Watch out for job gatekeeping by club officers at your MBA program

TLDR: Professional club boards at MBA programs (especially the designed careers officers) will sometimes withhold posting job opportunities and keep them private for only them and their friends to apply to. I want to preface that this is not specific to one school, a lot of them do it, as you'll see below.

I have a friend group from undergrad that's pretty tight knit. A lot of us ended up attending various M7 programs in the past few years. From that friend group alone, every M7 was covered except Stanford. A bunch of us recently moved back to the city after the MBA, and we got together to gossip about our programs. It came up in our conversations that all but one of us knew of club(s) in our programs that had officers that were gatekeeping application links that they basically contacted the company specifically for the school. For example, a hedge fund with a strong alumni connection to a MBA program specifically wants to fill two summer intern slots from a limited pool of schools. A student could only find out about this opportunity if the club published it, because you would often have to use a private link or email your resume directly to a contact at the firm.

This kind of abuse only really applied to the clubs that focused on industries with non traditional recruiting cycles (Tech, IM, PE, VC). You can't really get away with this in consulting and in recruiting because it's very rigidly structured and mostly driven by the school careers center than the clubs.

If you happen to see this gate keeping going on, you can report this to your school's administration. This happened to one of the clubs at my program and they actually got in trouble. Again, this is not specific to one school, it was observed at at least 5 of the 7 M7 programs by my group within the past 3-4 years. This actually happened at my undergrad too for fellowships and private networking events.