Top MBA Recruiters: Starbucks
American coffee behemoth and casual status symbol Starbucks has become one of the most well-known companies in the world with over 27,000 stores and a massive headquarters located in Seattle, Washington. The company is known its quality service, customizable drinks, and pre-packaged items. As it continues to grow, so does the appeal for a Starbucks corporate career.
The company got its start in 1971 when the first store was opened in the Pacific Northwest. However, it wouldn’t be until 1987, when Howard Schultz took over and re-branded the company that they would open their first location outside of Seattle. By 1989, it had 46 stores and were roasting over two million pounds of coffee.
In 1992, Starbucks released its initial public offering (IPO) with a revenue of $73.5 million and a market value of $271 million. By the end of the year, the share price had risen over 100 times the earnings per share of the previous year. Now, the company earns more than $22.3 billion per year and employs over 238,000 people worldwide.
You can’t talk about Starbucks without talking about the location of its headquarters in Seattle. Located in the city’s SoDo neighborhood, Starbucks can be found in the largest multi-tenant building in the city with over 2,200,000 square feet of space. But while the building is impressive, it’s the city that really stands out.
Washington was ranked as “America’s Top State for Business in 2017,” by CNBC, and Seattle is the city to be in. According to Outside Magazine, Seattle is one “America’s Best Towns Ever,” and a PWC survey considers it one of the nation’s most innovative cities. There’s much to love about Seattle from its opportunities for adventure, laid-back culture, and strong economy, which grew 3.7 percent last year—almost 2.5 times the national average.
MBA Recruiting at Starbucks
Starbucks is a major MBA recruiter. It looks for MBA students who understand who Starbucks is as a company. As well, it recommends reading former CEO Howard Schultz’s book, Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul and following the company on social media including LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. The company wants to know why you want to be a part of it and how you fit in with the Starbucks Mission Statement.
Other required qualities include:
- Strong analytical and technical skills
- Ability to analyze business trends
- A strong team player who can collaborate cross-functionally
- Strong interpersonal skills
- Great communication skills orally and in writing
- Strong organizational and problem-solving abilities
- Ability to balance priorities and meet deadlines
You may also be required to have a deep understanding of financial planning, forecasting, and inventory management. You should also have a strong understanding of marketing fundamentals and be able to understand sales, return on investments, and profit and loss.
As for where Starbucks recruits, many MBA programs feed into the company including:
- The University of Washington Foster School of Business
- Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business
- The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania
- Arizona State University’s W. P. Carey School of Business
- The University of Michigan Ross School of Business
Salary & Benefits of Starbucks Employment
According to PayScale, MBAs hired at Starbucks are paid well:
- Master of Business Administration (MBA), Business Administration – $128,500
- Master of Business Administration (MBA), Accounting – $65,111
- Master of Business Administration (MBA), Marketing – $109,823
- Master of Business Administration (MBA), General Business – $89,000
- Master of Business Administration (MBA), Global Management – $77,419
As for benefits, Starbucks offers a tailored benefits package that’s called “Your Special Blend,” which includes Medical, Dental and Vision coverage as well as life insurance, disability, adoption assistance, paid vacation, a 401(k) Savings Plan, stock investment, one free pound of coffee per week, and more. There are also perks that include in-store merchandise discounts, matching gifts programs, etc.
Interning at Starbucks
Every year, Starbucks offers an exclusive ten-week internship program in Seattle that is designed to provide a robust and meaningful experience. MBA students who are chosen to participate can expect to participate in high-impact, business relevant projects that have well-defined goals and expectations. Interns also have access to mentorship and leadership opportunities. Graduate internship applications open from January to February each year for the summer program.
According to Peter Kazarian, a ’16 UW Foster MBA graduate who interned at Starbucks, the intern program is very deliberate and well laid out.
