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JUNE 9, 2000 B-SCHOOL Q&A: PLACEMENT Meet Kellogg's Placement Director "This is a place that's very flexible. The whole school listens to what the needs are from students, and we try to respond to them."
Q: Roxanne, you've been at Kellogg for 10 years. Did you ever think it would be this exciting? A: No, I thought the excitement would only come from the economic ups and downs, and not from a combination of an economic up and then the bursting of this [technology] industry that's going like gangbusters. One MBA has a consulting opportunity from Chase that he is sitting on. He also has an opportunity with a high-tech hardware company in Silicon Valley. Other students have declined everything and are going to continue to keep looking. It has been a great year to be a graduating MBA student. Q: How has the Career Resources Center had to adjust its workings and daily doings to accommodate the new demands from students, and the demands from old and new recruiters? A: One shift would be accommodating companies that make requests later in the traditional [recruiting] process. We've [experienced an] extension of the recruiting process. We were running interview schedules as late as mid- to late April. [We've had to be] patient training [new recruiters] on how recruiting is done in a traditional format on campus. But at the same time, [we haven't] known how that works [for startup companies] and how to make that fit within their very nimble and amorphous organizations. When you don't have a lot of structure in your organization and then try to superimpose a structured [recruiting] process on top of it, it's a challenge for us as well as for the employers. We are in the process of retraining our staff. We brought compensation consultants to talk with [the staff]. And then the staff has a stronger base of knowledge to be able to respond to and ask better questions in compensation discussions with employers. Educating students is the other piece. For instance, a company's stage of funding may drive the compensation package that the student gets. They need to know what questions to ask the people who they are going to be working for: Where is the company in its funding? How many more rounds does the company have to go before it goes public? How does the company think it will give up to venture capitalists? Q: In the community of career center directors, is this state of recruiting considered a fad? A: I don't know if it's a fad. It's similar to the spike in interest that we saw in consulting a couple of years ago. That interest has since leveled off. In regards to technology, at some point, student interest will wane, or the opportunities will start to level off. We can't keep going like this. To me, this is a peak in a cycle. Tech has been building over several years, but this is the year where it has received the most focus. I don't know what the next big thing will be. Much of it will depend on how long the economy can keep chugging along at the pace that it has been. Q: With the recent shift in career interests, there's more emphasis on the "individual" career search, where a student seeks out contacts at companies, connects with employees in the company, and pursues a job. Do Kellogg's MBAs have the savvy to pursue jobs on their own? A: Yes. For years, we've done workshops on the [individual job search]. Working intimately with various clubs, such as the Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital, and the High-Tech Club, to do supplemental independent job search workshops about networking, etc., is helpful. We do an independent job search workshop in November. Today, in a meeting I was in with students, they said they'd like to see a series of workshops that start earlier, in October. I don't know if it's going to happen or not. We have to sit down with the students to discuss that. We can do that much earlier, but if the audience isn't ready to focus, then delaying it makes more sense. And I don't think you have to start the full-force independent job search in the fall. Q: Is that different advice than you gave at the beginning of the 1990s? A: Definitely. Today, MBAs can find a job with much greater ease. Employers tell you that. The advertisements on the radio and on the television for search sites and Web sites scream that at you. There is one [advertisement] that I heard today: "Never before has this job market been so great as it is for you as a job seeker!" And it's true. It is a buyer's market, so to speak. Q: How has that reality forced you to change the definition of your role? A: It has only changed in that the companies I'm calling on represent different industries, and they're companies of different sizes. I'm still pretty hands-on. I need to be in very close touch with the students so I know where their interests are so that I can market those interests, their backgrounds, and the students themselves to employers. And I'm always involved with new companies and getting them to post opportunities with us on our Web site. Instead of coaching people to prepare for the on-campus interview, we provide more guidance to students on how to conduct the off-campus interviews and job search. We direct them to a number of resources. They are a combination of Web sites, student-managed databases, for example the high-tech career database. It has elevated the importance of our career resource center manager, who spends more time than ever staying current on all the different [career] Web sites so she can refer students to those sites. There's also a need, on our part, to help students with their negotiation skills. We help them figure out which packages make sense and which don't. Q: Which skills are the MBAs lacking? A: General knowledge of how small or early-stage startup companies are structured. For instance, how the company puts its compensation together for employees. There is a range, and you can't apply the old model of recruiting that companies like Ford, General Mills, Procter & Gamble, McKinsey, and Goldman Sachs have to the younger companies. Q: One-third of Kellogg MBAs are non-U.S. citizens. Does that population have its own career counselor to help it land jobs in the U.S., or at home? A: As an office, we're all generalists, but I do have an associate director who is the point person for international students and their issues. Her job is to float those issues by us as the students raise them with her. Their primary concern continues to be why there aren't more companies coming to campus to recruit them. Q: And what is the answer? A: Some companies are more confident with their citizenship or work authorization requirements. Still, even though they make exceptions, they say: "We will not talk to anybody who doesn't already have a green card or isn't already a U.S. citizen." We tell the students that exceptions are made. A student with compelling skills can be hired on an F1 visa for 18 months of practical training, and then apply for the H1 visa status. And cross your fingers and hope that it comes through. Still, it's employer driven. If it were up to us, there would be no barriers. We work with the students and try to identify companies that we know have a track record of making these exceptions. Q: Part-time MBAs. Kellogg's Career Services office serves 2,500 MBAs between its full- and part-timers. What separated the two groups in the ways that they seek new jobs? A: The part-time population is figuring out how to do it while they're working full-time and going to school. Any free time that they have gets sucked up by the schoolwork. We help them balance the challenge of a 40-plus-hour-a-week job, one or two classes every term, and another one or two evenings a week of study groups. Then we help them figure out how to be more efficient with the [job] search and to be focused on the self-assessment piece of the job search. They don't have the luxury of shopping as much as the day student might have. Q: Are more part-time MBAs switching jobs than they were when you started a decade ago? A: Yes, it has doubled. When I first joined, we had 50 to 75 [part-timers looking for new jobs], and every year that number started creeping up. On average now, about 150 part-timers register with our office.
