As of December, 1998, Bob Bonner has been appointed the Director of the MBA Career Development & Placement Office. Bob has worked at Wharton for over five years and is truly admired by staff, students, and recruiters. He is the best consensus generator I have ever seen in action. Bob is the kind of manager who understands what is important, and stays focused on the mission.

Will you help with the school's transition on the career services front? After all, it's important that the new appointee enter the fray on the run.

Yes. I am looking forward to working with Bob as he takes over and adds his touch to the Career Development & Placement office. Bob is very highly thought of in the field and I have no doubt that he will take the program to new heights. One of the things I love about working in this field is that it is very collaborative -- on both the school-side and the company-side.

Wharton is by no means a small business school, with a total full-time enrollment of approximately 1,560 students. What was your philosophy surrounding the most effective way to service and place Wharton grads?

I think we were focused on helping the 1,600 or so current Wharton MBA students as well as the alumni. First and foremost, we were working with current students to help them find challenging and meaningful career opportunities. That was, in essence, our mission. We had a global perspective that involved helping students understand what their skill set was and what their interests were and how they could match up those things and get them into what would ultimately provide them with the best career opportunities.

On the corporate side, we were all about trying to help any and every company that approached us with the desire to hire Wharton MBAs. We frequently sat down with companies explaining to them how to effectively recruit at Wharton, which is not an easy task.

On the student side of the ball, it sounds like Wharton heavily pushes self-assessment as a first step in the job search process. What kinds of strategies do you suggest for students to get a job?

At Wharton, we taught a career management seminar as part of the first year curriculum. (Editor's note: Wharton continues to deliver its career management seminars. The school reports that the seminars are continually rated very highly by its students.) It was a class scheduled into the curriculum; it wasn't like a workshop in the afternoon. The class was really an overview of the career management process, where we'd delve into developing the preparatory skills necessary to being successful in the job search -- like preparing your resume and cover letter -- and then do an overview of the interview process.

Five different modules are offered over the course of the class, and the focus is to help students take a thorough assessment of their CIVs -- their Competencies, Interests, and Values. That's the foundation for where the Career Management Seminar begins. And the philosophy is: If you understand what they are, then you can be that much more effective in the recruiting process. The most effective student in an interview is the one who crosses the threshold, reaches out and shakes hands with the corporate interviewer, and says: "Hi, Andrew, this is who I am, and I hope to get to know you better." It's an honest conversation about what the student has to offer and what the company has to offer. That's exactly the process that we're looking for here at CIGNA. When we assess people, it's done at a level to get to know who these people are. On the corporate side, people appreciate that approach.

When we were teaching the Career Management Seminar, we were looking for the opportunity within the first two months to help students successfully locate their CIVs, which would then allow them to become so much better prepared for on-campus interviews, writing resumes and cover letters, and the entire recruiting process.

When I spoke to Bob Alig, Wharton's director of admissions, he talked quite a bit about how the school has really put an emphasis on teaching softer skills like leadership and communication. Is that one of the main points behind the school's placement office?

That's absolutely correct. We knew that most of our students could go toe-to-toe on technical skills. Not that they would not need to demonstrate them -- because they certainly would -- but that the soft skills would often be what differentiated them from others. The time and energy we devoted to helping students develop and effectively articulate their soft skills was unparalleled.

The Career Management Seminar, the collaborative programs CD&P conducted with the Wharton Communication and Leadership Programs, the thousands of videotaped practice interviews we gave each year, and the many programs and workshops lead by CD&P and co-sponsored with corporations and student organizations all helped to teach students the leadership and communication skills essential to their future success in business.

When does the placement office start working with students?

In August. [We have] an "orientation overview" where we bring students into the career resource center in groups of 35 to give them an overview of our services and a 15-minute tour of the Career Development and Placement Office (CDP) and the on-campus recruiting services building -- which has 50 interview rooms in it and a full staff to schedule interviews (it's shared by Wharton's MBA program and the rest of university). In September, when classes begin, we're in front of them teaching them the numerous skills they will need in the career management seminar.

How is Wharton's placement office structured?

