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MAY 16, 2000 B-SCHOOL Q&A: PLACEMENT Meet Krannert's Placement Director "Here, our numbers are such that most of our students will continue to gravitate to the Intels, IBMs, Hewlett Packards, and Fords of the world. All of those companies are very actively involved in e-commerce in the broader sense."
Q: You've been at Purdue for almost eight years now. What made this year different? A: Each year there seems to be a new interest among the students. This year, a large portion of the students are looking to e-commerce -- and hopefully are looking in a broad sense, as opposed to just [looking at] the dot-coms, which are a small portion of the revolution of the Internet retailers. That is the current area of interest, and it's much healthier than interests such as investment banking, which popped up a couple of years ago after consulting. [It's healthier] in terms of the number of students who are interested. Our school, by virtue of location and history, doesn't have a Wall Street presence. If they have an interest in [a job on] Wall Street, then they're doing a different kind of job search. A lot of students are interested in e-commerce because the students attracted to our MBA generally also have technical backgrounds. They're interested in the kinds of companies who are involving themselves in e-commerce. Q: For many MBAs, finding a job in a high-growth, high-tech company requires an extensive, individualized job search. Is that the case at Purdue? A: That's going to play a big part [in the careers process] for the next two to three years. We've built the independent job search into our placement infrastructure in a fairly major way. It expands your opportunities in good times and it may be your only opportunity in bad times. It's fundamental and especially appropriate for that segment of the e-commerce industries that doesn't come to campus [to recruit] MBAs. Q: How does Purdue prepare its MBAs for an independent job search? Why is that job hunt such a different animal? A: Independent job seekers dig their own contacts and follow through to generate an interview. The amount of work that the student has to put into the process is greater [than on-campus recruiting], but they're generally willing to do that, if the sort of companies that they want to explore aren't coming here. On-campus recruiting is much easier. We tell the students which companies are coming, and if they're interested, they try to get on the [company-interview] schedules. Q: When does the career-placement office start working with the MBAs to review job search dos and don'ts? A: Before the students arrive, we communicate with them about what to expect in terms of a job search, including our expectation that they will conduct a self-directed job search. We also hope that they'll understand that on-campus recruiting is a part of their self-directed search, as opposed to the self-directed search being just an emergency fallback position. We offer contacts to the Web site and suggest that they go through certain sections to get an understanding about how we conduct the career-services office. Our MBAs get the majority of their job-search education between orientation and the end of September in their first year. When they arrive at school, we host an orientation session that continues our philosophy about placement and what happens. Between orientation and the end of September, we have group meetings with the students to explain the ins and outs of the on-campus [recruiting] process. Students sign up for interviews, companies register their schedules, and so forth via our Web site. In early September, an expert on the job search and resume writing comes to speak to students. His goal is to teach self-directed job-search strategy and process from A to Z. At the end of September, we have a dual event -- the career-assessment conference and the MBA job fair. That kicks off the recruiting and self-directed job-search season. Throughout the fall semester and early into the spring, we have other seminars, such as business etiquette, salary and negotiation, and interview skills. You have to be able to interview well and have the usual social graces and social worth. The things that we teach tend to support both processes. Q: You've been on both sides of the MBA equation, as a recruiter and a placement director. Any words of advice for recruiters? A: As a recruiter, I appreciated being greeted [by schools] with the plan for the day. The most important piece occurs behind the scenes -- someone arranging your trip and telling the B-school what the recruiter is coming [to campus] for. The recruiter may only get involved at the last minute and is typically not the person who is making all the arrangements for the schedule. The person at the company and the one at the B-school [iron out] the details. If that goes smoothly, then everything else goes smoothly. I suggest that schools have someone who knows what they're doing in those positions.
