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JULY 10, 2000 B-SCHOOL Q&A: PLACEMENT Meet Cornell's Placement Director "I'm much less concerned about the two-dimensional portrayal of a candidate. Resumes are important, but they're the door opener. A resume doesn't necessarily get you a job. It's the three-dimensional self that gets you your job."
Q: John, your most recent position was at an investment bank. How's that compare to life as a B-school's director of career services? A: I haven't been on a learning curve like this in about 15 years. But it's been great fun, and I made it through one cycle. Q: The center received high marks from students and recruiters in 1998. When you got to Cornell, what goals did you set for the placement center? A: You don't want to come in with too many preconceived notions. I didn't want to do anything that would upset the apple cart out of naivete. Throughout the fall, I wanted to make sure that we didn't drop any balls with regard to what we were already doing well. Q: Such as? A: We have an impressive on-campus recruiting system and it's made all the more impressive by having a physical plant that's hospitable to recruiters. I wanted to ensure that we could provide the personal touch that [recruiters] had come to expect. I didn't make drastic changes. Throughout the fall term, we tweaked a few things to make [company] presentations more suitable to students' schedules. Next year, we'll try to eliminate some of the conflicts, which could preclude a student from attending a presentation. Q: With all that you figured out in year one, what will change in year two? A: We're a small school with a relatively small physical plant, and we have maxed out the numbers of companies that can come here in earnest. That's a good thing, but we've tried to think of innovative ways to expand our capacity without losing the "touch" factor. So next year, we'll have a career fair here. It will be an all-day event with numerous ways for companies to reach our students. Q: What kind of companies does the Johnson school want for that career fair? A: Companies that have huge histories with this school and huge historical appeal for our students will garner their own presentation slots in a normal evening schedule. The career fair is not necessarily targeted at Old or New Economy companies, but at companies that have not come here before, or those that have but haven't had the numbers [of students] attending their corporate presentations that they wanted. This is a way to get a lot more exposure to students. That's going to be an all-day event where the school classes will shut down. In the spring term, we began to cultivate our relationships with smaller companies through a Web-driven independent job search site. This is a way to reach the entrepreneurial sector that has suddenly emerged to recruit MBAs. This system helps us figure out how to meld their world with Old Economy companies. And the best way is to give them virtual access to our students. It gives our students a convenient way to introduce themselves to those companies. The next logical step is to have facilities to do the interview by videoconference. A company that may not have the resources or inclination to come here need not be denied access to our students.
Q: Have students been asking for more access to dot-coms? A: They're pretty happy with how we're doing it because they recognize that we can't bring every dot-com here, but we bring a large number of students out to the West Coast in January. We also take them to Route 128 in Boston, and we've got good proximity to Silicon Alley in New York. Q: Your title is director of career services and alumni relations, which is a new title at Cornell. What was the reasoning behind merging two mutually exclusive positions? A: It's to take advantage of a synergy, which for a graduate business school alumni population is very natural: the contact point between the alumni and their profession. When you're talking about a professional program, one's career becomes the primary affiliation, oftentimes with the school. We're also trying to capitalize on those who are often our most enthusiastic recruiters: our alumni. We have a separate staff for alumni relations. By having it all under one house, you can take advantage of some very logical synergies. For instance, we have alumni in leadership positions with companies that are very active recruiters: American Express, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Chase. Another company that recently came on the map because of alumni enthusiasm was CSFB. Q: What kinds of companies aren't recruiting at Johnson? A: We've done a good job understanding the portfolio as our students desire it. We've got good representation of technology companies, but I don't think you'll ever have enough representation on campus. Smaller companies don't have the resource justification to [travel to campus] for one or two days to hire one or two students. We're trying to ensure that a strong population of small companies is aware of our school, the branding that we have, what we believe we excel at, and what our graduates bring to the table. Q: Once the recruiters are on campus, they'll be expecting a strong product. What does Cornell do to prep its MBAs for the job search, resume writing, and interviewing? A: They receive preliminary information from us before any classes start. That's when we begin the Career Track, which runs the gamut from an exhaustive resume-writing program to one-on-one meetings to go over the resume. That course then progresses to the independent job search, and interviewing techniques, with videotaped mock interviews. Q: When first-year MBAs apply for internships, how many electives have they taken in their concentrations? What edge do they have in marketing themselves to recruiters? A: Let's take finance and investment banking as an example. Throughout the course of the fall term, we host a program called Street Smarts. Once a week, we have people come in from the Street to talk about specific areas of expertise. They're not meant to be paid-political announcements for interns. Then we have a program called Immersion in Investment Banking, which is for first-year students. The immersion is a full 15-credit program in that particular discipline. The investment banking immersion starts a week before the second semester. The professors go over a number of