I had a philosophy of having the professionals in my office serve both students and companies. When a professional in the placement office is talking to a company about how to more effectively recruit students, what they're really communicating is what Wharton students are like, what they're looking for in companies. You really have to know the students' needs and desires to relate that. Likewise, when you're counseling or advising students, they have questions about who we feel are the best companies to work for, which companies have developmental programs to aid them in their careers, and about which companies are the movers and the shakers. Here you are talking to students, and four or five of their questions have to do with where the companies are at.

Each professional does student career counseling and as well as corporate relations with recruiting companies. He or she would teach a segment of the Career Management Seminar, get involved in counseling students one-on-one, have different clubs and student organizations that they serve as liaison for, and have different companies broken down by industries that they would serve as consultants for.

How many people work in Wharton's career services office?

There are two different offices at Wharton. The CD&P, which I was just describing, employs 15 people, with a total of eight professionals (including the director) who have jobs as I just described. The assistant and associate directors would all do career counseling with the students as well as consult with companies, serving as key liaisons.

Wharton's other career-related office is the Office of On-Campus Recruiting Services, which employs 10 people, and is mainly responsible for managing the process of scheduling on-campus interviews.

Has Wharton's office structure changed under the mounting pressure caused by surging recruiter demand?

Yes. We used to have people focused on more specialties, like first-year student counseling, and have other people focused on corporate relations. But we realized that that was sort of counterintuitive, and it wasn't efficient that way. The first-year counseling dynamic is about the student wanting to know what's happening in the employment world and if the counselor doesn't have that knowledge then there's a problem.

Has the school broken ground on it's proposed $100 million recruiting complex?

There's a new building that's going up, though we don't refer to it as just a recruiting facility. Wharton already has a state-of-the-art recruiting facility that -- to this day, even with all the schools that have built new facilities -- still ranks among the best. It's 10 years old and still very innovative: there are 50 interview rooms, but recruiters feel like there's only four to five rooms because the rooms are set up in pods. That way you really don't feel the volume all around you. So it's very conducive to the process. That's important, since there were something like 25,000 on-campus interviews administered this past year. (Editor's note: According to Wharton officials, the school will break ground on a new 300,000 square foot academic center for both its MBA and undergraduate programs during spring, 1999. It will house interactive classrooms, amphitheaters, learning team rooms, student cafes, and social spaces, as well as admissions and faculty offices.)

What types of amenities does the school provide for recruiters during their stay at the school?

We provide a recruiter lunch as well as all of the information that the individual recruiter is looking for -- such as a package of the students they'll be seeing and information about the school and the program.

Switching perspectives for a moment, at CIGNA, just how important are the amenities that school career placement offices go out of their way to provide you with?

It's absolutely essential. When we go through the recruiting season, we're thinking very carefully about the process, making sure that we're on campus early, that we get our offers out early for second-round interviews, that we're in constant contact with the students, showing them that we're interested in them and care about cultivating a relationship. Those types of things are very important to Wharton as well.

At CIGNA, needing to hire 300 students a year, we don't lose track that each student we recruit is an individual first. And we get high marks for that. Some people are blown away by the level of our personal contact. We'll make calls to students we're interested in hiring saying, "Anything I can do for you, let me know." Those are sincere calls, we've identified what we want. That service mode and focus is also very important to Wharton.

I'm interested in understanding how important a school's more complex customer-service program is to a recruiter. What if that aspect of a school's placement office is poor, but the school's students are quite qualified. Does that have a negative impact?

It could have a negative impact, but the fact is we are much more focused on the students than the placement office. When we approach a school we're focused on identifying the students we think are a good fit with our company. We want to hire the best and the brightest. A school may have a placement office that, on a scale of 1 to 10, is a 5, and maybe that trips us up and slows us down on the margins. But we understand how to approach a school whether we're going to get the students that we desire or not.

At CIGNA we foster good relationships with schools by doing things like connecting with student organizations and professional groups, honor societies, and key faculty and administrators. In the end, once we look at resumes and meet with students face-to-face, that's where we move ahead in connecting with individuals. Whether they're helpful in getting us to the students or not, we'll find ways to get to the best students.

