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Another Thing Amazon Is Disrupting: Business-School Recruiting (foxbusiness.com) 42

An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon, disrupter of industries from book selling to grocery shopping, has found its latest sector to upend -- recruiting at the nation's elite business schools. The Seattle-based retail giant is now the top recruiter at the business schools of Carnegie Mellon University, Duke University and University of California, Berkeley. It is the biggest internship destination for first-year M.B.A.s at the University of Michigan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dartmouth College and Duke. Amazon took in more interns from the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business than either Bain & Co. or McKinsey & Co., which were until recently among the school's top hirers of interns, according to Madhav Rajan, Booth's dean. All told, Amazon has hired some 1,000 M.B.A.s in the past year, according to Miriam Park, Amazon's director of university programs -- a drop in the bucket for a company that plans to add 50,000 software developers in the next year. But Amazon's flood-the-zone approach to recruiting and hiring future M.B.A.s -- in some cases before they have taken a single business-school course -- is feeding the career frenzy on campus and rankling some rival recruiters. The talent wars begin even before classes do. This past June, Amazon sponsored an event at its Seattle headquarters for 650 soon-to-be first-year and returning women M.B.A. students, some of whom left the event with internship offers for summer 2018.
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Another Thing Amazon Is Disrupting: Business-School Recruiting

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  • So... 50k developers sounded like an awful lot, according to Wikipedia that is more than currently work at Microsoft headquarters. And that'd be on top of whatever they already have... big plans from Amazon I guess?
    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Amazon tries to recruit me all the time so I guess their standards aren't so high.

    • Not sure what they're hoping for. They've become a running gag around my workplace, what with us each getting contacted by Amazon recruiters every few weeks. The requests get trashed without further consideration by the vast majority of us, since none of us have heard good things about working at Amazon. After hearing about an MBA hiring spree, I suspect that even fewer of us would be inclined to join their ranks.

      • I've read articles about how bad the warehouses are, not seen anything about the white collar jobs. I guess if you want in management it would take less backstabbing than usual to climb the ladder with such rapid growth.
        • There were several horror stories in the last year or two from folks in white collar positions.

          I remember hearing one in particular about the working conditions surrounding the team that developed the Amazon Fire Phone and how they were grossly mistreated by their management and the executives. And at the end of it all, a lot of them were simply laid off after putting in crazy hours and sacrificing a lot to make that product happen, because the product failed to take off in the market for reasons out of the

    • Couldn't they have 50k people take orders on the phone and write down the orders on paper pads? Why the website?
      • Yeah that's why I was so surprised... I can't fathom what they're going to put all that labor towards.
  • Sell Your Stock (Score:5, Informative)

    by Thelasko ( 1196535 ) on Thursday October 05, 2017 @03:37PM (#55317605) Journal
    All of those MBA's are going to destroy the company with their "case studies" (i.e. anecdotes), buzzwords, and group-think.
    • What are they even going to do with all of those MBA's? A large company has use for maybe two dozen. They are all management, so they aren't producing product. By definition they will be overhead, which is bad for the bottom line. In theory, the return on investment for MBA's is improved efficiency. However, the diminishing return curve is very steep.

      Unless, Amazon is starting a business consulting division...
  • MBA will hurt them and drive 100 hour work weeks out of the tech team for 70K/year jobs bay area and 50-60K in the HQ 2 in a cheap to live area.

  • They're recruiting a lot of people. Is that really disruption? I thought that meant doing something radically different and new.

    • by swb ( 14022 )

      Maybe it's their methods -- throw a ton of money at the top 25% of MBA candidates for internships and see what sticks. You gain a database of these people and presumably a fair percentage actually take the internship, so you get to test drive them, too.

      Do this for 5 years and you have a pretty good idea of who's worth a damn in senior leadership positions for the next 20 years.

    • They're recruiting a lot of people. Is that really disruption? I thought that meant doing something radically different and new.

      The article uses disruption in an inaccurate, buzzwordy way, perhaps it's some sort of subtle dig at MBA-speak?

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday October 05, 2017 @04:42PM (#55318051)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by Anonymous Coward

    All told, Amazon has hired some 1,000 M.B.A.s

    Wow, all that managerial incompetence in one place should bring anything good at Amazon to a screeching halt.

    Just think, thousands of idiots straight out of school with no proven ability, no experience in any actual field of work, and all making the same moronic assumptions they all learned in school but otherwise know nothing about.

    Christ, send a fucking 1000 MBAs to China and you could probably cripple their entire economy. Because nobody know less about runni

  • Would be nice if this happened at less selective schools, versus the near-Ivy ones.
  • I've been from coast to coast in search of a reasonable businessman, but they've all had condition MBA and are suffering for it.

    If you can cure that, I'm sure a cure for many other conditions can't be far behind. If you unleash all that monkey power onto all those keyboards, we'll surely have enough employment candidates to spice up all the markets - after all, I can count on one hand the number of MBAs I've met who can read an email, much less respond to it. A cure for that can only be to the benefit of

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