Q: First-year internships. Has the first-year, full-timer had any exposure to electives that makes them more marketable to recruiters? A: One of the beauties of the quarter system [at Kellogg] is that you have three shots at [taking courses in a concentration] before finishing the first year. If you're finance-focused, you'll have a chance to take two or three courses in finance in the spring term. Q: Where are the first-year MBAs going to work this summer? A: All over. It is a mirror of the second-year class in a lot of ways. The vast majority will wind up in consulting and investment banking. The third-most popular choice is everything that falls under the high-tech umbrella. Some first-year students pick up part-time work if they know that they're going to be a dramatic career-changer. They may pick up a job in a venture capital firm, a small or a large company working 10 hours a week on a particular project. We get a lot of part-time opportunities posted with us because we're in an urban area. If you can do it and not impact your grade point average in an adverse way, go for it, because all that experience can only help you clarify whether or not this part-time job is the right direction. Q: Two hundred seventy-five companies recruited your second-year MBAs in 1999. What companies lack a presence at Kellogg? A: Right now, we need more venture capital and private equity firms. The VC part of the equity arena is the one where I would love to see more activity. Q: Are you bringing the students out on these great all-American treks? A: (Laughs) Yes. It's a logistics nightmare. We have a series of varied programs that we started in January when we bring industry representatives to our Digital Frontiers Conference. That's a student-run industry conference held at Kellogg that includes a series of keynote speakers, and break-out meetings, all related to technology. It gives students broad exposure to a lot of different people from the tech arena. In February, we also do an annual high-tech career fair on the West Coast. In 2000, about 160 students flew out there on their own dime and schmoozed with 40 companies. In March, there's a class that culminates with a trip out to the Valley called Tech Venture. About 150 to 160 students went on that trip with four professors and myself. We met with 80 different companies. In April, we did an interviewing event out on the West Coast again and had about 60 students go out to interview. Q: Does the career fair atmosphere really work? A: Yes. It gives the students exposure to many different players in a more condensed format. The students like it, and companies eat it up. Q: Yet many B-Schools hype such programs. Are Kellogg's really any different? A: We have a willingness from the dean's office down to have the students go out there and help plan these events. I don't know how other schools [run their trips], so I can't compare. But my sense is that in many other organizations, it's either 100% student-driven or 100% career-office-driven, and not as much of a 50/50 split that we've gone towards. Everybody owns it. Q: What do you foresee over the next year. Will MBAs change their interests again? A: It's difficult to predict, but there will be a core of folks next year who, regardless of what happens in the markets, will believe that they can make something work. Those jumping on the [dot-com] bandwagon will fall by the wayside and go back to the more traditional things. Their risk-tolerance is high, but it's not high enough to go along with the potential scenario of signing on with a company that could be gone in another month. Q: Admissions directors have said that evidence of job-hopping is frowned upon. B-schools think companies will look at that work record and say, "That's not a serious person." Yet, jumping jobs is in. People go to startups for six months, only to move to another, where they attain the position that their boss held at the old job. Are those work standards changing? A: If people can give strong reasons why they made those changes, then I don't think it will be a hindrance. Some [employers] will see it as an advantage. Q: Roxanne, the last time that we spoke to you in 1998, you mentioned your staff size: about 13 staff for 2,500 students. How do 13 people manage 2,500? A: We have the same structure and it works great. We've lost one counselor. We don't have turnover very often here. We have a lot of bench strength. The four of us who do counseling on a day-to-day basis have been around the school for a while, and know jobs pretty well out in the marketplace. We know alumni that we can refer students to, and we are avid readers to stay current. It works well. The numbers of students, at times, are overwhelming, but most days it's just fine. And when it is more overwhelming is that we've got too many things going on. We have mistakenly over-committed ourselves, which we have a tendency to do. Q: What's going to change next year? A: We had some education about compensation this year, but it's a moving target. There were new things that seemed to crop up over the year that we had limited knowledge of. It was the same on every campus. Next year, they will have to be fully equipped. The expectations of students are going to shift dramatically. We got a lot of questions from student on valuing options over the last two years: "I'm valuing options. How much should I be getting from the start-up companies?" Things along those lines. Next year, the questions will be there, but the expectation will be different. Then students and employers are going to expect folks in our jobs to know those answers as opposed to guessing them, because it won't be as novel next year. Going forward, my gut is that the expectation will be that we have a base line to work off of with two years of experience answering such questions. We're going to add a function in our current management system where employers can input more information, too, which will be nice. They'll be able to input their job descriptions, which hopefully will give students quicker access to that information. It'll be more real-time than it currently is. Q: Is there anything else that you see as giving the Kellogg students an advantage over other MBAs? A: This is a place that's very flexible. The whole school listens to what the needs are from students, and we try to respond to them. For instance, a year ago, it was evident that students were asking a lot of questions about networking, how executive search firms operate, et cetera. So we put a workshop together to answer those questions. That way, the students can ask the next level of question. Students also have easy access. It isn't difficult for a student to get into the office, and an appointment with us. We want to be an available group to the students. Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | JUNE Learn about your online education options |
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