Triumph and Disaster

Some thoughts on the job market

Once a shoo-in for top jobs, newly minted MBAs are now encountering a cooling job marketing with changing priorities. Many candidates are looking for high-pay, low-risk roles that may simply not exist anymore.

Over the past twelve months, we have seen a notable increase in the number of applicants to our GVP and GA CEO-in-training programs. The trend accelerated with applications for our 2025 summer internship programs (which are now closed). Reviewing the applicants was overwhelming not only because of the volume but also because of the quality of candidates. It is humbling to see such incredible people interested in our program. We certainly remember not too long ago, we had a summer internship job opening that got…one applicant. To be fair, we hired that individual and he’s been amazing, but still, the response at the time was not particularly encouraging.

So what has changed? Some of the strength of our current applicant pool could be attributed to Chenmark’s growth and proof of concept in our leadership development program. That said, news this week about trouble in the MBA job market reminded us not to get too self-congratulatory as there are larger forces at play. For instance, a click-bait WSJ article titled “Even Harvard M.B.A.s Are Struggling to Land Jobs" has been making the rounds this week. From the article:

“Twenty-three percent of job-seeking Harvard M.B.A.s who graduated last spring were still looking for work three months after leaving campus. That share is up from 20% the prior year, during a cooling white-collar labor market; the figure was 10% in 2022, according to the school.

The Economist piled on, showing that the trend is not just at Harvard:

“At the top 15 business schools, the share of students in 2024 who sought and accepted a job offer within three months of graduating, a standard measure of career outcomes, fell by six percentage points, to 84%. Compared with the average over the past five years, that share declined by eight points. Some declines are jaw-dropping. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has a decent claim to be the world’s top university. But at its business school, named after Alfred Sloan, a giant of the car industry during the 20th century, the wheels are coming off. During the decade to 2022, on average 82% of its students searching for a job had accepted one at graduation, and 93% had done so three months later. In 2024 those figures were 62% and 77%, respectively. At some elite schools the reality may be even worse than it looks. One professor worries that some students who are counted as entrepreneurs are in fact unemployed. American business may be booming. But those who imagine themselves as its future leaders are suffering a recession.”

Most seem to attribute this trend to a slowdown in hiring from consulting firms (Bain, McKinsey, BCG, etc.) and tech giants (Amazon, Google, and Microsoft). Clearly, the job market is changing. Some firms are pulling back due to previous over-hiring and a newfound focus on efficiency. Artificial intelligence is also starting to reduce the need for some white-collar jobs.

Anecdotally, we think there are some other factors at play. As noted from an HBS Course Catalogue description about a class titled Changing the World: Life Choices of Influential Leaders, "The mission of Harvard Business School is to educate leaders who make a difference in the world. As you prepare to leave HBS, you are likely asking yourself, 'How can I make a real and sustainable difference?'"

While that is great, when one is about to inevitably change the world through inspirational leadership, one tends to have compensation expectations to match. As a result, a lot of MBA candidates seem uninterested in thinking of what something could become, rather than what is right now. So it’s possible there are perfectly acceptable jobs currently available for MBAs that simply don’t fit the high-compensation, low-risk paradigm most MBAs use to evaluate opportunities. We suspect a couple of months of unemployment may cause (ahem, force?) a perspective shift.

For Chenmark, while it’s nice to see strong interest in our open positions, we accept that a lot of this is due to macro forces that are outside of our control. As Rudyard Kipling wisely reminds us, we must “meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same”. Just as we didn’t get too down when nobody was interested in our internships in 2019, we’re not going to get too ahead of ourselves today. The reality is that the opportunity set at Chenmark is basically the same as when we had a lone applicant. So we’ll just keep on trying to fill each unforgiving minute, and hopefully find a few great people who want to come along for the ride.

Have a great week,

Your Chenmark Team

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