MBA Recruiters Rank Candidates’ ESG Experience Dead Last
Hiring runs counter to overwhelming interest in sustainability among students, schools, and companies.
Visit any major business school these days, and you’ll find students like Juan Adorno. The 31-year-old former product development and strategy worker was drawn to the University of Vermont’s Grossman School of Business for the one-year sustainable innovation MBA it offers and the edge he felt it would give him in the workplace. “As environmental, social, and governance investing has increased in popularity and become so important for asset managers, it became a growing part of my world,” Adorno says. “I’m looking for an organization that is corporately socially responsible, that holds true to its mission, and has a sense of more than profit.”
Responding to the demand from students like Adorno and commitments from companies and investors around diversity and sustainability, Harvard Business School, NYU Stern, Copenhagen Business School, and a clutch of other top universities now offer ESG-focused MBAs or individual classes on topics such as corporate social responsibility (CSR). But even as such coursework is being offered more widely, the people tapping the pool of graduates have yet to give adherence to ESG standards the same priority. In a survey of MBA recruiters conducted by Bloomberg Businessweek last year, 1 in 4 said they valued a candidate’s problem-solving skills most. Following ESG standards was ranked last, with only 1 in every 500 recruiters saying it was the most important skill. It was ranked in the top five by recruiters 1.2% of the time.