How many companies recruited at Wharton for internships and permanent jobs in 1998?

Traditionally there have been about 600 companies on an off campus who make offers for both full-time jobs and internships to Wharton MBA students. And, as I said, the interview facility at Wharton handled about 25,000 interviews this past recruiting year -- 10,000 of those were MBA interviews. (Editor's Note: According to BW's records, in 1998 a total of 420 companies came to recruit Wharton 1st and 2nd years, sitting down for approximately 10,000 on-campus interviews.)

How many job opportunities were available through correspondence or posting in 1998?

Last year, there were a little over 1,000.

Does Wharton augment its recruiter base by participating in any consortia or forums?

We don't get involved in too many. There are several different career fairs that go on that we do feel are worthwhile, however. One is EMDS in Brussels. CIGNA will probably participate in that. There are two international career fairs in Miami and Orlando that are also worthwhile. Then there's the National Black MBA forum -- CIGNA will have a big presence in that this year. Wharton, while I was there, would get involved in some of these events and make sure that students were aware of them. But if by consortia you mean events where Wharton partners with four or five other schools for a large recruiting weekend, then no, we didn't do too much of that. The 600 companies that made job and internship offers to Wharton students this past year are very geographically diverse, so we didn't feel compelled to participate in consortia that were geographically focused.

Do you feel the consortia still play a helpful role in placing graduates or finding them viable job opportunities?

Yes, CIGNA gets thoroughly involved in the career fairs of the different consortia.

During your tenure, did Wharton pick up the tab for the students participating in the various job fairs outside of Pennsylvania?

No, I don't think any school does that. Some of the recruiting events that we would be involved in, the way they were structured, sometimes meant that students didn't have to pay airfare. For example, at Crimson & Brown (a recruiting forum targeted at women and minority students), companies pay a certain amount of the students' fees to help them fly back and forth.

Has your attitude about the worth of the consortia changed at all since your move from Wharton into the CIGNA fold?

We are very focused on certain consortia events and career fairs that meet our needs in terms of our hiring goals and the quality of student that we're looking for. That's why we participate in the National Black MBA Forum, for example. We are involved in that because we have determined that we'll be able to access a critical mass of high-level talent. It's a cost effective and very strategic process. For every 10 calls or mailings I get about a career fair, CIGNA might get involved in two.

Speaking of cost, can you give me an idea of the resources a company spends over the entire course of its recruiting year?

We consider our time and financial resources equally valuable and try to plug them into where we have determined they have a high impact and return on investment. CIGNA is well funded for its recruitment efforts, but as the program director, of course I'd like to see more funds devoted to it. I've seen some benchmarking data in the Journal of Career Planning and Employment, Spring '98. CIGNA stacks up competitively against that aggregate information.

How important has the summer internship become in today's hiring environment, particularly speaking from personal experience at CIGNA?

The internship is very important to us. We have a philosophy here where when we look at the 300 hires that we've made in the past year, we'd like to be able to say that all of the hires used to work here at one time or another. For example, many of the college seniors we hire worked for us at one time as interns between their freshman, sophmore, and junior years of college.

The reality is that former interns make up a percentage of the total hires that you make. So the goal is to have an internship program that brings some of the best and brightest students at colleges and B-schools that we recruit at into our fold. And hopefully, if everything works out, that'll lead to a full-time opportunity at CIGNA. We had a reception in Connecticut a couple of weeks ago where I was speaking to a group of interns working in our retirement and investment-services division, and some of them were telling me about their careers. One student said that he was being trained in his internship to do what other people are being hired for full-time positions for. He was thrilled about that.

Overall, the internship is important for everyone. It's important to the student because it gives him or her the opportunity to test the waters and figure out what it is that they really want to do, and it's important for the placement office because they have individuals who are seeking employment. At CIGNA, we're focused on providing high quality opportunities over the summer.

Is CIGNA now throwing more resources into its internship recruiting now that the eight-week trial period's benefits has increased?

