Our guest on May 28, 1998, was Ilse Evans, director of the career development office at the MIT Sloan School of Management [15th on Business Week's 1998 rankings]. Ilse has been director of the Career Development Office at the Sloan School since 1994. After receiving her MBA in 1981 from Simmons College's School of Management, she spent 12 years in the high-tech industry, holding marketing management positions with consumer electronics and computer companies. She received her BA in German literature from Wheaton College, a master's in German literature from University of California at Berkeley, and an MBA from Simmons College's School of Management. Ms. Evans was interviewed by Business Week Online reporter Nadav Enbar. Here's the transcript of that discussion:

Ilse, to get us started, what's your philosophy for the most effective way to place students -- be it in summer internships or jobs?

I don't think of myself as placing students so much as helping them get the necessary focus to market their competencies effectively. Oddly enough, marketing oneself is really more important today, where there's a strong market, than it was when I first started in the placement function, and the market was just heating up. More recruiters, more job postings -- the combination of which add up to over 600 at Sloan -- is pulling students in many directions. So, we spend a lot of time working with students on self-assessment, which is administered on a voluntary basis. (Editor's note: All of the Sloan School's career courses are voluntary, except for a course in management communications, which is built into the school's curriculum and teaches written, presentation, and interactive skills in various business settings.) We want students to proactively seek the career that's right for them, instead of be swept up off their feet by the glut of companies looking to hire them.

Do you think that approach differs from the philosophies of placement offices at other schools?

I think maybe it does. I think Sloan has a closer affinity to what's fueling today's market -- namely the technology niche -- but it's really technology in the broadest sense of the word. That tech niche no longer just encompasses bits and bytes but a whole world of applied technology that is fueling growth in every industry. This recruiting frenzy is something we really try to accommodate by helping students make intelligent choices, making access for companies as smooth as possible. We're not gatekeepers -- we see ourselves as facilitators. We don't place any limitations on students or companies, the only real exception being the starting date for when we allow companies to come to campus for recruitment (which, for the 1998-99 academic year, is Nov. 2).

That starting date has definitely gotten earlier -- it was January when I first arrived, and nearly every school has since moved that up to the fall. Harvard and Sloan held out one extra year, but companies were so adamant about getting to campus earlier that we moved the start date up to November last year. As a result, many schools are now specifying a date before which second-years cannot be forced to accept an offer. For Sloan it's Jan. 29 for second-years, and Feb. 26 for first-years.

But as a general rule, we try to give companies every opportunity to gain access to students by having them work with school clubs and participate in classes. We'll also make every effort to accommodate companies who make last minute changes to their interview schedule, for example. But, overall, we want the students to take the lead.

So you don't see your job in terms of being a placement sergeant, but more of an adviser -- which speaks to your office's actual name: the "career development office" -- not the "placement office." What types of services does your office provide that really give students a leg up?

The most important service we provide is a class called the Career Core, which offers first-year students a first look at the career planning process. It's a five-session course taught once a week during the fall semester that takes them through the career planning methodology with a real focus on the marketing perspective. The positioning work that we do in the Career Core is key to a student's ability to take charge. Positioning has two dimensions: The first is how to position yourself in terms of meeting the job requirements; and the second dimension is how you position yourself competitively.

You have to think through your course of action so that you can stand out from the pack: Research the company, think through the requirements that need to be met, etc. If students understand that, then their resumes have more focus, and the content of their interviews has more focus. The worst resume a student writes has no specific audience in mind, no target, no differentiator -- you come across as being a smart person. But the top 10 business schools graduate upwards of 5,000 MBAs every year. And because schools are so competitive nowadays, all of their grads are very bright. So, marketing yourself as a smart person isn't going to differentiate you that much. The Career Core, which was established last year, really drives the marketing end of recruitment home.

