Bain and Company Careers

Bain and Company careers can often be as short as two years, even for high performers. It’s common to start as an undergraduate new-hire and head to an MBA program two years later. But whether you stay for two years or twenty, it’s safe to say that jobs at Bain are some of the most sought after in the management consulting industry. If you’re looking to break into management consulting, you’re almost sure to be looking into Bain careers. But even if that describes you, you might not necessarily know what makes working at Bain and Company so desirable.

So what makes everyone so interested in Bain consulting careers? Is it just the salary and benefits package, and how they compare with industry competitors? Or does it go deeper than that? Does it have to do with the work itself? Is there something in the corporate culture that attracts aspiring consultants from such a wide range of backgrounds? And perhaps most importantly, what is the employee satisfaction like? Do people working in Bain and Company careers have an experience that justifies all the competition to get hired?

In this article, we’ll tell you just about everything you need to know about Bain & Company careers. We’ll walk you through what life and work at Bain are actually like. We’ll give you an overview of the company culture, as well as the reported experiences of actual Bain employees and alumni. And finally, we’ll give you a preview of the Bain and Company careers that are available right now.

Life at Bain

Bain and Company is one of the premier consulting firms in the world. They work with a majority of the most famous and successful international companies. Bain consulting careers may vary widely, but at their core, you will be a part of Bain teams that partner with clients to help them design & implement strategic solutions, to envision new strategies, and to identify & capitalize on emerging opportunities.

The vast majority of the work is project-based, with consultants working in hierarchical teams, in close coordination with clients, for the duration of a project. This work draws on a variety of skills and expertise. Bain consultants utilize an array of quantitative techniques and business acumen to analyze situations, design strategies, and present proposals to clients to help those clients achieve superior results. Depending on your role within the company, Bain and Company careers may involve working on number crunching and related tasks, managing teams of consultants, communicating with existing clients, and helping to bring in new clients and create new business.

Whatever your role, you can expect all Bain and Company careers to involve a high degree of stimulation and challenge. This will draw on and increase virtually all of your business skills. You can expect to succeed in Bain if you are a highly motivated, collaborative, innovation-minded, results-oriented worker. You can also expect your time at Bain to involve long hours with a steady stream of tasks and a hectic travel schedule, as you spend much of your time working from specific job sites outside your home office. But you almost never work alone—even as the work is challenging, you can expect support from not only your team and home office but also the entire network of Bain and Company employees.

Bain Culture, Benefits, and Reviews

If the corporate culture responsible for nurturing the various Bain and Company careers could be distilled to a single motto, it would be: “A Bainie never lets another Bainie fail.” Many other top consulting firms tout their collaborative values, but in practice working at them can be highly competitive, with mercurial management and sharp-elbowed colleagues. At Bain, however, the collaborative environment is real. Employees rave about how kind and supportive their colleagues are. This makes the frequent challenges associated with Bain careers much easier to bear, as you have a network of generous and talented people there to support you along the way.

Bain Structure

There is a more hierarchical structure than at other famous consulting firms. Bain consultants working on a project report as a group to a single Manager. This is instead of having more consultants within a project manage their own project stream, like many other firms. But this does not compromise the collaborative nature of the environment. The feedback is constant and moves in every direction, which can create a lot of pressure, but also a lot of support.

Bain Career Path

A Bain career path can take many forms. On the one hand, Bain is famous for offering its employees the chance to advance within the company as quickly as they can. Most employees working in Bain consulting careers are promoted within six months of rising to a new role. They may even leap over multiple roles in the process if their performance merits the acceleration. However, this flexibility also works the other way. Bain and Company careers permit employees to take extended time off when they need it, and to generally be in charge of their own development.

Bain Salary & Benefits

This flexibility is seen by many as a major benefit of Bain & company careers. Of course, there are other, more quantitative benefits. The salary, for example, is extremely competitive. New hires with just an undergraduate degree earn an average base salary of $90,000 a year, and new hires with an MBA or PhD earn an average salary of $165,000 a year. And that’s just the base figure—the company also offers performance bonuses that can exceed 25% of the base salary, as well as significant 401k benefits regardless of employee contributions. You should also keep in mind the value of the Bain brand. Like working at McKinsey or attending an Ivy League university, you will forever have the Bain brand attached to you. This is valuable, and signals to others that you are hardworking, highly intelligent, creative, and generally high performing.

Bain Employment Reviews

It would be difficult to overstate the level of enthusiasm employees and alumni have expressed for their Bain and Company careers. The compensation as well as the collaborative culture have made Bain one of the top ten workplaces, according to Glassdoor, for ten years in a row. In this day and age, that kind of company loyalty is more commonly seen in Silicon Valley than consulting, as other consulting firms tend to have a high degree of turnover. The average Glassdoor review for Bain careers is 4.6 stars out of 5.

Bain Job Openings

Bain and Company’s global success and scale means that they are always hiring. But Bain’s approach to hiring for “core” Bain and company careers is heavily reliant on-campus recruiting. They send thousands of consultants to campuses across the U.S. (and the world) to recruit undergraduate, master’s, and PhD candidates each year. But if you know someone at the firm or have relevant consulting experience, it’s always possible to initiate a Bain career through “after-market’ or “off cycle” recruiting as well. Bain’s website or Glassdoor are good ways to research job openings, but on-campus recruiting is the typical path to a Bain consulting career. Once at Bain, moving between offices is common—by the time Bain employees reach the role of Manager, 50% of them have been stationed at a foreign office.

Wrap Up

Overall, Bain and Company careers should be highly appealing to anyone looking to enter the management consulting industry. Bain’s salary and benefits make them competitive with any consulting firm in the world. And the supportive culture, as well as the high degree of employee satisfaction, make Bain and Company stand out even among its top-tier competitors.

Additional Reading:

• Bain Resume
• MBB: McKinsey, BCG, Bain; Are They Really the Best?
• McKinsey, Bain, and BCG: 3 Things They Look for in Consultants
• Bain-Style Case Study: Lamp Market in Mexico
• Case Interview: Complete Prep Guide