Hiring someone to manage your application timeline, to give you guidance, inspiration, and feedback on your application materials, and coach you through your application forms and interviews should make the process of applying to top MBA programs easier.
However, if you’ve spent time researching MBA admissions consulting companies, you probably know by now that the process of shopping for an admissions consultant can become needlessly complicated.
Before you hire any admissions consultant, ask them these important questions to separate the service they actually provide from the marketing they use to justify it.
If you’re looking for an admissions consultant to help you create your best application for business school, it’s important to consider what backgrounds will be genuinely useful in doing so.
While there are many prerequisites for an MBA degree, writing skills is not typically one of them.
For this reason, a graduate business degree does not make someone more qualified to help you craft your application.
The same goes for AdCom experience.
Even though admissions officers have a talent for spotting applicants who will be very successful post-MBA, this talent often does not translate into creating winning applications.
If you’re looking to hire an MBA admissions consultant, chances are you aren’t totally confident in your ability to write the most compelling case for your candidacy—especially when being compared to so many other gifted and talented applicants.
That’s why an MBA admissions consultant’s primary skills should be in writing, storytelling, and in understanding who you are beyond your work experience and career ambitions. Don’t be swayed by flashy qualifications over the substantive experience that is required to make your application sing.
For most people, the months leading up to submitting their MBA applications tend to be hectic. If you’re working long days and managing responsibilities outside of work, your schedule is probably packed tight. Your admissions consultant should be available to work on your schedule—not the other way around.
This is why you should look for full-time MBA admissions consultants. When you’re approaching your deadlines, you will want to know that your admissions consultant is right there with you. So before you hire a consultant, you should discern whether this is their primary career—or simply a side-hustle.
If an admissions consulting company attempts to get you to commit to their service before you get a chance to meet your coach, take it as a massive red flag.
The rapport between a coach and a client is paramount when working on your applications. They will come to learn so much about your personal life, your career, your goals, and your weaknesses, so you want to be sure that you can trust them and get along with them throughout the duration of the application process.
Further, you should feel confident that your admissions consultant has a strategy for your application, and you should have a chance to ask them questions about that strategy before you sign up.
The approach your admissions consultant takes when responding to this question will tell you an awful lot about their service.
We’ve heard reports from clients of MBA admissions consulting companies that will try to “beat you up” about your test scores and career profile in order to convince you that your only hope is to go with their service.
We’ve also heard of admissions consulting firms taking the opposite approach: being overly optimistic, attempting to sell you a fantasy that their service makes it easy to get into the most selective programs.
Your prospective admissions consultant should be able to give you a realistic measure of the strength of your profile, as well as the steps it will take to boost it in the eyes of the admissions committee—without sugarcoating your prospects or dashing your confidence.
At Menlo Coaching, the vast majority of our clients get into one or more of their target MBA programs, and you can find video testimonials of real people reflecting on their experience on our Client Stories hub. To us, real, recent testimonials are the only measure of success you can trust.
And yet, even though we make no secret of our disdain for purported “success rates,” if an admissions consulting firm does advertise their success rate, it’s worthwhile to figure out how they measure success.
In order to calculate a high (90%+) success rate, there are a number of ways an admissions consulting company can inflate their figures. They can convince very competitive applicants to apply to less competitive schools or they can take on only “clear admits.” No one audits these numbers, and, more importantly, a company’s success rate has no meaningful correlation to how likely you are to win admission to your target program if you decide to go with their service.
Be very skeptical about any admissions consulting company that touts a success rate that suggests their service is a surefire means of getting through to HBS or Stanford GSB.
(Read more about the problem with success rates and guarantees here).
Some admissions consulting firms limit your contact with a coach to email, which is not a very effective method of communicating important parts of your story and your background: it’s very easy to miss key elements of your unique profile if your coach isn’t actually getting to know you.
Meeting with your coach face-to-face will allow you to establish trust and build a connection, develop a schedule and strategy, and ask important questions that occur to you only when delving deeper both into the application itself and to the wider MBA landscape. It is also the only certain way to ensure that your coach isn’t outsourcing elements of your application.
We don’t recommend signing up with a coach unless you can meet them somewhat regularly.
One thing to watch out for is whether your coach will try push the work on you by making you fill out lengthy intake documents. Your coach should want to take the time to get to know you personally—not from a piece of paper.
On the other hand, some admissions consulting companies work with applications platforms, which can make the process of communicating with your coach and organizing the materials you need for each school a lot easier.
It’s important to understand what you’re signing up for, so be aware of what tools your admissions consultant intends to use and whether they will actually help you—or if technology is substituting for coaching.
Working with the right admissions consultant can take a lot of stress out of the arduous process of applying for MBA programs, but working with the wrong coach can make the process even more stressful. These questions should help you filter out the MBA admissions consultants that aren’t likely to fulfill your needs.
Happy Shopping!