“With part MBAs and the rest technical and undergrad interns, there was a formal on-boarding program, weekly meetings with SVP/C-suite leadership, and great experiences like a Sounders game or fancy catered dinners at museums,” Kazarian explained in a blog. “My department was under the Channel Development arm of Starbucks, which included consumer packaged goods and anything else not in a Starbucks retail store, like grocery bottled fB2brappuccinos, licensed stores, and in my case, bulk B2B customers like airlines, hotel chains, restaurants, and campus cafes. As part of the Digital and Loyalty team, my main project involved e-commerce enhancements to our B2B team’s website, and forecasting new sales revenue and cost savings from these changes.”
As for what Kazarian enjoyed most about his experience, he enjoyed the free pound of coffee each week. He also loved getting to know his fellow MBAs who are now good friends of his. “I had a great experience … and I’ll be returning to Starbucks … as a Product Manager,” he said.
The Pacific Northwest MBA Conference Arrives April 21, 2018
On Saturday, April 21, 2018, the annual Pacific Northwest MBA Conference will be held at the T-Mobile HQ in Factoria, Bellevue, hosting an array of talented, experienced MBA professionals, recruiters, and executives together in a one-of-a-kind networking opportunity.
The Value of Choosing a Research-Focused MBA Program at UW Foster
How important is faculty research to choosing your MBA program? Should you care if you go to a research university or is it all just white smoke? Is there value in choosing a research-focused MBA program?
We know that faculty matter. According to a paper written by researchers at Indiana University and Michigan State University titled “Faculty Do Matter: The Role of College Faculty in Student Learning and Engagement,” faculty have a significant impact on student learning and the overall educational experience.
“The impact that a faculty member can have on the student experience can be seen in and out of the classroom,” the study explained. “We found that faculty behaviors and attitudes affect students profoundly, which suggests that faculty members may play the single-most important role in student learning.”
But what about faculty research, is it important? Continue reading…
20 Cities Survive Amazon HQ2 Shortlist
Four months after Amazon announced plans to construct a second headquarters, North American cities have been making grandstanding pleas in order to court the ecommerce behemoth. New York City’s mayoral office lit up the Empire State building with Amazon’s glowing orange hue in a symbolic gesture, while certain cities like Chicago went the more extreme route, proposing laws that could funnel income taxes directly back to the company. After much speculation, here is the official Amazon HQ2 shortlist:
- Atlanta
- Austin
- Boston
- Chicago
- Columbus, Ohio
- Dallas
- Denver
- Indianapolis
- Los Angeles
- Miami
- Montgomery County, Md.
- Nashville
- Newark
- New York
- Northern Virginia
- Philadelphia
- Pittsburgh
- Raleigh, N.C.
- Toronto
- Washington, D.C.
Unsurprisingly, most of the cities that made the cut were among the largest in North America, with only one Canadian city—Toronto—left standing. Over 230 cities from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico made official bids for the company’s second headquarters, with Amazon prioritizing tech-centric metros of populations larger than 500,000. In fact, only four of the 20 metro areas—Miami, Nashville, Newark, and Pittsburgh—have a population of less than half a million, with Newark being the smallest of the entrants. Notably, Newark offered perhaps the largest financial incentive to the company, proposing upwards of $7 billion in tax incentives.
How the Amazon HQ2 shortlist was formed is not totally known, according to the New York Times:
“According to people briefed on the process who would speak only anonymously because the deliberations were private, the process was conducted by a team of about a dozen people within Amazon, including economists, human resources managers and executives who oversee real estate. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive who was the mastermind behind turning the search into a public process and coined the term “HQ2,” was also involved, the people said.”
At the time of the initial announcement, Amazon released a stream of positive economic statistics about its impact in Seattle, home to the original headquarters. The company stated (although these statistics are still not yet verified by any source outside of Amazon) that it added $38 billion USD to the value of the city from 2010-16 alone, due to its investments and rapidly expanding workforce. Detractors argue that the financial value added to the city did not positively impact the quality of life, however, with more than 51 percent of Seattle residents making less than $50,000 per year and more than quarter of city residents earn less than $25,000 per year. The influx of high-level employment also contributed to rapidly rising housing costs and poorer traffic.
