I think the services that we provide for MBAs tend to be much more individually focused. When you're working at an undergraduate institution, the quantity of undergraduate students alone makes it difficult to have a lot of individual interaction. But with an MBA school, I think that the programs tend to be smaller (Editor's note: For the 1998/99 academic year, the Smith School has a total of 925 students enrolled in its MBA program -- 497 full-timers and 428 part-timers). And because of the very competitive nature of the MBA program, the expectations of the MBA student are higher.

What do you feel is the most important aspect of your job, in terms of approaching the MBA placement function?

For me, what's most relevant for MBAs is really having a connection with the corporate community. Clearly, MBAs come to the school because they want to excel further in the job market. So they're expecting us to have a good understanding of the different options available to them and how to best pursue options in those fields.

How do you weave that knowledge into the students' experience?

We look at ways that we can impact the curriculum. We look at ways that we can meet with them, partner with student groups, and perhaps partner with faculty to disseminate the information.

What are some programs that you've instituted with faculty or corporations to further involve students in the recruitment process?

One of the programs that we believe is pretty popular is our mock-interviewing program, where we invite corporate representatives to campus to conduct those interviews for students and then provide feedback. Targeted at second-year students, the mock interviewing happens across industries and occurs primarily during the fall semester -- during October and November.

Certainly, we've also partnered with faculty, for example, in our finance area. We've invited some faculty, particularly those who have worked on Wall Street, to talk about their experiences in the hiring process and to provide some details, not only about the job search but about the differences between sales and training and corporate finance. Also, a faculty panel addresses the incoming class during orientation to talk about the job-search issue.

In addition, we've had some finance faculty members partner with the [student-run] finance association to put on two seminars that focus on opportunities in finance, target finance as a field, and identify the different nuances in terms of the search and hiring cycle that pertain to the field. We've also done work with the student marketing club, talking with faculty to look specifically at marketing interviews and case interviewing.

Are most of the corporate reps who help out with the job search and preparation alums?

Not necessarily. Yes, whenever possible, we utilize alumni. But I think that we've been able to develop a number of strong relationships with recruiters. And they haven't always been alumni. For example, American Management Systems (AMS) has been very actively involved in our career-services programming. Also, Andersen Consulting has done a number of things with us, from sponsoring a career forum to help students learn about the available job opportunities with their practice areas and the arena in general, to also sponsoring our internal case competition that happens during the end of the fall semester.

Andersen has also done behavioral interviewing workshops with us, where they help our students study specific types of questions that they might be asked and discuss the best ways to respond to them. For example, it is stressed that students provide examples and specifics about a time when they demonstrated a skill area. So, instead of saying, "I have leadership skills," try describing a situation where you've taken charge to demonstrate those leadership skills. Typically, students are not used to talking and elaborating extensively on what they've done. These types of workshops help them learn that it's okay to talk about the great things that they've done.

You mentioned that students feel strongly about your office being plugged into what's going on in the corporate world. Do you make an effort to integrate students into that process, whether it be through programming or having a couple of students hired in your office to disseminate information and provide career advice?

We sure do. We have about 20 student ambassadors who are employed in our office who are able to take some of that information back to their peers. But beyond that, whenever we have meetings set up with employers here in the school, we invite students to be a part of those strategy sessions so that the employers can get to know them. And, in turn, the students get to hear directly from the employer what the opportunities and skills are that are in demand. We probably set up around two meetings with companies each month and try to involve between one and six students for each.

We also are planning in the future to involve our students in our marketing calls where we go off-campus. We will probably include the student leaders who represent their subject areas (i.e., the marketing club co-presidents, etc.) -- in total about 10 to 15 people. Right now, we involve those student leaders in our employer meeting here at school, but we don't do that when we go on the road.

What has the increasingly competitive hiring environment done to Maryland's career-services schedule? Has it made you guys start your career-services programming earlier or beef up the offerings that you provide?

Yes, it has. Let me back up just for a minute and give you a little bit of history. I was brought in about two and a half years ago to take a look at what the Graduate Career Center was doing and to really take it from more of a regional focus to a national focus. I think that historically, we have been a very strong school in the local region but nationally, we've been trying to gain greater recognition. So I think that maybe the strategies that we're pursuing over the last two and a half years have really begun with a number of new initiatives.

