HEC Paris MBA 2025: Consulting Fell From 25% to 15%

The ten point drop in HEC Paris MBA consulting, two ways

The head of HEC Talents opens the report with the year in one sentence: "Technology, financial services, and consulting remained key sectors for our graduates, collectively accounting for 66 percent of placements (63 percent in 2024). Technology saw a substantial increase (27 percent vs. 16 percent in 2024); financial services remained stable (24 percent vs. 22 percent in 2024) while consulting experienced another significant market correction (15 percent vs. 25 percent in 2024)."

Both totals in that sentence check out. For 2025, 27 plus 24 plus 15 gives 66. For 2024, 16 plus 22 plus 25 gives 63.

The consulting move is worth stating two ways, because they sound different and are the same fact. From 25 to 15 is a fall of 10 percentage points. In relative terms it is 10 divided by 25, so consulting lost 40 percent of its share in a year. Confirm it backward: 25 multiplied by 0.60 gives 15.

That is the steepest single-sector move anywhere in this batch of European reports. The word the school uses for it is "correction", and the letter also states that "Management consulting experienced a marked decline in MBA hiring".

One caution the school itself supplies. The letter reports that "Many students declare that they have voluntarily extended their job searches beyond the three-month period due to regional or sectoral preferences that were adversely affected in the current market correction." So the three-month window that anchors the headline rate is measuring a class that partly chose to fall outside it.

Fifteen percent or twenty percent, depending on the column

Page 19 of the report prints two tables side by side, and consulting appears in both with different numbers.

Both tables sum to 100 on their own. The sector table runs Technology 27, Finance 24, Consulting 15, then six rows at 5 or 4 and five smaller ones, and the eleven-row function table runs Financial services 24, Consulting 20, Marketing and sales 19, Operations and logistics 13, General management 8, Information technology 5, and five smaller rows.

The five point gap has a meaning. A sector row counts people who joined a consulting firm. A function row counts people doing consulting work, including inside a bank, a manufacturer or a technology company that sells something else. Roughly one graduate in twenty of this class does the second thing.

So the honest answer to "what share of HEC Paris goes into consulting" is that it depends which question you asked. Quote 15 percent for the industry and 20 percent for the job, and say which. A page giving you one number without the axis has dropped half the information, and the industry and function axes across twenty-six programs show six schools publishing two different answers for one class.

The report also tracks the function across the MBA: consulting was 16 percent of the class before the program and 20 percent after, a rise of 4 points, published in the same document that reports the sector falling 10.

The exchange rate the report never prints, rebuilt here

HEC is in Jouy-en-Josas and pays a quarter of its graduates in euros. Its report is denominated entirely in United States dollars, and across 28 pages it names no rate, no date and no method. We searched the extracted text for "exchange", "conversion", "rate" and "euro" and found nothing beyond a company name and region labels.

You can recover the rate anyway, because converted round amounts leave fingerprints. Several figures in the report divide into clean euro numbers at one and the same factor.

Six independent amounts from four different tables land on round euros at the same divisor. Check two in the other direction: 60,000 multiplied by 1.16419 gives 69,851.4, and 175,000 multiplied by 1.16419 gives 203,733.3. Both within a dollar of the printed figure.

So the report is converted at a fixed rate of about 1.16419 dollars per euro. That reconstruction is ours and the school states none of it. For scale, the European Central Bank reference rate on 30 September 2026 was 1.1355 dollars per euro. The school's implied rate is 2.5 percent above that, which is roughly where the euro traded in mid 2025, consistent with a class that graduated that year.

The practical consequence for a candidate is direct. A HEC consulting offer in Paris is written in euros. The report's consulting mean of $118,930 divides back to about €102,157, and at today's market rate that same €102,157 is about $116,000. Nothing changed except the day of the conversion.

What the consulting row actually contains

The mean sits $9,966 above the median, which is what a column looks like when a few large offers pull the average up. Quoting the mean overstates what a typical graduate in this row received, and the school publishes both so the comparison is available.