Yes. What we've done with the internship program is completely professionalize it. The goal is that every internship is a career opportunity. It's not simply a job -- it plugs into something that leads to something. We go after those interns pretty aggressively when the summer ends. Midway through the summer and at the end of the summer, our interns go through an evaluation process where they're treated as full-time employees. They are evaluated and are given feedback on where they met their objectives, and the areas that they need to work on. At the end of the summer, we make the determination on whether we want to hire the intern full-time or not.

Once you've made that determination, does CIGNA throw any incentives into its offer packages to up the chances of converting the hire?

CIGNA is made up of seven different operating divisions, and three staffing divisions. Some of the things you're asking about are done differently according to division, while other things are done on the corporate level. By corporate mandate, each division develops programs based on the line of business they're in. So after they've evaluated their summer interns, they can get very creative trying to convert them into full-time hires. In terms of CIGNA's total compensation package, we do offer a very competitive 401k plan, competitive health benefits, financial-planning services, and in some cases, tuition reimbursement and stock options.

CIGNA focuses their hiring on a couple of schools, including Cornell, Wharton, and Michigan. In addition to that, we have close ties to schools in our geographical region such as Penn State, Drexel, Temple, and UCONN. We also do very well at Howard University and have a long standing relationship with the University of Richmond, Notre Dame, Syracuse, and Rutgers. (Editor's Note: CIGNA chooses its target schools based on hire rate, geographic fit, a school's academic excellence, retention rates of a school's grads in the company, diversity of the student body, and a placement office's customer service.) There are division heads who serve as campus execs for those certain schools. Last year, what we did for interns who worked with us over the summer was send them a letter from a division head thanking them for their work and a gift (a duffle bag), as well as an invitation for the student to call [the division head]. We felt that was a nice way of informing the students that we were interested in hiring them. We'll also take students out to dinner. And we'll get involved in service projects and sponsoring specific scholarship opportunities as a way of promoting ourselves on campuses. Having worked at Wharton, I can tell you that tricks and gimmicks do not work -- students see right through them. Being genuine and honest creates job opportunities.

What is Wharton's philosophy for interview schedules -- are most schedules open or closed?

When I was there -- though it could change with the new director -- my philosophy was that we offered open and closed schedules, as well as schedules where students could bid competitively. (Editor's note: Wharton still urges its recruiters to do a 50 - 50 split of open/closed interviewing. Ultimately, however, Wharton leaves it up to the recruiter.) My philosophy was to set up the interview scheduling in such a way that would give the students more opportunities of getting on them. One schedule could be part bidding and part open, for example. It's ultimately up to the company to determine how to most effectively recruit Wharton students, so when I was employed by the school, I didn't force companies to have open or closed schedules. But having said that, I've had many conversations with companies about their process of consistently having closed schedules...how that may not be the most effective way to do it.

Were students content with the interviewing process, it's set up and all?

I think so. In the end, sometimes students would raise concerns because other placement offices forced companies to have half of their schedules open. But we were able to demonstrate through our placement statistics that 60% of the schedules were open. So in the end, more than half of our schedules were open. And we were also able to then describe in vignettes that Wharton's relationship with companies over a period of time had changed, and that some companies that had only had closed schedules now had them open. I would still argue that it's in the companies' domain to make the decision, not the placement director's.

But most companies took advantage of one version or another of our open scheduling. For example, a company would come to us and say we want to have two interview schedules, both of them completely closed. Then we'd say that you really should have them both be open. Maybe we can start by having one be open and the other bidding. They'd agree to that, and so you win a schedule there. Then I'd follow up and say, "Let's wait and see how the sign-up process goes." And Wharton, having a very competitive recruiting environment, sometimes means that some closed schedules are not going to receive a lot of attention. Let's say that this particular company still has a closed schedule available and has found that it's only half full. Well, we still have time to talk to them about altering their strategy a bit. We'll say: "You still have two weeks to switch it up." We would provide a menu of opportunities, go through a plan, and be able to adjust throughout the process upward or downward depending on where we were. So, bottom-line -- the school is flexible concerning interview schedules.

What was the average amount of job offers a Wharton grad walked away with in '98?

I've been very vocal with colleagues and students about this over the years, and anytime somebody will give me an audience... I'm not interested in students having multiple job offers. It's going to happen and there's no problem with that in and of itself. But if that's the goal of the placement office, it's probably not ultimately going to serve its most important customers (i.e., employers and students) very well.