One of the things that we started was taking a look at students really from the moment that they're applying to school. What we do is we start off in the application process, and we ask them two very pointed questions about their career direction to get a sense of how focused they are up front. Following that, once students are admitted, we send them a welcome package over the summer before they start school that really gets them to start thinking about their job search. It also requires them to put together a resume that we'll use in a resume book. Once they hit campus, we have an orientation program with some student panels, each comprised of five to six second years representing their functional areas who talk to first years about how to pursue internships in specific industries. Later into orientation, we have individual appointments with each student to review their resumes. Our goal is to let students know that they really need to start their job search from day one.

Most of this programming occurs during the course of the first month?

Really, the first two pieces (asking applicants questions about their career direction and sending the welcome package) occur prior to their arrival, and then the orientation starts right when they arrive.

Our goal really has been a little bit different than in the past. Now, we're focusing our attention on the first-year students, believing that if we're able to get them prepared during their first year for that summer internship, those skills will translate into the second year. I think our primary motivation behind that is [coming from] some of the statistics that you see about the number of students who receive full-time offers from their internships.

Has that grown over the course of time that you've been in your position?

It's hard for me to say because, again, I've only been here for a little over two years. But I think that certainly we are seeing [students receive full-time offers as an extension of their internships] more and more. So, whereas in the past, the center used to provide the resume writing and all that in the second year, we're now providing all that in the first year, coupled with what we call our Career Management Experience or Learning Module (ELM), which occurs in the seventh week, in October. It happens in the middle of the first semester so that students have some time to get adjusted to school before we start hitting them with a lot of career information.

What does the Career Management Experience involve?

It's pretty intensive. Students go to class for six weeks. They take a break, and during that seventh week, they focus strictly on this career management, or ELM as we call them. It lasts five days. During the first day, we take them through the Career Leader instrument, a tool which helps students to assess their individual values and competencies and then points them in a particular career direction. What we generally see is that students may come in and know that finance, for example, is the area they'd like to pursue. But then, they may not know exactly what direction to go within that particular field. Career Leader helps them to further define their career aspirations.

The second day, we take them through an etiquette seminar where we bring in a consultant who does the nuts and bolts of business etiquette. So we start off with how to properly dress. Then we have a seven-course lunch that we take them through and instruct them on the proper fork to use, and so on. We also take them through a cocktail reception and instruct them on proper networking techniques and how to pick someone up and drop then off -- those kinds of things.

Days three through five are filled with various seminars covering topical areas in depth. For example, one seminar covers networking, helping the student develop personal and professional networks and having them think about people they know and all the possibilities that are out there. We also have students develop a two-minute commercial, so that when they find themselves talking to a recruiter over the phone or at a cocktail reception, they have pre-prepared what they briefly want to share about themselves.

Other seminar topics cover interviewing, marketing oneself, and the resume letter.

How many people are there in your office to service Maryland's student body?

In the Graduate Career Center, we have six professionals and two and a half support staff. That has tripled since I became director.

Are there plans to grow the staff further as you lay out the groundwork to increase your office's role in the job search and placement process?

Yes, there are. In fact, this past year alone, we've added several positions. One has focused on employer development and outreach. What I'd like to see in the future is some focus on international students and more focus on alumni.

Of the 61 schools evaluated for Business Week's 1998 rankings, Maryland's was the only one to have all of its graduates pocket at least one job offer by graduation. Meanwhile, second-year recruiters decreased from 73 in 1997 to 64 in '98. Why do you think on-campus recruiters are diminishing?

There could be a lot of reasons. For example, in the current economic climate with what's going on in the markets, we have people like Merrill Lynch, say, schedule visits and then cancel. But I think that another example of what we've seen is that because Maryland has been very regionally focused in the past, we tend to have a lot of smaller, more regional firms.

Now that we're moving into a different type of arena, I think, given the competition that's out there and our resource constraints and so forth, it's been much more difficult to try to attract them to campus. So part of our strategy has been looking at ways that we can move beyond the actual on-campus visit and perhaps help employers with services that allow them to achieve similar results, and then screen and invite students to their offices.

