Getting Hired at a Startup – How Business Schools Help and Resources to Get Started

What Are Top MBA Programs Doing About Startup Recruiting?

Top MBA programs focusing heavily on entrepreneurship curricula

Classes on data science, entry-level programming, value proposition discovery, and entrepreneurial finance abound. At Chicago Booth, long known as a finance hub, entrepreneurship is now the #1 concentration.

MIT Sloan, HBS, Booth, Stanford, Haas, McCombs – all have startup accelerators in-house with hundreds of thousands in prizes.

Wharton has an executive option for a semester in San Francisco. An astounding 14% of Stanford MBA grads start companies right away, with a much larger percentage working at other nascent companies in non-founding roles.

Establishing relationships with hot companies

Later-stage private companies like Airbnb, Nerdwallet have rolled out MBA internship programs. Hundreds if not thousands of applications are submitted for usually few spots. Job postings at Wharton from startups increased from 130 to 400+ in just a year, according to Poets & Quants.

Must-Know Resources for MBAs Recruiting for Startups

AngelList

A job search and social networking platform in one, it’s kind of like LinkedIn for the startup world. Create a profile and you can monitor various opportunities in your preferred locations.

LaunchTicker

A simple daily email digest that’s great for staying on top of the startup world. One strategy some MBAs follow is to pick some industries and monitor funding announcements – chances are companies raising money are also hiring in droves.

Crunchbase

The Library of Alexandria for startups and VCs. Research funding rounds for any company, research founders names and roles, check out acquisition history.

CB Insights

Produces a data portal for privately-held companies used by analysts and investors. More importantly, sends out a daily (hilarious) newsletter, full of irreverent commentary and fantastic visual industry summaries.

LinkedIn (do we even need to link this?)

Despite the new and not-improved interface, it’s still an incredibly useful tool for career research. Here’s your link. If you don’t have a LinkedIn profile already as an MBA, we’re not entirely sure how you got this far.

Medium

Startups (including us) LOVE talking about themselves on this popular blogging platform. Follow people in your target industry, comment and share their stuff, eventually you might build a rapport. It’s also a low-barrier way to start your own blog, like this Booth MBA did as she was aiming to get into VC.

TransparentCareer

Pardon the shameless plug at this point, but we DO have the most comprehensive database of MBA-specific career data and jobs on our platform. Contact us if you need some custom data to help you navigate your startup journey.

Want more info on working at startups? Check out our articles on startup salaries, and our MBA/Startup Overview.

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