For example, if I have two students, and one of them has 10 offers, the probability that I will see that person a lot for one-on-one counseling sessions and that he or she is not sure what they really want to do increases considerably. In the end, that person has a harder time determining what it is that they think they want to do for a career. That happened at Wharton many times. Likewise, on the corporate side, I've got nine companies that are going to walk away unhappy. On the other side of the coin, if I have a student who has two job offers, he has narrowed it down and has a pretty strong focus on what his competencies are and what the skills are that he wants to build on.

My goal was always to help students figure out where their strengths apply and to determine what would help them open doors in the arenas they wanted to enter. I wanted to help students find what career options would have added the best skill set to the skill set that they already had. While I was at Wharton, we never published a number that would say how many job offers each student had because we felt that would be sending the wrong message. There are other measures out there that can relate Wharton's marketability. For example, over 600 different companies made offers to Wharton MBA grads last year, and over 400 different companies recruited on campus. Meanwhile grads accepted offers into 50 different industries. They also entered into close to 30 different functional areas that extend to 25 different states and 31 different countries.

As I had mentioned, we kick off the year with the Career Exploration Conference (CEC) where 70 alumni representing virtually every different field that MBAs go into come to campus to talk to first years about the career options out there in the marketplace. The natural follow up step to that is a class that we offer on networking. That occurs during the beginning of October, after we've started the Career Management Seminar...It's the perfect scenario in terms of the linear timeline: Orientation is in August, classes start during the beginning of September where we lay the foundation for CIVs (Competencies, Interests, and Values), then we move from self-assessment to a session on information gathering and networking, and then that class is followed up with the CEC (which occurs during the third to fourth week of classes).

You talk about students grabbing 10 job offers and diversity of employment opportunities available at Wharton. Where are students going to work after graduation?

Over the years, as the program has grown and its impact on the business world has heightened, we've seen students get more offers. I'm not saying in and of itself that's a bad thing but philosophically, from a placement director's perspective, it's not in my best interest to have a goal of trying to get students as many job offers as possible. I had a goal of teaching students how to do the job search as well as a thorough evaluation of the marketplace.

In terms of the business world, the fact is that Wharton had more companies coming to campus than ever in the past. And as a result, our students received more job offers than in the past. But, that wasn't what they were pursuing. Students grew up during their two years at Wharton under the philosophy I just described -- collecting offers was not a game.

Does Wharton, with it's reputation in finance and real estate, to name a few, cater to any specific industry? Are its students graduating primarily into one or two job markets?

Wharton never catered to any specific industry while I was there, our interest was in having a diverse mix of employment opportunities for our students to take advantage of. The three big industries that recruit at Wharton were consulting, investment banking, and high-tech. For Wharton, the fastest growing industry area has been high-tech. It's the third highest area by industry where students are going. Over the last couple of years, consulting has been the schools number-one industry, followed by I-banking/financial services, and then high-tech, which has really ramped up over the last several years.

Where are students going geographically? Is the school's alumni concentrated in New York and the Northeast, where most of the consulting firms and I-banks predominate?

Most students end up in the Northeast, but the trend has been the Midwest, South, and Southwest. If you look at the West Coast four years ago versus today, you'll see a significant increase there. We also consistently placed 20% of our graduating student body internationally (that includes both U.S. citizens and international students being placed abroad). The placement trend has been more and more people settling in the West Coast and the Southwest.

There has been a tremendous amount of interest in China at Wharton. In the spring of 1994, along with a colleague in the placement office, I led the first Global Immersion Program to China. That was a truly fascinating experience. As a group, we spent a week each in Taipei, Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong meeting with business leaders and government officials and learning about the economics and culture of the country. Of the 40 students that participated that year, four to five stayed, deciding to see if they could create a summer internship for themselves. Since that time, China has remained a very strong interest to Wharton students -- Asia and Europe are where we're seeing most of our students placed internationally. Europe has been up and down. Brazil has also piqued a lot of interest and curiosity.