And as part of the Career Core, we have students go through a self-assessment process where they can better determine their career goals. We get them used to doing market research using electronic databases and Web sites; we help them develop their resumes and cover letters; and then they participate in mock interviews. Evaluating offers and salary negotiation techniques is also touched upon in the Career Core, but we also collaborate with several Sloan faculty who are experts in mediation and negotiation to deliver seminars on the subject throughout the year. We have a faculty member, Ed Schein, who wrote a book called Career Anchors, a self-assessment book, and he joins us sometimes to help students in the career planning process.

We, of course, also offer the usual resume-development and offer-evaluation workshops as well, and have the luxury of bringing in some professionals for workshops in their specific areas of expertise. For instance, we brought in a Goldman Sachs investment banker from New York and she did two workshops with our student and then did some individual counseling gratis. We also hired another woman who has a banking background as a consultant to do mock interviewing workshops. Banking tends to require a lot of treatment, so we offered some focused seminars on mock interviews and negotiation techniques.

In addition, we provide a whole separate series of workshops for students interested in the high-tech arena. That's necessary because the industry dramatically differs from the regular recruiting. Smaller high-growth firms don't recruit as early in the year, and there's usually no centralized HR-driven process in place. Smaller technology firms come in to interview students during the spring term, and the company representative is usually the hiring manager interviewing during his day job... the entire situation is very ad hoc. We're usually scrambling to accomodate their schedule changes, and, to do so, we have to be very flexible.

It sounds like Sloan students are showered with services and programs to get them going. Are alumni accommodated under the career services umbrella as well? Does Sloan's placement office provide any career services to alumni who are looking for new jobs, or a career change?

Yes, the school does, but through the alumni relations office, not the career development office. That's part of the long-term relationship that the school maintains with alumni. That office has a Sloan alumnus who is a part-time counselor to alumni, and he's done innovative things like videoconferencing seminars with alumni clubs around the country. We stay closely in touch so that we can exchange leads. I think we have built much more networking into our placement curriculum after seeing how much it has paid off for alumni career counseling. Thanks to their input, we spend a lot more time on networking, cold calling, and informational interviews.

In addition, the consultant who works with the alumni office has an executive-search background, so he helps us with issues of how to best work with executive-search firms -- there are a few that are very helpful to MBA students.

The school has been expanding enrollment in recent years, adding 200 or so full-time students over the past couple years to its current enrollment of 711. Has that phenomenon changed the way you deliver services? Have you had to up the number of placement staff to accommodate the increased student body?

We've added two staff people, which brings our total to six full-timers. We have a different staffing paradigm than most other B-schools, in that 5 of the 6 staff members are professionals, and one is the office manager. So we don't employ a receptionist or anybody that isn't fully involved in the career planning process. Everybody is degreed, and two members have MBAs, while another has a master's in counseling. We feel that it's very important to have in-depth professionals at every level. And we're lucky to have enough of a reputation among the local community to be able to bring in counselors for mock interviews and work with company HR professionals who might be willing to work weekends or evenings.

Ilse, you touched briefly on Sloan's technology niche, something you've tapped into on the placement side, implementing a new generation of technology into Sloan's career services. Can you describe some of these services? Are they unique to Sloan?

Many of them are. We just went through our second year using a Web-based interview-bidding and sign-up system. We were fortunate to be the beta site for the vendor, Exeter Systems, because the experience of working with a development team helped adapt us to the processes offered. The system gives our students one-stop shopping so that they can bid on an interview, sign-up for an interview time, access job descriptions, unearth contact names, link to company home pages ... all that without coming to campus. We also use the system for job fairs. And what's nice about the technology is that it's the same software we use for course bidding during the academic year -- you can preregister that way.

The other thing we do, technologically speaking, is give students access to our own contacts database -- which contains the names of companies and contacts of our prospective recruiters as well as our mature companies. So, students can see the kinds of companies we're working on bringing to campus, and that helps because companies look more favorably upon that. In other words, if students get in touch with the companies independently, it becomes easier to get those companies on campus, because they've already tasted a sample of student demand.

