HOW THE TOP BUSINESS SCHOOLS
INFLUENCE THE MBA RECRUITING PROCESS
By Dominic Basulto
After gaining admission to a prestigious B-school,
incoming students inevitably begin thinking of how to arrange the dream
job after graduation. Throughout the recruiting process, students are
not alone- they are assisted by the career placement office at the B-school,
which can range from an office comprised of two professionals to the
bustling, well-staffed HBS war room. In the 2000 Business
Week poll, the top-ranked career placement offices were Kellogg, Virginia,
Chicago, Duke, and Cornell. An earlier article (Inside the MBA
Recruiting Process) discussed the actual recruiting process as
it plays out at the elite B-schools. This article analyzes how the top
B-schools deliver added value by (1) developing a pre-recruiting
process to facilitate the core recruiting process and (2) leveraging
their prestige to open opportunities available in new sectors or geographies,
effectively creating jobs for students.
#1: PRE-RECRUITING IS JUST AS IMPORTANT AS THE RECRUITING
ITSELF
Since the job placement process is essentially a marketing
process, it is critical to have the best possible product
to sell to recruiters. An essential part of preparing this product is
pre-recruiting- all the steps involved in assuring that
students are prepared for the arrival of interview season. A particular
area of weakness for international students concerns the actual nuts
& bolts of the recruiting process, ranging from resume preparation
to interview skills to salary negotiation skills. As a rule of thumb,
international students require four times the amount of counseling as
domestic students. For entering students, the pre-recruiting
starts as early as the summer, when they are expected to complete a
series of career-assessments and begin thinking seriously of how to
attain their post-MBA plans.
The major role of the career placement office is to
maximize the number of job offers for every student- not just for the
best students. In order to achieve an average of five offers/student,
Columbia Business School holds workshops on how to manage a career and
on the MBA marketplace as a whole; conducts self-assessment drills;
and offers instruction on resumes, cover letters, and interview skills.
At smaller B-schools, the focus is more on developing a personalized
game plan and 1-on-1 counseling. Almost all top B-schools
now conduct mock interview evaluations and career panels (usually with
alumni), which discuss a particular industry or career path. Russian
applicants should also ascertain whether a prospective B-school offers
assistance with the visa and work authorization as well as full-time
advisors for international students.
International students should focus on a B-schools
on-campus recruiting muscle with the typical MBA employers
- basically, investment banks, consulting companies, and multinationals.
These are firms that are accustomed to dealing with foreign MBAs and
have a dedicated hiring track for them. The key is bringing recruiters
in volume to campus; this saves the student time (both in travel and
research) and makes the process more manageable since the recruiters
come directly to the students. In general, larger B-schools such as
Columbia can arrange an on-campus schedule of up to 350 different recruiters
for summer internship positions and almost 600 firms for full-time hiring.
Smaller B-schools such as Dartmouth Amos Tuck, despite less critical
mass, still attract up to 150 firms to campus.
In general, the fewer firms that recruit on campus,
the more effort that needs to be dedicated to the much more difficult
off-campus recruiting. Off-campus recruiters are usually
only hiring for a niche position and/or do not have the
well-oiled recruiting machinery of the consulting firms that flock to
campuses. At lesser-ranked schools, only 25-35% of students actually
get jobs on-campus, so the career placement office must be quite active
in getting potential employers and alumni involved in hosting receptions,
industry nights, and information sessions. At these B-schools,
only 75-80% of foreign students may have offers by graduation, due to
weaknesses in off-campus recruiting efforts. The more a student must
rely on off-campus recruiting, the more important is having access to
a proactive career placement office. This means having live bodies arranging
receptions, not being handed a database of names for cold calling. When
a program is criticized for having a non-responsive career placement
office, it usually implies that these proactive steps are not being
taken.