So far this year, what kind of feedback are you receiving? Are more companies signing on to recruit on-campus?

Yes, I would say that we've probably had a 25% increase in the number of companies on campus this year. That brings our second-year recruiter total to 90, which is our goal. But I feel pretty strongly that we're going to exceed that [by year's end].

How are you going about attracting these new recruiters?

We're looking at ways that we can help them test our students, who are the product, and sort of get their feet wet. One way we do this, for example, might be through a resume and cover-letter collection, where we specifically work with our faculty to identify students who fit the exact profile that a company is looking for based on students' stated preferences. We're also looking at ways that we can leverage alumni within an organization.

Are you specifically involved in that process? Or is someone else on your staff responsible for making that happen?

I think that I need to maintain some role in that. Our primary direction, in terms of that outreach, comes from our new Associate Director for Employer Relations. I've worked very closely with him to develop our marketing plan just so that it's in line with our strategic plan. He's really the one that is generating the leads and doing a lot of that work. Then, he and I, together as well as individually, make some of the sales calls.

Which companies are you targeting as future on-campus recruiters?

When we look at our breakout in terms of student preference data, we see that approximately 40% of our students are interested in the financial-services area, while about 30% are interested in consulting. Then there's a split between marketing and information systems. What we're really doing is identifying firms that are in the finance area. We've been very strong with corporate finance in the past but haven't done nearly as much with i-banking. So we're trying to develop some relationships there with some of those firms.

With consulting, again, we've been doing great with the Big Five. Now we need to move beyond that and look at McKinsey (a relationship was established this past year), Bain, and others that are out there...firms at top of consulting game.

When does the internship and second-year recruiting season begin at Maryland? I know that, over the past couple of years, it has been inching earlier and earlier in the recruiting season, a testament to just how competitive MBA recruiting has become.

That's true. We typically have started recruiting for second years during the third week in September. That continues through the first week of December. For interns, we occasionally have a couple of companies that come in the fall, but the bulk of that recruiting happens in the spring. It starts in February and then goes through April.

How do you prepare the second-year students for the full-time job recruiting season, which apparently starts almost as soon as they set foot on campus?

Part of what we do, again, is we communicate with students over the summer, and we send out what we call our transition package, which helps out with the transition from the first to the second year. The transition package revisits each student's personal strategic plan that they stated in their first year during ELM. Then, it walks them through their resume and cover-letter writing. We also ask students to clarify for us how their personal strategic plan has changed. That helps to alert us to where we have to focus some time and energy with specific students. Then, when they arrive back on campus, we take them through some recruiting kickoff meetings, mock interviews, resume critiques. All those kinds of things to help get them ready.

In your opinion, what is the most important piece of counseling or programming that you provide for second years with respect to bagging that lucrative job?

I think all of the work that we do in the first year to get them ready sort of sets the stage. Part of that involves a personal strategic plan, where we ask each of our students to develop this plan for him or herself. That way they clearly define their objectives and their methodologies for achieving their objectives.

By the time they get here in their second year, we tend to be more focused on helping students do their company research and identify resources, as well as helping them deal with issues of salary negotiation, transitioning to work, etc.

According to Business Week's survey results for its 1998 B-school ranking project, Maryland's Class of '98 earned a total compensation package worth about $98,200. Meanwhile, on average, they earned average base salaries roughly 83% higher than their pre-enrollment levels. Are those figures partially the result of the specific negotiating skills students have learned through your office?

Part of what we're trying to do, again, is to equip students with information, helping them to understand who their competitors are. So, for example, if a student goes into a company and he or she realizes that they're up against someone from Duke, Wharton, and Harvard, then I think what we're trying to do is to help them negotiate a similar package even though we might be ranked a little bit lower than those schools. We also want to help them look at the full array of benefits and compensation packages that can be negotiated.

One other piece that we've been pretty successful at last year and are starting to be this year is in working with recruiters to help them understand a student's situation. For example, a recruiter conversation my office might have might involve helping the recruiter understand that XYZ student has offers from firms A, B, and C in these salary ranges. That way we can help the recruiter understand what their competition is. That accomplishes two things: It helps recruiters to be competitive in the bidding process, and for the students, it also helps them achieve the best compensation package they can.