Name the top 10 companies at Wharton (with the number of grads hired in 1998). [Editor's Note: Wharton's 1997 top 10 came in as follows: McKinsey (49), Goldman Sachs (28), Bain & Co. (24), Morgan Stanley (24), A.T. Kearney (23), Anderson Consulting Strategic Services (20), Merrill Lynch (20), J.P. Morgan & Co. (15), Boston Consulting Group (14), Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, Inc. (N/A)]

McKinsey (40 full-time hires), Boston Consulting Group (31), Goldman Sachs (29), Bain & Co. (25), Booz Allen (24), Deloitte & Touche (24), Merrill Lynch (24), Morgan Stanley (24), Anderson Consulting (21), PriceWaterhouseCoopers (21), and A.T. Kearney (19).

Does CIGNA plan to recruit at Wharton this year?

Yes, the University of Pennsylvania is one of our target schools. We hire undergrads as well as MBAs from the schools that we target being the large multinational corporation that we are (CIGNA hires around 300 students a year). Approximately 250 of ourhires will be undergrads and 50-60 will be masters students.

Has CIGNA recruited at Wharton in the past?

Yes, we have many Wharton grads that work for us today. They work in finance, systems, and marketing, with several in senior level positions. CIGNA's current CIO is a Wharton MBA.

How does a company like CIGNA determine which B-school campuses to visit during the recruitment season?

There are a lot of things that go into it. The reputation of the school is where we start -- we only target top academic programs. There are sometimes geographical motivations for a particular school that we might choose. CIGNA has corporate headquarters both in Connecticut and Philadelphia, but we have offices in every major city around the country and the world. So, there are some students that we target because we know that we have a particular mass in a given region. The other thing is the direct linkage between what our business needs are and what programs those grads come from. So if we know that a school has a very strong health-care program, we're interested in that. If a school has a strong HR program and we hire HR professionals, we'd be interested. We have very strong needs for finance professionals, so we go after schools with strong finance programs.

The placement director wears many hats. One of them is to service corporate partners. How have the skills that you've developed in Wharton's director's chair helped you in your role at CIGNA?

CIGNA is a very results-oriented, driven-to-succeed, sense-of-urgency-about-meeting-the-objectives type of company. You get ahead by helping others succeed, and your goal is to help the people around you succeed. It's very similar at Wharton. People smile and ask me how life is in the corporate world, as if I'm experiencing corporate shock. But to be honest, Wharton prepared me exceptionally well to be a manager and immerse myself in the corporate culture. There are a lot of similarities between how the Wharton CDP office and CIGNA are run.

Have you integrated any of the skills or techniques you've developed as Wharton's placement director into your job at CIGNA? Just how transferable are those skills?

Absolutely. Everything from managing people to project management to understanding what the priorities are and how to readjust them have been transferred from my job at Wharton. At Wharton I had a fairly sizable staff to manage and plenty of objectives to keep my focus on. That was the key to success at the school, and now those skills are serving me very well here at CIGNA. You're constantly multitasking, working on 20 projects. It is a constant effort to prioritize and readjust your priorities. You're telling some people you'll get to them first, and others second, and still others third, and doing that diplomatically is the key.

How important is it to have professional corporate/industry knowledge prior to becoming a B-school placement director?

I don't think it's essential. I'm probably biased though because I had little prior professional experience to speak of other than a short time with a small company (ATI Communications). Company-side experience helped me, but I don't think it was essential. What I do think is essential is putting together a diverse staff. So my goal at Wharton as well as at CIGNA was and is to put together a team of people who have master's degrees in consulting or history, or who have MBAs. The object is to hire people who have business experience, HR experience, finance experience, marketing experience, etc. Whether the director has this or that type of experience isn't critical, but he or she wants to balance what their strengths are with the rest of the recruiting or career services team.

To date, what are Wharton's average base salary, bonus, and total compensation figures for 1998?

It's a war out there. Speaking from the CIGNA seat, we're going after the best and brightest students. When we recruit at university campuses, we want the best students, and once we get to know different folks and identify that there is a nice match between us and the students, then we want to go after them. Speaking from the Wharton seat, I noticed high-tech, finance, and marketing companies getting into the dynamic of starting to get a little creative with their incentives. Some companies, for example, began offering tuition remission.