Obviously, interviews are an important part of the placement process. How does Sloan treat them?

We offer both closed- and open-interview schedules for companies that are interviewing. We actually require on-campus recruiters to split their interview schedules 50-50 between closed and open interviews. If a company is only sending one person for a day of interviews, then they can do open or closed schedules. But if they do more than one schedule of interviewing, we ask that they balance it out. There are plenty of companies that interview off campus in local hotels. And we give students the option of using our service or doing it their own way. Off campus, the most competitive firms usually do exclusively closed interviewing during the peak season -- that includes some of the boutique banks and consulting firms that don't hire large numbers of MBAs.

How many students actually go the independent route, and do you encourage that?

Most of the students use both the services that we provide as well as take their own initiative -- which I encourage. I don't think students should go just one route. Taking their own initiative also diffuses some of the concentration of interviewing in the fall semester, allowing us to stretch that out over the winter and spring. I'd rather see longer recruiting relationships than have three frenzied weeks of intense interviewing. That's a strategy on our part to have companies keep the dialogue open with our students. We want companies and students to have a longer time to sample one another and develop a partnership and an ongoing relationship. Someone puts out feelers and you nibble, that's really how the job market works.

Also, we're working on bringing more small-to-midsize companies to interview on campus as student interest in them grows. We brought 62 new companies to campus last year, and almost the same amount this year -- 50-something. Some small-to-midsize companies that have recently come to Sloan include: Lycos, a fast growing search-engine firm, Amazon.com, Aspect Telecommunications, Frogdesign, and George Group. Other larger companies now recruiting here include: 20th Century Fox, Visa International, and Johnson & Johnson.

How many interviews are Sloan students garnering?

That's hard to say because we just can't keep track of everything. Someone like McKinsey, a firm that interviews over half the class, usually in a hotel, is hard to keep track of, so we have to make estimates. We're seeing second-years averaging 13 interviews apiece -- that's for first-round interviews only. The companies-to-students ratio is 210 to 265.

Does every Sloan student get an internship who wants one?

Let me put it this way, this last month of May, we had more employers looking for students than students looking for jobs. A lot more students are now not making their job decisions until graduation is behind them to give them more time to think it through... They're just very confident about their value in today's marketplace. Those students who are still looking are doing so because they're holding out for geography reasons or because what employers are bringing to the table may not be quite right for them. Certainly the jobs are there. So, on the one hand, we're encouraging students to focus on which specific companies they're interested in (thus cutting down on the number of interviews students have), but on the other hand, it looks bad if everybody doesn't have a job by June. There are quite a few students who find their internships through job postings and ad hoc hirings.

Do you encourage everyone at Sloan to do the summer internship?

Well, there's one part of the market that are the formal summer internships (formal internships comprising those at big I-banking and consulting firms), and there's another part of the market that are the summer jobs -- which do not engage in the same type of formal rotation where students are exposed to different functions designed to woo them into employment. The actual work content of a summer job is hands-on and project-based. Very often it's business development, where a student analyzes a potential market for a new product or service. Or they'll do a study on a firm to see if it's appropriate for acquisition.

Everybody wants and needs a summer job, and I encourage students to think about what the most important type of work that they need to experience is. I don't have too many students who choose not to work over the summer. Nearly every student uses the career development office for contact, job, and company information. And most formal internships are obtained through our office. Meanwhile, I'd say that 50% of our students find their summer jobs through independent interviewing. That's good because students are now being more exposed to the real job market -- formal on campus recruiting is an artifact of B-school. I want all of our students to experience the informal recruiting process, check out our job postings, and do the work.

How important is prior work experience in today's marketplace?