The spread runs from $58,210 to $205,000, a factor of 3.5. The likeliest driver is geography, since the same report shows France paying a mean of $90,172 and North America $135,444 across all sectors. The report never crosses sector with location, so we will not assert that the consulting spread is geographic.

Set the consulting row against the whole class. The overall average salary package for 2025 was $123,170, with a median of $115,255, and the letter states this "reached $123,170, a 12 percent increase over the average salary package for the previous year". Dividing, 123,170 by 1.12 gives about $109,973 for the prior class. That base is not printed and the figure is our arithmetic.

One row in the report does not survive a recalculation. Page 11 gives hospitality and tourism a mean of $96,288 with a minimum, a maximum and a median all equal to $69,852. A mean cannot exceed its own maximum, and here it exceeds it by $26,436. We read the row by its text coordinates rather than by document order, so the labels are correctly attached. One of the four numbers is wrong and we will not guess which, because that is the school's to correct.

Where HEC graduates work, and the half the website omits

The report splits job location six ways and the school's employment statistics page splits it five ways. The difference matters.

Both add to 100, and the two presentations agree. But a reader who takes "52 percent in Europe" from the web page does not learn that exactly half of that is France, which is the single largest destination in the class and the one paying the lowest European salaries in the school's own table.

The report also carries a mobility note in its own words: "The percentages of non-Europeans finding jobs in Western Europe was 45% of the placement rates in this region." It is awkwardly phrased and we quote it rather than paraphrase it, because paraphrasing would require deciding what it means.

One more disclosure sets HEC apart. It publishes a sector split for women alone, and consulting there is 13 percent against 15 percent for the class. Technology runs the other way, at 30 against 27. That table sums to 100 on its own, and no American school in our corpus publishes anything equivalent.

The asterisk on the HEC Paris MBA recruiter list

Pages 22 and 23 list every company where a member of the class accepted a full-time position, alphabetically, and mark some of them. The legend is printed twice: "Corporate partners of HEC Paris" and "* Corporate member of the Club Campus".

By our reading of that alphabetical list, sixteen of the companies are consulting firms. Seven carry the corporate partner asterisk: Accenture, Bain & Company, BCG, Deloitte, KPMG, McKinsey & Company and PwC. Two carry the Club Campus double asterisk: Kearney and Oliver Wyman. Seven carry no mark: Allianz Consulting, Alvarez and Marsal, Arthur D. Little, BIP Group, Iris Consulting, Newton Consulting Partners and Strategy&.

The classification into consulting is ours. The report publishes one alphabetical list with no sector headings, so where a firm belongs is a judgment we made and you can check against the same list.

What the marking itself means is worth being careful about. The school discloses a commercial relationship with recruiters on its placement list, which is more transparency than any other school in this batch offers. It does not define the relationship anywhere in the report. So the honest statement is that seven of the largest consulting recruiters of this class are commercial partners of the school, and what that buys either side is not published.

No hire count appears against any name. "How many HEC graduates did McKinsey take" has no published answer, and multiplying 15 percent by 235 participants would give a number that is ours.

What the firms publish about MBA consulting interviews

HEC gives a strong picture of outcomes and nothing about the interview. The firms fill part of that in.

Accenture's case workbook, checked 29 September 2026, carries the only published duration in our corpus: "case interviews typically last from 45 to 60 minutes, with a focus on the case itself lasting 30 to 45 minutes". Deloitte, also on the HEC list, publishes five named headings for working a case in its case prep tool: "Clear thinking", "Strategic framing", "Practical judgement", "Summary analysis", "Final recommendations". The third spelling is the firm's own. That page also states the tool "is not an assessment and we do not track your responses or results".

Roland Berger's application FAQ answers two questions a continental European candidate has and an American page never raises. On timing: "In general, the process will take around six to eight weeks (from submitting your application to signing the contract) and you should apply four to six months before your ideal start date." On the application file itself: "For us, your personality and qualification are what counts. Hence, please don't include a photo in your application documents."

That second rule cuts against the local convention it sits in. A photographed CV is normal practice in Germany and unusual in France and Britain, and the firm settles it in one sentence. The same FAQ adds that "Half of our consultants have backgrounds in engineering, natural sciences, social sciences, or the humanities", which is relevant at a school where 49 nationalities and a wide spread of prior sectors sit in one room.

