Recruiting Our Future Leaders: Women at Bain & Company

Julie Coffman, a self-described Bain & Company ‘lifer’, joined the consulting firm 24 years ago as an undergraduate intern, returning after graduating from Wesleyan and again after getting her MBA at Stanford. As a consultant, her focus is on healthcare organizations, but she has also previously headed up the firm’s North American MBA recruiting efforts. For the last five years she has chaired Bain’s Global Women’s Leadership Council, a role that includes spearheading efforts to recruit more female MBAs and increase their ranks among the firm’s leadership team.

TopMBA.com editor-in-chief Louis Lavelle quizzes her on MBA recruitment at Bain and the drive to address gender imbalance at the top level.

What skills is Bain looking for in your MBA hires? Describe the ideal MBA employee.

When I think about recruiting, and at Bain in particular, I think we need two key elements. They have to be real problem-solvers by nature. The second thing that’s as important, if not more so, is they have to be really good with people – able to listen well, have empathy, that understand how to read points of view and read body language, and understand how we’re going to help clients to take decisions that are hard for them. We also need people with a good dash of humility. They need to have some level of understanding that they are but one piece of the puzzle and not the be-all and end-all all the time. 

Where do you recruit most of your MBAs?

We have a long history of recruiting at a lot of different top MBA schools and we’ve broadened that globally over time as we’ve grown as an organization. We have about a dozen core business schools and about 25 at the undergraduate level. We have great relationships with Kellogg, Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Booth, Michigan, Berkeley and UCLA.

Excluding interns, how many MBAs will you hire this year?

I think we’re going to be north of 400 MBAs this year. We have had robust growth year after year after year across all regions. We’ve got to hire talent to keep up with that growth, so we expect to have a gangbuster recruiting season. To fuel that growth we need to have the talent behind it. 

Among MBAs seeking careers in consulting, Bain is easily one of the most coveted employers. Why is that? What’s the Bain magic?

We work really, really hard at creating an environment and a place to work that people really love being a part of. First and foremost you have to be doing great work. You have to be working for top companies and top executives on their toughest problems. But all the great firms do great work and have great clients. The difference at Bain is that we have an amazingly supportive and engaged culture where each individual employee gets the full potential out of those opportunities.

MBAs from the best programs who land jobs with top-tier consulting firms like Bain typically get offers of about US$125,000 or more. At Bain, do they earn their keep?

Absolutely. We’re in this for the long haul. We’re recruiting our future leaders. They’re going to help create our innovative breakthroughs and our offerings. They’re going to keep people motivated and excited. Ultimately we are investing in the best talent we can find in the hopes that we can continue to prosper and grow. 

In addition to being involved in MBA recruiting, you also head up Bain’s Global Women’s Leadership Council. What is that? 

The one thing we noticed in the last five to seven years is that while we have great numbers in our early years, just like every other professional services firms we’re seeing thinner and thinner numbers [of women] as it gets to the leadership team. We’re trying to understand what it would take to change the composition of our partners and leadership team more broadly, inclusive of managers, to have a much higher percentage of women. That is ultimately why we created the Global Women’s Leadership Council. We know we’re bringing in fantastic leaders at the entry level. What can we do to try to help them aspire to and maintain a longer term career at Bain? That’s ultimately what we’re trying to accomplish.

Bain has been ramping up its efforts to recruit more female MBAs, which now make up about 35% of students at most top programs, with a few notable exceptions such as Wharton. What are you doing to target these candidates?

First and foremost, we realized that a lot of women right off the bat don’t even seem to consider consulting as a viable option. They don’t think they can pursue their life goals or pursue a family and career and everything else at the same time. One of the first things we started to work on was to debunk the myth that consulting is not for women that have other aspirations in life beyond just career. Relationships throughout a student’s time at b-school are really, really important. We’ve been building out our touch points to have early targeting, early relationship building, and to make sure our women candidates get the most well-rounded picture they can about how women at Bain really thrive.

What kind of success have you had so far? What are your goals?

We’re trying to match the gender composition at business schools and we’ve been quite successful in hitting that number. At some schools we overachieve.

Bain’s chairman, Orit Gadiesh, has an MBA from Harvard Business School, and is probably one of the school’s most successful graduates of either gender. Is recruiting more women from top business schools a priority for her?

We believe fundamentally that it’s essential for us to do a better job at this because it’s important to our business. We’re not interested in growing women partners because we’re nice people or think it’s the politically correct thing to do or it’s the right thing to do. What are the biggest risks to our future growth? The number one biggest risk is not doing great work for clients. Our business is a results business. When you tear that down what that really means is that you need to connect with a variety of business leaders and you have to be an effective communicator, empathizer, listener, cajoler, negotiator, what-have-you, in order to get those executives to make tough decisions. More diversity in our talent base, and not just gender diversity, really ups your odds of success of creating a real connection with clients. We believe that’s why getting more women in leadership is helpful. We think it’s good for business.

What do women bring to the table as consultants that men don’t? For a company like Bain, are MBA women a competitive advantage?

On average the research shows that women are better at listening and better at allowing a client to share their point of view and making their more compelling points in a manner that’s a little less threatening. We think that skillset and natural set of tendencies is something we need more of inside our business.

Research by Bloomberg Businessweek has documented that the gender pay gap among MBA graduates has gotten worse in the last decade, largely because of the differing career choices made by male and female graduates. What, if anything, can be done to narrow the gap?

If the highest-paid jobs coming out of MBA school are in private equity, investment banking, consulting or what-have-you, and there’s much more of a male dominance in those roles, it’s up to the industries that have that skew to do something about it. I’m not sure it’s something for schools to worry about per se. A lot of it has to do with how [women] are counseled. What I would look at if I was a school is what is our career center doing, and are we doing all we can do as a career center to nurture the aspirations for women across all the variety of industries or are we channeling them in such a way because we’re presupposing what they want or what they need.