I've seen companies express disappointment if a student hasn't had enough prior work experience -- which is about four years. The admissions office accepts a few students with two years of experience under their belts, but the average is creeping upward. (Editor's note: The average amount of work experience for Sloan's Class of 2000 is 4.6 years.) You also must realize that many of the students entering into MBA programs are doing so with the idea of making a career change. That makes marketing them more interesting because together we are trying to figure out what it is in their background and experience that can give them more leverage in the job market.

There's a student who has a background in the U.S. military, and he was involved in humanitarian relief operations in Bosnia and Eastern Europe. He wanted to be an investment banker, and the way he got into I-banking is by leveraging his experiences in emerging markets and demonstrating his understanding of the risk factors in those markets. Another student had a background in telecommunications -- he worked as a consultant in IT operations for major telcos in Europe, and was involved indirectly in some of the major alliances and privatizations that have happened in Europe over the last five years. He, too, wanted to go into I-banking, and telcos are a huge market for I-banks (many have a focus on telecommunications), so he had to use his business training and finance learning at Sloan to demonstrate that his background made him a strong candidate in I-banking. That was hard because banks look for a narrow profile -- someone who has been on Wall Street beforehand.

One of the things that we would do in the Career Core is put up an anonymous resume and tell students where the anonymous resume ended up. From there, we ask students what pitch they feel the particular students had to develop to go from where they had been to where they went after graduation. I think, for one example, a software developer in Chile leveraged his experience to work in finance at a big multinational firm developing Latin American markets -- that's the power of the MBA degree.

There seems to be a trend where more students are now accepting jobs straight out of their internships, that employers are really trying to lock up their vacant positions as early as possible with the new crop of MBA students working for them over the summer. Do you see that trend at Sloan?

Yes. That situation has mostly occurred in the investment banking and consulting fields. Those two industries hire maybe 60% of our graduating class. They actually have, as part of their recruiting strategy, the goal of converting as many of their summer interns as possible. And students are receptive to that because they then have the job security after they graduate, and can focus on their academics during their second year. Most of the companies that have formal internships believe that those internships are investments on their part, which allows them to groom students and hire them after graduation.

How do you coach students to best deal with the mounting pressure placed on them by companies to sign on the dotted line right out of the summer internship? Has that situation changed the way you counsel?

We do provide offer-assessment counseling and workshops and also have people from industry come in and talk about how students can handle offers. Firms do a great deal of marketing on campus -- consulting and I-banking alone make up 95% of the marketing dollars spent on campus even though they comprise only 50% of the recruiting companies here. That forces us to make sure that students know there's a whole other vibrant market out there. Those two industries have dramatically broadened the market for MBAs. It's astonishing how many different kinds of companies are interested in hiring MBAs now. It grows every year.

I guess we haven't been especially successful in our efforts to showcase other industries because every year students, in their comments on our exit survey, tell us that we shouldn't emphasize consulting and I-banking so much. What they're seeing are the industries that are most visible to them. We have showcased events where we invite a whole bunch of smaller firms or industries to come to campus at once to get student attention. We also put together industry panels where we bring in alumni or folks who have had good job experiences in industries outside of I-banking and consulting, such as business services and high tech.

I can imagine that companies would be interested in MIT for its technology niche -- which you addressed. What other industries or areas is Sloan recognized for by recruiters? We talked about the prominence of I-banking and consulting...

The skills that students learn here have really broad industry applications. For example, we have a strong program in entrepreneurship that cuts across industries and an operations track that cuts across manufacturing and services. If you look at something like consumer packaged-goods companies that now use sophisticated technology to analyze consumer buying trends, they're looking for people who can understand those things. So there's a diverse cross section of employment opportunities here.

Clearly, however, MIT will always occupy a place in the old high-tech recruiting area. Computer peripherals and software, for example, is a strong segment and accounts for maybe 10%-12% of class placement. And as technology becomes more pervasive, opportunities in the field will grow, in things like Internet services and electronic commerce. This year, for example, the top three companies requested by the graduating class were Procter & Gamble, Disney, and Nike. The reason, we believe, is because they have great marketing and Internet programs that make the jobs more appealing to Sloan students.