Experts from CNBC believe that Raleigh might be the front-runner of the remaining entrants, which matches the initial bid criteria the most. Although some speculate that Austin most aligns up with Amazon’s future. The company declined to announce when the final decision will be made.
What Amazon Means For MBA Students
Not so secretly, Amazon has become one of the world’s largest MBA recruiters, hiring students from top schools all over the world. We’ve previously outlined the details of why it has become such an attractive destination for business school students.
The company creates a direct pipeline from its MBA internship program to full-time employment, which should rapidly increase with the creation of HQ2. In a previous interview with the Financial Times, Miriam Park, the Amazon Director of University Programs, highlighted the company’s recruitment strategy:
“The Amazon recruitment process is designed to ensure we hire top candidates with high-growth potential whatever their background may be. As part of this we recruit current MBA students and MBA alumni for permanent and internship opportunities worldwide and see MBAs as an important part of our leadership development. We value people who can balance long-term strategic thinking with tactical execution, and who have the ability to make data-driven decisions.”
Stay tuned for more information about the second headquarters and more potential MBA employment opportunities with MetroMBA.
Stanford International Students Stay Home, Take Study Trip of Middle America
Amidst this divisive political moment, coastal dwellers have begun to reconsider the culture and future of what many might have once condescendingly referred to as “fly-over country.” Stanford recently published an article about some outside-the-box economic strategies currently underway to revitalize the Rust Belt.
After leading study abroad trips to Seoul and Shanghai, Matt Mascioli, MBA ’17, wanted to show off a part of America that folks “don’t typically see on the coasts.” Mascioli co-led 18 international students on a Global Study Trip that included Detroit, Pittsburgh, Charleston, North Carolina, and his native state of West Virginia.
“It’s a tremendous opportunity to lead peers into a place that most of them have never been, and to lead them in learning from a different perspective.”
In Detroit, Mascioli met with the mayor’s jobs and economy team where they learned about the city’s extensive development plans, which include replacing 100,000 vacant homes—a byproduct of a decade of white flight—with public spaces.
For the more rural portion of the trip, Mascioli partnered with two of West Virginia’s “leading economic thinkers,” WVU’s John Deskins and Stephen Spence from WV’s Department of Commerce to give Global Study students a bird’s-eye view of the problems facing the state. Mascioli explains that having locals “devoted to thinking about what is the economic future of that region” is important to clarifying a place’s seemingly impenetrable logic for outsiders. He elaborates:
“It’s easy to assume from the outside that there’s zero rationale about how people are thinking. But once you’re on the ground and get to know people and organizations, oftentimes, it makes a lot more sense.”
Alumni Spotlight: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella – University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Once a ferocious beast in the kingdom of tech with massive product launches and Antitrust sagas, it could be argued that Microsoft has spent the first two decades of the 21st century in search of solid ground. The Steve Balmer era, which focused on “devices and services,” brought us the Xbox, the Surface, and the acquisitions of Skype and Linkedin. Wired posits that the fall of Microsoft “stems from its attempts to lock users into its products by refusing to work with competitors,” coupled with a series of “me-too hardware products,” like the Zune and the Kin. There’s also Bing and MSN, which are practically non-entities compared to their competition.
In the last three years, CEO Satya Nadella has been a relevatory savior for the company, spearheading a massive pivot away away from hardware and toward cloud computing and AI. So far, so good. Company shares reached record highs since 1999 and its cloud is valued at a $14 billion annual run rate, which places Microsoft neck and neck with Amazon Web Services, if you include Microsoft Office 365. That said, Nadella remains unphased by the numbers, as he tells the Economist, “When you have a core that’s growing at more than 20 percent, that is when the rot really sets in.”
Let’s take a deeper dive to find out more about Nadella’s past, present, and future.