Typically, what type of compensation are you seeing more and more of these days?

We're seeing students that receive a lot of stock options. In previous years, that wasn't as popular of an option, initially, for MBAs. But now, we're seeing quite a bit more of that.

In fact, our records show that about 24% of the graduating class of '98 received stock options as part of their comp packages -- third-most in Business Week's Top 25. Is that a testament to the school's forte in entrepreneurship? Does that mean that a large percentage of the companies that recruit at Maryland are small businesses or startups?

Not necessarily. I think we have a pretty healthy mix. I think that our target is really to take a look at diversifying our portfolio and looking at ways that we can have those large, multinational firms along with some of the smaller startups in the region.

The nice thing about having such a great entrepreneurship center [named the Dingman Center] in the school is that we have a number of extensive networks and resources at our disposal to help students make connections. For example, there are different funding sources and venture-capital groups that the center can help students connect with.

Also, the center has something called the Inner Circle. This is a group of individuals who are very closely tied with the Dingman Center and have networking sessions and seminars and all sorts of activities that students can participate in. The center's activities tend to be focused more on entrepreneurial students, though they can be both open to everyone or confined just to students in that concentration depending on the nature of the activity.

Given the growing propensity of students to join smaller companies or startups at graduation, do you see many folks doing independent job searches?

Absolutely.

Would you say the majority of Maryland student body does an independent job search?

Philosophically, my feeling is that if you want to be successful, you need to employ all strategies. So I encourage students to not rely solely on us but to also take a look at the independent job search. And certainly, we look for networking opportunities and alumni connections to aid students in their independent searches. We do anything we can to help them make connections with people who are in hiring positions.

Do you offer any workshops to help people along with their independent job search? Or are there any support groups designed to aid students in their own job searches?

We do offer two different types of job search workshops. One tends to be for the job seeker in general, and the second tends to be focused on a specific industry. So we give students the general skills, but then we also try to tailor it to a particular industry that they might be pursuing an opportunity in.

Is this taught by Career Services staff? Or do you bring in professionals who are willing to help out?

Typically, it's probably taught by one of our staff. But we're trying to partner wherever we can. For example, we also offer an international student job-search workshop that helps them look at some of the specifics around the student visa. In this case, we bring in someone from the outside who knows about immigration issues and visas.

Speaking of international students, at 39%, the Smith School has the largest percentage of foreign students enrolled in its total, full-time student body in Business Week's Top 25. Earlier you mentioned that you are trying to beef up the school's international student job-search assistance. What types of things does your office do to help foreigners with their career search that make it unique?

One of the projects that's underway right now is developing a database of companies that employ international students or that are open to hiring students on a visa. We have made that available to students, yet there may only be about 150 companies in it to date. So that's an ongoing project and one that we're continuing to work on.

We're also looking at ways to help our foreign students develop skills so that when they're in an interviewing situation, they can compete effectively. We're specifically helping them with their English-speaking skills, especially for those students who do not have English as a native language. That way they'll be able to better express their ideas during interviews.

Every school has a TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) requirement for its international population. Do these communications skills that you're imparting focus on actual lingusitics or on nuance, such as body language?

Probably a little bit of both, quite honestly. We certainly have the TOEFL requirement, and we also conduct phone interviews with international students. So yes, we do some screening up front to make sure students have competent English-speaking skills. But I think that there's a different dynamic when you're in an interview setting, and that pressure is on. For someone whose native language is English, there's typically a lot of anxiety in an interview setting. Add a language barrier on top of that and I think that makes it even more difficult. So we try to help our international student population look at ways that they can express their ideas, help them to understand that it's okay to ask for clarification, and understand body language and signals.

Does your office go so far as to assure a job for those foreigners who really want to stay in the U.S. for postgraduate employment?

We're really careful up front about managing expectations. I don't know that I would say we go so far as to assure students of a job on U.S. soil because we're not the ones who are making the job offers. But, yes, we do what we can. We help them to understand how their situation is unique and how that might present additional hurdles in the job search.

But we also, again, try to connect them with companies that would be open to sponsoring them. For example, we encourage them and support them in attending the International Career Consortia in Miami and Orlando. We also publish an international students' resume book as a way to get their resumes in front of employers.

