wanted most, and which they had trouble finding.
In the upper-right corner below are truly valuable skills: recruiters want them, but
consider them rare.

Pick an industry: All industries ▼

2014 2015

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LESS COMMON, LESS DESIRED LESS COMMON, MORE DESIRED

A .K. A . ‘THE SWEET SPOT

Leadership
skills Strategic
Adaptability thinking

Creative
problem-solving
Communication
Work skills
experience

Decision-
Risk-taking making

Analytical
thinking
Global
mindset Motivation/
drive

Work
Entrepreneurship collaboratively
Quantitative
skills

MORE COMMON, LESS DESIRED MORE COMMON, MORE DESIRED

Another way of looking at this is by charting the importance and rarity of each skill
across industries. Recruiters picked up to five skills they considered “most important”
and five that were “hardest to find.”

Show how many recruiters called this skill... Most important Hardest to find

All Consulting Energy Health care Pharmaceuticals Technology

Chemicals Consumer Finance Manufacturing Retail Transportation

Communication skills

Analytical thinking

Work collaboratively
Strategic thinking

Leadership skills

Creative problem solving

Motivation/drive

Adaptability
Quantitative skills

Decision-making
Risk-taking
Work experience
Global mindset
Entrepreneurship

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These schools are hitting the sweet spot

Recruiters rated MBA programs on how well their graduates mastered each skill. See
which program’s graduates score highly for each industry’s sought-after skills.

Pick an industry: Consulting ▼

Communication skills Strategic thinking Creative problem-solving

1 USC (Marshall) 1 UT Austin (McCombs) 1 UC Berkeley (Haas)
2 Virginia (Darden) 2 Michigan (Ross) 2 Michigan (Ross)
3 UT Austin (McCombs) 3 Chicago (Booth) 3 Northwestern (Kellogg)

Why are some lists shorter than others? For a school to be matched with a skill here, it had to be scored
by a minimum of eight recruiters in that industry who have experience with the school’s graduates.

How schools stack up

Here’s how 103 business schools scored on a one-to-five scale for teaching each skill.
Bubble sizes vary by number of ratings—recruiters only judged schools they were
familiar with, and skills they cared about.

Pick a skill: Work collaboratively ▼ Sort by: Score Alphabetical

Size reflects number of recruiters scoring a school

Each school, in depth

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11/21/2019 The Bloomberg Job Skills Report 2016

Pick a school to see how (and how many) recruiters rated it for a specific skill, within
each industry.

Choose one each: American (Kogod) ▼ Financial services ▼

1 2 3 4 5 Mean score
3.10

Sub-total: 0 Sub-total: 1 Sub-total: 7 Sub-total: 2 Sub-total: 0 Total: 10

Methodology
The source of the data in this report is Bloomberg’s employer survey, which was
conducted as part of our 2015 Full-Time MBA Rankings. The survey was conducted in
partnership with Cambria Consulting between June and August 2015. For this report, we
focused on recruiters in the 11 industries with the most responses, for a total sample size
of 1,251. Below is a breakdown of all of the recruiters we surveyed, by industry.

We used data from recruiters industries with the most responses. That resulted in a
slightly smaller sample than the one used for our rankings (From 1,461 recruiters in 26
industries, to 1,251 recruiters in 11 industries).
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11/21/2019 The Bloomberg Job Skills Report 2016

To qualify to take our survey, respondents had to have recent MBA recruiting
experience. We also asked them to pick, from a list of 14 skills, the five most important,
and the five hardest to find, when recruiting MBAs. We also asked them to identify up to
10 schools at which they had significant recruiting experience in the last five years.

Recruiters then rated, on a scale of one to five, how well these schools’ graduates
performed on the specific skills they identified. These scores comprise the findings in
this report.

We define “sweet spots” as the skills that the largest numbers of recruiters within each
industry listed as both highly desired and hard to find.

It is common for MBA alumni to take up the task of recruiting from their alma mater for
their employer. However, alumni tended to rate their own school significantly more
favorably than non-alumni rating that school; while some schools in our rankings had
many alumni in the employer survey, others had zero. To correct for this imbalance, we
excluded alumni ratings from this report.

Reported and written by: Francesca Levy and Jonathan Rodkin

Graphics: Christopher Cannon, Julian Burgess and Blacki Migliozzi

Source: Bloomberg

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