What I find interesting is that the top companies that have traditionally hired the largest number of grads haven't changed that much over time. It has always been the top consulting firms and I-banks, with a sprinkling of Dells and Hewlett-Packards -- the technology mainstays. What has changed, however, are our recruiters' clients. And that has broadened the scope of opportunities for our students. Private Client Service (PCS), for example, hires entrepreneurial MBAs to work with young, high net worth clients. Consultants have also recently hired MBAs into media, entertainment, and hi-tech practices.

What's interesting to me is that banks will now talk about the small startups that they've taken public -- that's how they market themselves to cater to entrepreneurially minded MBA students. A couple of years ago, they'd be talking about managing a Salomon Smith Barney merger, but now they talk about working with Firefly (a small search-technology firm). Nowadays, a consulting firm might be asked to assess the demand for a new product line or a bank might be taking some Internet startup public -- so the opportunities are broadening.

Can you give me an idea, specifically of who Sloan's top 10 recruiting companies are?

McKinsey Consulting (20 hires) has been No. 1 for a long time, and consulting firms usually comprise the top three to four spots: Booz Allen (8 hires), Boston Consulting Group (7 hires), A.T. Kearney (8 hires). A bunch of investment banks also recruit heavily. Merrill Lynch (7 hires) is the biggest, and Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers are up there. And then the top 10 becomes rounded off by companies like Bain Consulting, Dell, Intel, and Hewlett-Packard. Sloan's top 10 usually contains a couple of industries, but the prestigious banks and consulting firms predominate.

That's keeping some pretty good company. But of course, a placement director's job is never done when it comes to recruiting new companies to campus. Which companies are high on your list to bring to campus for next year?

We actually launch into our market development mode in another two weeks, and the Career Office has started tabulating responses from students to actively solicit companies that they're interested in.

I think that for a while the consumer packaged-goods firms weren't as interesting to students, and with all the more sophisticated techniques in marketing today -- which has become a very strong area at Sloan -- we are now looking for firms that are doing unusual things in marketing. Sloan also used to be strong in operations, but then that concentration got a little smaller as students in operations and marketing started moving into finance. But now, operations is now picking up again because things like the supply chain management at Dell have made things interesting again.

We've also been able to get business-services marketing firms to come to campus because they're doing some of the more interesting things like electronic commerce and combining demographics with consumer buying patterns. Visa International, Amazon.com, and various travel agencies are all using more in-depth research and modern technology to drive their businesses.

In 1996, Sloan was one of five schools where MBAs earned median six-figure starting pay packages. Indeed, its graduates had the biggest jump in median salary and bonus, up 34% in two years. Is that growth in salary still occurring?

I feel uneasy with that question because one of the things we're running into is that schools are defining salary terms differently. We, for instance, historically defined total compensation as base salary, signing bonus, and guaranteed bonus. But then we found out that other schools were adding cash relocation into their compensation figure. As a result, we decided that in order to ensure that our students were competitive with other schools, we needed to add cash relocation. Unfortunately, the situation does not allow prospective students to get an apples-to-apples comparison across schools.

Based on our preliminary numbers, 1998 Sloan grads are earning an average base salary of around $83,000. The median, which I believe to be more accurate than the average because it can't be swung by odd currency exchange, is lower, at $80,000. But that's $5,000 higher than last year. Meanwhile, the total compensation package, which includes base salary, plus signing bonus, plus guaranteed bonus and cash relocation is at $120,000. Last year, it was at $110,000. And you should keep in mind that the salary figures at schools that are more entrepreneurial should be a bit lower because there are things such as stock options that are not easily quantifiable. Generally speaking, the top five MBA schools aren't going to be that far apart salarywise because it is a maturing market.