None of these firms publishes a scoring weight. That absence holds across every firm research file we keep.

A sixteen month clock, and a twelve month one

The report states the structure plainly: "We offer both a 16-month format (for both September and January intakes) and an accelerated, 12-month format (available only to January intake students)."

This matters for two reasons. First, comparing a HEC salary to a two-year American MBA salary without saying the program lengths differ compares two different investments. The forgone earnings behind a sixteen month degree and a twenty four month degree differ by about eight months of pay.

Second, the accelerated route removes the internship window. The report says September intake students take summer internships from May to end of August, while twelve month students go straight to full-time positions from January of their graduating year. A candidate on the accelerated track has no summer to convert, so the case preparation has to be substantially finished before the program starts.

Since no dated consulting recruiting calendar is published, index the plan on diagnosis instead. Run one short exercise of each type in a single evening, in this order, and write down the dimension each one flags.

1. Math. One timed set, and say every figure out loud as you go.
2. Structuring. Ninety seconds of writing, then deliver it face up.
3. Brainstorming. Count the ideas first, then check they sat in named groups.
4. Exhibits. One chart, caption hidden, and state the takeaway before the detail.
5. Synthesis. One recommendation in answer-first order, with a named risk.
6. Market sizing. One chain, and write the unit beside every multiplication.

Six short exercises return six named causes. One full mock returns a single impression, which tells you how it went without telling you what to repair.

Unit discipline, weighted, and whose weights these are

The table below comes out of src/lib/grading/rubrics.ts and the weights belong to us. HEC publishes no rubric and neither does any firm on its recruiter list, so a scoring scheme shown under a firm's name was invented by whoever drew it.

Units carries 15 points and this page is a long argument for it. A euro figure and a dollar figure can be the same salary and different numbers, and the only thing standing between them is a rate nobody printed. In a case interview the identical mistake looks like a per-household figure multiplied as though it were per-person.

Interpretation carries 20, which is the weight on what a number means once you have it. Run the math drill and the structure drill once each and read the flagged dimension. Every rubric and its weights sit on how an answer is assessed, and the drills are open in the tools without an account. What they do not do: no live interviewer, no business knowledge teaching, and none of our six assessment simulators is live today.

Six things the report leaves open

1. The exchange rate. No rate, no date, no method across 28 pages. Ours is a reconstruction from six round-euro amounts.
2. The denominator of every salary. No salary reporting rate is published, where Oxford Saïd publishes 94 percent.
3. How many people sit behind each row. Several rows carry an identical mean, minimum, maximum and median, which reads as a single observation, and nothing states the count.
4. A hire count per firm. One alphabetical list, no numbers.
5. What a corporate partnership involves. The school marks the firms and defines the term nowhere.
6. Which hospitality figure is wrong. A mean above a maximum is impossible and only HEC can say which of the four numbers to fix.

One control stays red on purpose. We hold no independent first-hand account of consulting recruiting at HEC Paris. The session's search quota was spent before this page was opened, forum archives refuse our user agent, and the six graduate quotes inside the report are published and selected by the school they describe. One of them is specifically about a transition into consulting, and we record it in the research file rather than using it as evidence here.

How this page was wrong before today

1 October 2026. Rewritten after the 2025 employment report was read for the first time. The earlier version was 420 words and told readers that it would not report placement figures or name recruiting firms, because that belonged to the careers office and we had no way to verify it.

The school publishes all of it, in a document linked from its own website with no account required. What it does not do is publish it as a PDF. The report lives in a page-turning reader that serves images, so a plain request returns a two kilobyte shell and an ordinary text extraction returns nothing. That looks exactly like an absent document.

It was not one. The reader's manifest exposes signed page URLs in SVGZ form, and each page carries its text in vector elements with position data attached. Downloading 28 of them, decompressing and parsing by coordinate produced the whole report, and the coordinates are what make the salary tables safe to read, since the labels and the amounts are separate elements. Declining to look had been offered to readers as rigor. It was an absence of research, and the correction is the seven tables above.