the things that the students will need to know as they interview, and spend time at our Week on Wall Street, which happens early in the semester. We have four additional immersions: tech smarts; managerial finance immersion; an e-business intensive, which is about two-thirds of an immersion; and manufacturing. The immersions have gotten rave reviews from recruiters. People have a much better appreciation for the discipline because it's all very carefully orchestrated around a particular field. Clearly, you can't completely simulate the work environment and all of the various dimensions therein. But you can prepare students for what it's going to be like and give them enough working knowledge. Q: What percent of the first-year interns take full-time positions with companies that they intern with? A: My guess would be about 30%. That seems to be ratcheting up a little bit. Maybe five years ago it was in the 20s. Q: Unlike the time that you left Cornell for Corporate America, students now aren't all looking to traditional firms. A: Correct. Q: What's happening at the Johnson School? Who's really interested in dot-coms? A: Last year, the number that went to dot-coms was pretty small: about 5%. This year, it's going to be a little bit higher. Some of our peer schools are anticipating that it will be a lot higher, but I'm not sure that we'll see it. I'm also not so sure how long-lived that phenomenon will be. As the tumult of the equity markets rides itself out, we're going to see some normalcy. I don't think what some schools have experienced in terms of entrepreneurial pursuits reflects normalcy over a protracted period of time. Q: Are there any striking differences that you've noticed between the first- and second-year MBAs? A: For the first years, of course, the dust is settling on where they are going for their internships. Most internships are with established companies, because they're the ones that can afford to do them. Some students are going to startup situations, but not tons. We're up in terms of those students going to e-commerce-type positions, and we can extrapolate and say that perhaps a reasonable percentage of those are with smaller companies. Comparing first-year with second-year MBAs, we have about 50% more [MBAs] in the first-year going to that kind of a position. Based upon our preliminary data, it looks like we have about 7% of our second years and about 9% of our first years [in summer internships] going to what would be considered New Economy companies. This is up from about 3% in the prior year. Q: The average age of a Cornell MBA is 29, which is higher than the average at top B-schools: 27. What is the ideal work experience that they need to bring to you when they say, "Help me get a job"? A: They'd have tremendous success in whatever they have done before. It's not dependent upon what a person specifically did in their former career, because people use MBAs to make a transition. The most important thing is that they did it well and with passion. What's important is that they convey passion for what it is they want to do next. And that they can create a logical segue argument for why they want to do the next thing. Let's say you have someone who was an analyst at an investment bank. That's a fairly fertile ground for feeding into MBA programs. If they were a passable analyst in an investment bank, they might not be a stellar associate in an investment bank coming out of an MBA program. But if the person was a stellar marketing person for an electronics company, and had reasonably good presentation skills as well as analytical skills, that person might be a better candidate. I'm much less concerned about the two-dimensional portrayal of a candidate. Resumes are important, but they're the door opener. A resume doesn't necessarily get you a job. It's the three-dimensional self that gets you your job. Q: Do better doors open for Johnson's Park Leadership Fellows Program? A: Not really. One of the things that the Park program has afforded the Johnson School is the ability to develop a state-of-the-art leadership-development program. But while the Park program was the driver for the creation of those leadership skills, those programs are open to and taken by a very high percentage of our students. Leadership skill development is something that we make available to all of our students. The seed was planted by the Park program. Q: How does it look when recruiters come to talk to a Park fellow versus a traditional MBA? A: If one is the recipient of a fellowship, it is a mark of distinction. There are many other merit-based fellowships that exist here. The Park fellowship receives quite a bit of attention because it applies to a broader number of students. Is it a feather in one's cap? It is. But so is any other academic and merit-based distinction that one can have. Q: Last year, Johnson hosted 89 companies recruiting first-year interns - down 23 companies from 1998. About 141 came after second-year MBAs to offer full-time jobs. Why the change? A: Our numbers were quite a bit higher this year, but we couldn't have taken any more companies. We had a few that we allowed in after the fact because as long as you don't have eight or nine companies on a given day, it's not as obtrusive as if you have students missing classes. Still, the numbers of companies coming for summer internships was more than ample. I can't really speak to what happened in spring, 1999, when I wasn't here. However, in spring, 2000, we had 121 companies involved in the on-campus summer internship recruiting process, and in fall, 1999, we had 150 companies come to campus for full time hires. Q: Is there anything else that you want to add? A: We're using an extensive system that we just put in place called our Job Status System. It's an environment wherein every single student is logged into our system vis-a-vis where they stand in their career search, what they are looking for, how many offers they have, etc. When first-year students arrive in the fall, they can just log in to the system to note what they're interested in. It allows us to keep close track of how our students are doing. That's a good thing, because right now, about 94% of our second-year class has offers. Maybe 85% has not yet firmly decided, so we can reach out to students to say, "We know you've got offers. Do you need any help?" 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