But let's start at beginning. Something as basic as the sign-on bonus -- which is now ubiquitous -- in the past was only offered to high level corporate execs in certain fields like consulting and I-banking. Today, sign-on bonus is happening everywhere, even on the undergrad level. Now, it's standard fare in the MBA field. What has followed sign-on bonus (which started in earnest during the early-to-mid-'90s) are things like tuition reimbursement, stock options or grants, and sometimes companies being flexible, making special arrangements such as offering housing or sharing the cost in housing during a student's summer internship.

Wharton's average starting base salary for the Class of '98 came in at $82,000 (based on 100% of the class). The average first-year signing bonus was $20,056 (based on 85% of the class). Meanwhile, the median sign-on bonus was $20,000, and the guaranteed first-year bonus was $25,000. The median total compensation was $158,000 -- that includes median sign-on bonus, yearend bonus, tuition reimbursement, and whatever the company said was part of the students' first-year compensation.

While at Wharton, did you emphasize any particular counseling or workshops to better prepare students for salary negotiation or offer assessment?

One of the things that prepares Wharton students better than any other are the negotiation workshops. At Wharton, starting six to seven years ago, we offered a popular negotiations course that is part of curriculum. It's an elective that teaches students how to negotiate effectively. That's important for anyone pursuing a career in business.

Several years ago, we started talking to the faculty, noticing how popular that negotiations class was -- it was completely booked -- and decided to offer two workshops (one in the fall and the other in the spring) on the subject. They're co-sponsored by the faculty and the staff in the Career Placement Office. The spin is how to negotiate a job offer so that you feel comfortable accepting it. And we were very clear that the class isn't all about negotiating salary. You might be thrilled with your compensation package, but want to be in another location, want a different start date, etc. What you find is that a lot of companies won't negotiate for compensation. That's relatively rare in MBA marketplace because companies are aware of how demanding the MBA market is. So they've already done their homework and are pretty confident that they're offering a competitive package.

Where do those higher pay packages predominate?

Clearly in consulting. They offer, year after year, the highest base salary. There's no industry that offers the level of base compensation that consulting firms do. In addition to that, consulting firms have been generous in offering sign-on bonuses. And in the last couple of years, they've developed a policy where summer interns who sign on for full time employment end up getting their second year of tuition paid for.

You don't see Procter & Gamble, General Mills, or Kraft trying to match the base salaries offered by Bain, Boston Consulting Group, and McKinsey. They have, however, responded in other ways to keep the compensation gap from widening unabated. The gap is still there though. Today what you have to add to the formula for successful recruitment is the competitive market out there for talent. You might be going after a student who's not even interested in working for a consulting firm, but he may have three or four offers, so you have to ante up anyway. Every industry right now has a very strong need for hiring.

Have students ever enjoyed the amount of leverage that they have today?

In my 12 years of doing this...no. Definitely in the mid-to-late 80's, before the stock market crash, we were in a similar dynamic. But it wasn't as widespread as it is today.

Let's shift gears and talk a little bit about the role that alumni play in the recruitment process. What do they do and has their role increased? (Editor's Note: As of Aug. 1, 1998, Wharton's alumni network numbered 26,463.)

From the CIGNA perspective, it's critical that we get our alumni involved in our on-campus recruitment process. They are part and parcel of our university recruiting program. When we're going to Wharton, we have a campus manager role that is filled by a Wharton alum who was either a grad or undergrad student at the school. The campus manager first goes internally into CIGNA looking for UPenn or Wharton grads and pulls them together as a team to work on cultivating the company's Wharton-specific campus recruiting program. They talk about, for example, what student clubs to get involved with, the key administrators that we need to support with some of our foundation money, and where we should plug our scholarship dollars into.

On the flip side of that, let's say I'm at Wharton, sitting in the director's chair.... Our goal is to bring these companies on campus, and to educate students about the different functions, industries, and career opportunities that exist out there. Let's bring folks in to help us do some resume preparation programs. Let's bring folks in to do a topical presentation, on say, how to make money on the Internet, or how to open a new business with an existing product. The best way to do those types of things is through alumni. It's a great, symbiotic relationship.

