An open letter to the new director of admissions at HBS

In another post, I wrote an open letter to the Stanford GSB Admissions committee with suggestions for how they might change the application, if they so desired.

To be honest, the Stanford application is pretty tight, but I did have some ideas for questions I thought might elicit richer and more diverse answers from applicants than What matters most and why?

But to you, new Director of Admissions at HBS, I say: please, don’t change a thing.

The HBS application is the most perfect of all the MBA applications out there and it no doubt enables you to make strong, confident, and generally correct choices about who to include in your class.

• You collect detailed but finite information on achievements via the online short answers for candidates whose resumes were poorly written that adds meaningful detail for those with well-written ones.
• You ask a quite frankly perfect MBA essay question that evokes rich, thought-provoking, revealing, and differentiating answers from applicants. (Unlike Stanford’s question A, which can lead candidates to emphasize the what and the why too heavily, reducing themselves to boilerplate claptrap, your question actually forces the candidate to reveal the how of their life: how they want to be known. It’s much harder for students to answer Harvard’s MBA application essay because it requires such depth of reflection and then, ultimately, self-confidence to answer authentically.)
• The Harvard MBA interview process is thorough, generous, fair, and enjoyable for applicants.

So basically, though I know you didn’t ask, from my humble perspective as a seasoned MBA application coach who’s helped hundreds of people successfully apply to Harvard Business School, I’d say: don’t change a thing.