Q: Alan, what needs to be done to ensure that the recruiters keep coming back to campus, especially since many students are looking at nontraditional companies? A: That's like asking, "How do you breathe?" At one level, recruiters are people and they like personal attention when they come. That can be a simple greeting and an invitation to stop in at the end of the day to debrief about their schedule. [It's also nice to] follow up with a call later in the season to see how things are going. But it's tough to capture all the things you might do to make the best possible arrangement for the company in a trip for the recruiter. We provide coffee. We try to anticipate basic needs of that sort and explain, as soon as they arrive, where the basics can be had. We've had some inconvenient requests. Recruiters occasionally arrive and say, "By the way, I need to leave at 3:30 instead of 5:00. Can you move my interviews up?" It's an unfair request at that late hour. Last year, 104 companies visited campus. We have some turnover [of companies] each year and have had trouble replacing that. But the ratio of our companies to job seeking second-year students is quite good. It's 1 to 1.2, in the most recent season. We don't think that numbers are a big issue. From the student's point of view, the mixed companies [are] the issue. Overall, the number of companies [coming to campus] is competitive and healthy. If we had more companies, the ratio would be so good that even more companies would go away empty-handed. In a given season, about half of the companies that visit Purdue hire someone. The other 40%, for a variety of reasons, leave empty-handed. That gives us a bit of a job [of retaining recruiting companies that aren't able hire Purdue graduates] to deal with. Q: Alan, the last time you spoke to Business Week Online, you mentioned that the number of people on staff at the career center was lean. And you've already told us that the career center is in a frenzy this year. Has the school remedied the situation? A: We did. We added an international career services person and an assistant director for placement operations for the day-to-day, on-campus process. Q: Does that mean you get to step away a bit and try to attract more recruiting companies? A: It does. We've gone from two full-time professionals to four fairly recently. The design is to allow the associate director and myself more time for visiting companies -- both prospective and current customers -- and for working on retention issues. Q: What kind of companies lack a presence at Krannert? A: That's dependent on what students ask for every year. Four years ago, consulting was the popular career and I doubt that we met the expectations of the students who came to Purdue with consulting as an interest. Over about two-and-a-half years, we built our consulting recruiters to a good level. About one-third of the class of 1999 went to consulting companies. In the class of 2000, it's not going to be that high. Between consulting and e-commerce, we had a short-lived but vocal interest in investment banking and financial services. Those companies aren't coming here, so we teach students the market for Wall Street opportunities and show them [Purdue's] historic position. We help them in the short term by giving them contacts there, which doesn't mean getting [a recruiter from an investment bank] to campus that season. We try to play our strengths against Wall Street. Last year, companies such as Merrill Lynch, Barclays, and Goldman Sachs came for [MBAs to work in] service operations. They're good jobs and necessary in those organizations. The companies came because of our strengths in operations, and in recent years, our strength in service operations. This year, [the hot area] is e-commerce. And it's larger and is affecting all segments of the economy. It's also different because it's the beginning of a revolution, such that in five years, e-commerce will be a standard with many companies, just as quality is a standard. At Purdue, recognizing that has built up the curriculum for an e-commerce academic option. That [concentration] will help us to market to a large group of [prospective] students with those interests. Q: Purdue has a high percentage of international students. Does that make your job more difficult? A: It sure does. About four or five years ago, we brought in an associate director whose primary responsibilities were building job-search resources for international students. She did that very well. Again, we've expanded our staff to include a person who is devoted solely to international career services. That's the start. We work with our current company customers to find out where the international hiring points are. We have people doing pure online research to uncover opportunities and job fairs, which have been responsible for placing a number of our students in very good slots. In compensation, our international students tend to do slightly better than the domestic students, but it's close. It's probably close enough that it's not an issue here. Q: What challenges does the MBA with little pre-MBA work experience have when looking for a job? A: It's still tougher for the inexperienced student to put a package together to sell to the companies. But everything is relative. On the one hand, companies representing good opportunities will insist on someone with three or more years of work experience. On the other hand, there's such a need for people that companies that historically haven't considered someone with less experience are doing so now. That results in higher placement rates for all of the business schools. Q: What are the differences that you're seeing between the first years and the graduates this year? A: I don't think there's any fundamental difference. The first-year group is very much in tune with what's happening in e-commerce. Q: How about some quick estimates: You've said that some students are interested in going out West or to dot-coms. What percentage will do so? A: We've estimated that less than 5% of our students will go to the small e-tailers, other dot-coms, or some sort of startup company. Some schools are concerned about larger percentages of students forsaking the traditional customers, and that may or may not be a real problem. Here, our numbers are such that most of our students will continue to gravitate to the Intels, IBMs, Hewlett Packards, and Fords of the world. All of those companies, by the way, are very actively involved in e-commerce in the broader sense. Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  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