#2 THE PRESTIGE OF THE B-SCHOOL IMPACTS THE RECRUITING
PROCESS
It is important to see how career placement directors
serve two constituencies simultaneously - students and recruiters. Students
want the most offers, the most money, and global access. Recruiters
want the best talent with a minimum effort. The more prestigious the
B-school, the more leverage the students have; conversely, the less
prestigious the B-school, the more leverage the recruiters have.
Prestigious MBA programs, in addition to attracting
a greater volume of recruiters, can force these recruiters into open
schedule interviewing formats. In these open schedules,
recruiters have no power to choose the names on the interview schedule
- the B-school serves its own menu and the recruiter should be thankful
for that. In closed schedules, recruiters pre-screen their
candidates, meaning that students must compete for as few as 12 interview
spots with up to 800 classmates. A Top 10 program should
have enough leverage to force a 50-50 ratio of open to closed
schedules, in addition to obtaining at least three schedules (36 interviews)
per recruiter. The less prestigious the program, the more students are
subjected to the highly competitive closed schedule process.
For example, at USC Marshall (usually ranked among the Top 25
US B-schools), 99% of interviews are closed, meaning that
it is theoretically possible that the least talented members of the
class may not receive a single on-campus interview.
Since almost 75% of all graduates from elite B-schools
now go into one of two industries- investment banking and consulting
its more instructive to look at how the top B-schools are
branching out of their traditional strengths to offer increased access
to media, internet, and new technology employers. The typical percentage
of grads now going to start-ups is hovering around 10%,
with this number higher for MBA programs (such as Stanford and London
Business School) biased toward New Economy firms. In order to bring
in the hottest New Economy employers, B-schools develop
tailored strategies for recruiting firms and hold focus
groups of current students to get a clear idea of what both students
and start-up firms desire. In order to dedicate resources to an untried
product, recruiters want to feel special- they want to be invited to
conduct interviews in modern facilities, host prime time
receptions, and have first crack at the best talent. In
this way, Stanford has attracted such highly sought-after employers
as Yahoo! and eBay to recruit actively on campus.
Anyone can sell in his or her own backyard, but how
about selling 3,000 miles away? Can a Spanish B-school sell in London
or on Wall Street? Doing so requires extensive marketing and outreach,
in the form of targeted resume books, corporate site visits, and even
meetings with executive education participants; in short, beating the
bushes for opportunities. The more prestigious the B-school, the easier
it is to place students outside of the hometown market since
the brand name carries more weight. As a rule of thumb, the Top
20 will place its grads in the leading global money centers -
London, New York, Tokyo, and now Silicon Valley. Consider Dartmouth
Amos Tuck- of 6,000 living alumni, approximately 45% of them live in
one of 3 cities- Boston, New York, and San Francisco. Although Dartmouth
Amos Tuck is easily a Top 10 B-school, it has very limited
global placing power. There may only be three students in each class
from, say, Brazil, so there will be few or even no recruiting resources
for Brazilian students trying to return to Rio de Janeiro. Contrast
this with Harvard where there may be 30 or more Brazilians, a real community,
with the concomitant critical mass to attract guest speakers, visiting
CEOs, and
recruiting corporations.
CONCLUSION
In the most recent Business Week survey of career
placement directors at B-schools, there was an almost unanimous opinion
that international students must work harder to secure jobs than
domestic peers. Given that, it makes sense for Russian applicants
to concentrate on B-schools which can offer significant value-added
during all stages of the recruiting process. In the pre-recruiting stage,
B-schools should provide significant support with the mechanics of the
recruiting process while in the recruiting stage, B-schools should campaign
on behalf of their students to gain the most advantageous interviewing
formats, attract new firms to campus, and expand opportunities in new
geographies. After all, the ultimate measure of a B-school is not the
size of the total compensation packages of graduating students, but
rather, how well the B-school meets the needs of all students looking
to develop their future business career.
Dominic Basulto is a 1998 graduate of Yale School
of Management and currently works as a consultant for Pericles ABLE
(American Business & Legal Education) in Moscow. Pericles offers
a full MBA advising program. For contact information, please call: 292-5188/6463.