Which industry, in your experience, have you found to be most flexible in hiring internationals? For example, some career-services officials have intimated that Wall Street is a little easier for international students to break into. Have you noticed that as well?

We haven't necessarily seen that. We just surveyed a number of employers through telephone conversations and asked them some questions about the whole hiring issue around international students. And while many of the companies said officially, their policy might be open to hiring international students, unofficially they were saying that because of the costs associated with sponsorship, they may not always be willing to make that leap. As a result, we've talked about developing a brochure for employers to help them understand what's involved with sponsorship and the myths and truths surrounding it. That will be ready for this summer, and we hope it will help break down some of the barriers and stereotypes (i.e., the amount of money and paperwork involved in sponsoring an international employee).

You were also mentioning consortia as being another way to hook up international students with job opportunities. Do you really plug these job fairs on campus?

We do. And I think the reason for that is because we are very much in a growth mode with attracting companies to campus. I want to be sure that our students have the widest exposure possible to opportunities. So we're encouraging their involvement in these other consortia to widen their exposure.

Which consortia have had the highest student success rate?

Well, there's one consortium that we are a part of for domestic students, and that's the National MBA Consortium. That's also a consortium that we play a very prominent role in running, along with the 14 other schools involved. This past year, we handled all of the interview scheduling for every school. What that means is that we posted company position announcements, communicated with employers about which students were interested in their positions, and then scheduled the interviews. The consortium happens because each school plays a role, and those roles rotate each year. Overall, we feel that the consortium is a good way for students to gain exposure with other students and with companies that don't recruit on campus. And our students have done fairly well in the past with accepting offers.

Does your office or the school pick up some of the tab for students who choose to travel to the different consortia?

We have not in the past, but I have been planning to pick up the registration fee for students who decide to attend the National MBA Consortium this year. I know that some of the others, like the international fairs, tend to have various financial aid packages that students can apply for.

For some of the other events -- for example, the Black MBA Association Conference and Career Fair -- we have provided some money to the student group to put together a resume book and distribute it at the event. But in terms of individual support, we typically have not done that.

Returning to your student population: At 36%, Maryland has a fairly high female total class enrollment. In fact, that's the third-highest percentage in Business Week's Top 25. Is there any particular counseling that your office provides for women?

We work one-on-one with women to talk about issues that might be of prominence -- for example, salary issues, to help in the negotiation process. We're also trying to be supportive. We have a Women in Business MBA club that we're supporting by doing things like making available announcements about conferences and resources in the career library, or spotlighting family-friendly companies. That's of rising importance to us because, for the first time this past year, we had four to six women start the program with young children or pregnant. So we're seeing a changing demographic and trying to find a way to help them get a sense of the corporate culture. Moreover, we're hearing from both women and men an increasing interest in a more balanced work life.

Have you received any student feedback about specific career-services programming that needs improvement or should be added to the career center's repertoire?

One of the areas that students would like to see us do a little bit more work on is case interviewing, a tactic usually employed by consulting and consumer products companies. And this year, there was a workshop that was offered on that. That case interviewing practice is important since we're now seeing interest from some of the larger consulting firms that historically have not looked at or visited Maryland -- for example, McKinsey Consulting and A.T. Kearney.

In the past, we really didn't offer a specific workshop on case interviewing. Now that's a program that we work with the faculty to put on and will become a more integrated part of our landscape in the future.

To conclude, what was one of the zanier moments you've experienced during the recruitment process so far during your tenure at Maryland?

One time, we had a student who was very into expressing his individuality. He had braids in his hair that probably stuck out maybe eight inches from his head. So, you can imagine the reaction recruiters might have upon their initial meeting with the student. I'd bet that most recruiters are probably expecting a more conservative approach. So we coached him on the balance between individual expression vs. professional etiquette.

And the upshot?

The upshot was that he eventually went ahead and had his hair cut.

Which industry was he interviewing for?

He was interested in finance, actually, which is probably among the more conservative functions.

Whereas you might have been a little bit more flexible if he was interviewing, say for a high-tech position?

Sure, exactly. And the irony is that his father was the director of HR for a very large, multinational firm!

Robert, thanks much for speaking to me today. Best of luck with this season's recruiting cycle.