Amazon is named the biggest US graduate employer in technology

The American electronic commerce and cloud computing company, Amazon, has been named the tech industry’s biggest employer of elite business school graduates in the US, according to recent figures.

Data from schools featured in the Top 20 of the U.S. News & World Report’s Best Graduate Schools for Business 2016 has revealed Amazon to be America’s largest graduate employer, taking on twice as many high-achieving MBAs last year than Microsoft – the second biggest employer in technology in the US.

While international consulting firms such as Deloitte and McKinsey remain the single biggest employers, Amazon takes the lead in terms of hiring statistics at a number of prestigious business schools. The University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, for example, saw 34 qualified MBAs hired by Amazon in 2015, whereas consulting giant McKinsey only hired 22 Ross School graduates last year.

Amazon’s Seattle-based headquarters also took the lead in summer internships at Michigan, with a considerable number of candidates being offered full-time paid positions upon successful completion of the internship period.

“At Amazon, opportunities to move, grow and take on new challenges are abundant,” wrote Maria Renz, vice president of Amazon, in Re/code last year. “Our dynamic environment – where there is no shortage of interesting problems to solve or opportunities to build – is what has kept me here for so long. Amazon encourages employees to create their own career paths, and we have great flexibility to move between departments and roles.”

Among the elite business schools that do not release data concerning graduate destinations, including Harvard and The Stern School at NYU, Amazon still features on the list of companies that have hired school graduates. Cornell’s Graduate School of Management states that Amazon is their second biggest graduate employer after Deloitte, but does not specify exactly how many graduates were hired.

In a survey conducted by Universum, where MBA respondents were asked to name America’s most attractive employers, Amazon was ranked fifth favourite, behind Google, Apple, McKinsey and Disney, respectively.

According to Miriam Park, Amazon’s director of university and assessment programmes, Amazon is a well-suited company for ambitious graduates with a creative flair. In an email to Quartz, she claimed the company prefers to hire skilled MBA graduates “because they value the deep analytics and fresh perspective of an MBA hire.

“Amazon is hiring future leaders for our company,” she adds. “As the scope of Amazon’s offerings to customers grows, so will the need for leaders that can invent on their behalf. We hire MBAs for eight different roles ranging from rotations in the Amazon Fashion retail team, to product managers in Amazon Web Services (AWS), to fast tracked progressive leadership roles in our fulfilment network, to finance HR roles.”

With Amazon’s online marketplace, paired with its expansion into cloud computing and Fire technology devices, the company presents a wealth of progressive employment opportunities- including 230,800 full and part-time roles – that talented MBA graduates can take advantage of.

“Amazon teams run like small start-ups – you see that in the breadth of roles we regularly hire MBAs for,” Park concludes. “And what we hear time and time again from these MBA hires is how much they love the amount of responsibility they get – making business decisions that often affect millions of customers.”

Additional reporting by Quartz.

Image via AP Images.

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