One of the biggest motivations, if not the biggest motivation, for applying to graduate school is career enhancement and achievement of professional goals. For many MBAs and some other graduate students, consulting has irresistible appeal. Today it is my distinct pleasure to have on Admissions Straight Talk Keith Bevans, Partner and Global Head of Consulting Recruitment at Bain & Company.

Keith earned his BS and MS in engineering from MIT and an MBA from Harvard. Except for his two years at HBS, Keith has been with Bain since 1996 both as a client-facing consultant and most recently as head of global recruiting.

Can you briefly outline the hiring process at Bain for consultant positions if one is coming from a graduate business school? [1:52]

We first engage with students as part of our Experience Bain programming which is a series of live and virtual events over the summer, before students even arrive on campus, to give them a sense of what we are about, what consulting is about, and what consultants actually do.

In the first year of business school, we are not typically allowed to talk to students in the first 4-6 weeks. So in Sept./Oct. we have a large kick-off event, introducing students to Bain, to some of our consultants, summer associates, and our projects, and they meet a lot of us during that same time. We go through the recruiting process in Oct./Nov. and then interviews are in January. That is how first-year recruiting works.

The same thing happens for second-year students but most of them opt out of summer events since they know us already. For second years, right at the beginning of the semester in September we start recruiting, with October interviews, and offers given out by Thanksgiving.

If someone gets in touch with you the summer before starting business school, are they aiming for an internship that summer or thinking about fulltime employment at the end of that two years? [3:45]

Sometimes both. A lot of times what we find is that summer events aren’t recruiting events, but education events. We want people to learn as much as they can about us early on, so if we are not aligned with their career goals, then they can focus on things that are a better fit once they get to campus. Most are looking for that summer internship, and about 90% of the people who work for us in the summer get an offer and return. So the summer program is a very important onramp. It gets your foot in the door and sets up the strong possibility of an offer.

In an excellent interview on your bio page on the Bain website, you outlined the four qualities Bain looks for in recruits: Problem solving ability, client-facing skills, teamwork, and certain personal characteristics including humility and leadership. Can you unwrap those requirements a bit? Why are they important and where do you find them in the recruiting process? [5:18]

The answer starts with what we are about at Bain. We are about creating client success stories and people success stories. Problem solving ability is about the ability to break down a problem into discreet parts to prove or disprove a hypothesis on each part to come up with an overall answer for what to do next.

It’s not enough to be smarter or more credentialed, or just more self-confident than the people you’re working with. To be effective as a Bain consultant you need to have people skills to inspire clients and be able to present your analysis in a compelling way.