Learning at Chicago Booth
Nadella’s tenure at Microsoft is inextricably linked with his University of Chicago Booth School of Business education. In fact he started both at the exact same time, in 1992. Instead of opting out of one for the other, he enrolled in Booth’s Weekend MBA program and flew from Seattle to Chicago every weekend for two-and-a-half years.
Nadella believes his Booth MBA was instrumental in giving him the “knowledge and confidence to tackle complex questions at the intersection of business and technology,” according to a UChicago profile. Nadella cites Steven Kaplan’s entrepreneurial finance class as particularly influential on his ability to “evaluate new business opportunities at Microsoft.” On Nadella, Kaplan spoke highly: “He can take a situation and analyze and articulate the issues involved. He can both write well and understand the case quantitatively.”
Wired traces Nadella’s “clarity of vision and empathetic listening style” to his firstborn son Zain’s cerebral palsy, which helped Nadella “see beyond himself and compelled him to force-rank his daily priorities so that he could meet his son’s needs and still perform his job—the same skill so necessary to effective management.” He tells Wired:
“I think back to how I thought about work before and after, and this notion of the words you say and what they can do to the other person. How can you really change the energy around you? It’s a thing that started building in me, and I started exercising it in my day job. It made a lot of difference to how I felt when I went back home. So much of it is mental attitude.”
Early Days at Microsoft
In 2015, Nadella told UChicago Booth Magazine, “Having grown up in the company, what is it 23 years or so, I always come back to the very first thing Microsoft did, the BASIC interpreter. It was this notion of empowering others to do great things.”
Nadella progressed quickly through company ranks. His first major notch on his belt was Windows NT but played significant technical roles in Bing, MSN, and Microsoft’s advertising systems. UChicago Booth Magazine pinpoints Nadella’s real contribution to the company during his tenure of Executive VP of cloud and enterprise businesses.
“At Microsoft, Nadella is navigating a rapidly shifting technology landscape, in which customers have been moving away from traditional desktop computers, toward nimbler mobile platforms such as tablets and smartphones.” Nadella says, “The only way you’re going to have that mobility of the human experience—not the device—is by having cloud orchestrate the movement.”
CEO
When the Nadella era began, he publicly invoked Nietzsche when he said Microsoft must have “courage in the face of reality,” according to Wired. His approach to steering Microsoft is nothing if not rooted in reality. Wired compared his Microsoft strategy to those of “the Silicon Valley startups that have eclipsed it” in which the change is cultural, not just organizational. The Economist writes that Microsoft is much more of a “full stack” firm, in which it “not only writes all kinds of software, but builds its own data centers and designs its own hardware.”
Nadella tells UChicago Booth Magazine, “My vision is to take that productivity and empowerment of individuals and organizations and express it in this new world, which is mobile-first, cloud-first.”
Nadella jettisoned the company’s R&D process in favor of a more transparent, open-ended model, which is perhaps in response to such New Coke-style abominations as the Microsoft Courier. He encourages execs to work with people outside their divisions, whose lines of demarcation have become increasingly ambiguous.
He’s pushing engineers and researchers from disparate parts of Microsoft to work more closely together—even wrangling Bill Gates back into the saddle as a part-time technical adviser to motivate his team. “When I say, ‘Hey, I want you to go run this by Bill,’ I know they’re going to do their best job prepping for it,” he tells Wired. Nadella described Microsoft’s Skype Translator, which offers real-time translation of multilingual chats, as the apotheosis of his cooperative company-wide strategy.
The Future
Nadella tells UChicago Booth that his overarching vision for Microsoft is to adapt to the dialogue between culture and technology but to push for a more productive, harmonious conversation. In March, Nadella shared his vision for a new “platform-neutral” Microsoft with the announcement that the company would soon launch Word, Excel, and PowerPoint editions for the iPad.
“Technology has always led us to have better lives [but] you can measure whether you’re doing anything useful. Do you feel a little stretched? If not, there’s something wrong.”