Are you seeing companies throw more creative compensation packages at today's graduates, luring them with tuition reimbursement or stock options?

Tuition reimbursement has been around for a while, but there has been an increase in stock options. I think that students are looking for greater equity these days. Just look at the top entrepreneurial high-tech company CEOs, like Bill Gates, Michael Dell, or Scott McNealy -- they're high-profile people living the glamorous lifestyle. Who knows of anybody who's the head of an investment bank or a consulting firm? The willingness to take equity in the hopes of being the next Bill Gates is what's become new on the MBA front.

In your opinion, will the demand for MBAs continue to rise unabated, continuing to push salaries upward?

As a matter of fact, consulting firms and I-banks are supply-constrained right now. And it's that demand for MBA talent that's pushing salaries upward. The demand for MBAs is much broader than I-banking and consulting, however, and clearly, salaries have gotten higher. Furthermore, no one's fighting harder to slow salary growth down, or at least level it off, than the very consulting and I-banking companies that are hiring MBAs.

One indicator to see whether the demand for MBAs is waning is to monitor whether companies are hiring undergraduates or PhDs to fill their positions over MBAs. I'm seeing companies try and source from other places that aren't as expensive, but the demand for MBA remains strong. That's because they bring unique skills and a quant approach to solving business problems. All B-schools are becoming more quantitative. Of course, soft skills are critical as well -- no one succeeds in management without leadership and communication skills -- and those issues are being hammered home in B-school as well. Those skills will keep MBA demand up. A market correction will obviously have an impact, but the fundamentals are very strong for MBA employment.

Who do you report your placement numbers to? And how do you determine whether the school's placement record is successful for a given year?

We share all of our aggregate statistics, and we send a letter out to the faculty and deans with summary information. I have had no intervention from deans or communications office to share our numbers with the public. We're really committed to reporting them honestly and suffering the consequences [because the school is not releasing inflated figures].

What determines that you've achieved success in your job?

There's not one metric that I would say is the most indicative of success. Certainly the percentage of students placed is important to us. But actually in the last three years, the number of students still looking for jobs has increased. We were at a 96% placement rate last year. And the people who were not placed had the opportunities but needed more time to evaluate their offers. The real story for me is the satisfaction of students on what they've learned and what opportunities that education has given them. Sloan is a research institution -- we offer more electives than any other school. I would be troubled if recruiting were so dominant on campus that students felt that they could not take electives for fear that they were missing out on some job opportunity. I'm committed to keeping them focused on their job searches while encouraging a balance between interviewing and studying.

I'm sure thatover the past four years you've amassed quite a trove of zany placement anecdotes. What's one of the stranger ones you've come across?

Well, we hold small job fairs throughout the year, and we had one designed for those interested in high growth, high-tech firms. It was very lively because the market is so strong -- there's just so much hiring happening in that area. So students do pretty well at these fairs. I was told that one of the recruiters at the job fair actually interviewed and accepted a job offer from another firm that was represented at the fair! That was a new one for me. Just goes to show you that, in today's market, nothing and nobody is sacred.

Speaking of job fairs, how many consortiums does Sloan participate in to give its students added placement opportunities?

We participate in several. Here's a quick rundown: Crimson & Brown (for women, international, and minority students); EMDS; the International MBA Consortium; the MIT European Career Fair; the High Tech Career Fair; the California Job Fair; the Consulting Showcase; and the Financial Services Showcase.

Ilse, would you like to add anything else before we wrap up?

I want to reiterate that where the marketing is so strong, quality is becoming a more meaningful differentiator over quantity. The highest number of job offers and highest number of recruiting companies and all of those metrics really aren't as important as the quality of the job itself. We take that quite seriously. Placement used to be about demand generation, but now you have to probe into a firm to see if it's making the best of its MBAs' skills. That makes our work much more interesting and our interaction with students much more substantive.

Ilse, thanks much for the candid insights on Sloan's career services.