I've had companies think they could just jump out of a plane, land on campus, and think that they could walk away in a day with a fistful of hires. Well, those were the companies that usually called me later in the year in frustration. The alumni are the oil that make much of the recruitment process run smoothly. From a programmatic standpoint, sure, I'll be setting up the paradigm, doing things like making introductions [at the schools we recruit at], but at CIGNA, it's the actual school alumni that will be out there and doing the work. And campus managers are evaluated on their performance; It becomes one of their major job objectives.

What if any service did Wharton provide for its alums in exchange for all of the help they provide during the recruitment process?

That varies tremendously from school to school. At Wharton, the Career Development and Placement Office was prepared to service alumni with their career management needs no matter what. We expected all of my staff to do career counseling with alumni as they approached us. We also provided a very effective alumni Web site that's free and contains job listings, networking contact info, information about resume and cover letter preparation, and rich content on the nuts and bolts of the job search process. And every Thursday and Friday, we updated our online Job Opportunities Database. We did charge people to use the Job Opportunities Database a minimal fee ($25) ever six months to cover administrative costs. If they wanted a hard copy of the Career Management Guide they'd also have to pay for that.

We also packaged all the content around how to successfully go through an efficient job search into a book called The Career Management Guide. Written by the staff, a new edition comes out each year. The key driver is the Career Management Seminar, which is used to service alumni in their career management needs. In particular, it goes over the job search. We used it in class with current students that we were teaching. But it was designed in such a way that anybody could use it.

Andrew I'd like to talk to you briefly about international students and the added challenges they face during the job search process. Do you feel that you have to manage foreign students' expectations? And is that becoming more important given the torrent of applications being sent to U.S. B-school from abroad?

I felt that Wharton's admissions office did a real good job being realistic about that. I never felt that as internationalism has become more important and more and more international applications were streaming in, that Wharton was affected by having more people enroll with unrealistic employment expectations.

We worked very closely with the admissions office, and both Bob Alig and Sam Lundquist understood and understand what the employment market is for international students. Most do well. They were and are heavily recruited by consulting firms and multinationals that recruit there as well as more and more I-banks. In the end, sometimes we would dampen their expectations, and they'd come in and say: "This is fantastic, you guys said I'd have a hard time." There are definitely students who really want to stay in the States long term, working at a corporation that is not a consulting firm, and that can sometimes lead to a tough situation. They may not have the proper working papers, but want to stay in the U.S. regardless.

What we apppreciated was when a student did come to us and say this is a tough scenario, can you help me out? Wharton's not the kind of school to take the approach that enrolls a 30% international class constituency, and then for the sake of it, decides to admit more. The school is looking for the best and the brightest and doesn't have quotas to fill by country. It has never worked that way.

What counseling does Wharton's CD&P provide for international students?

First of all, Wharton did have specialized international programs, but the way we looked at it was that internationals were not a separate category of what we did. It's kind of like diversity at CIGNA. Diversity is not a separate folder. It's part and parcel of everything that we do. That was true of the international piece at Wharton. When we did the Career Exploration Conference, for example, we might have had 15 panels, and each of them had a global representative on it. We did that instead of just having one international panel. Having said that, we did do a couple of international workshops. For example, we did a workshop where several foreign nationals who worked in the States told the student audience how they succeeded in landing their summer of full-time job.

Andrew, having worked in the placement field for more than a decade, I'm sure you've seen a lot of whacky scenarios unfold. What is one of the funnier experiences you've had counseling a Wharton student?

Well, there was this one student who wasn't sure whether or not to cut off his ponytail before the interview process. He was told that he would have to make the final decision, but that the interview and job search process itself tended to be very conservative. He ended up cuffing it under the back of his collar and went through the entire day of interviews as if no one would notice. It was a pretty humorous situation, but he did end up getting hired and kept his long hair. He interviewed for high-tech positions, and I think that's where he ended up.

Andrew, thank you for your insights on the career management program at Wharton as well as the hiring practices at CIGNA.