Home
| Register/Subscribe Home | /common_adcode/bs_qnaplacement_10.htm
|
 UNDERGRADSMain Page2007 RankingsAdmissions Q&AsCareer Q&AsUndergrad ForumReading ListRecruiter Q&AsSchool Report CardsSchool ToursUndergrad 24-7Undergrad VideosNews HeadlinesPREMIUM CONTENT
| |
MAY 4, 2000 B-SCHOOL Q&A: PLACEMENT Meet Duke's Placement Director "We ask students one question: how many interviews did you take this year? When I came to Duke in 1994, the average student had 15. This year, the average student will have four or five because they have an offer in their hip pocket."
Q: Unlike some of your colleagues at other top business schools, you do a lot of in-house research about MBAs and their career preferences. What have you found from your recent studies about where they are going and what the going rate is? A: We've been doing the study for 13 years, and are doing this year's study now. We have 650 [responses so far]. This year, there are some significant changes. For instance, we were interested to see what impact dot-com companies were going to have on the MBA world, whether it was real or imaginary, and how many people truly pursued jobs [with them]. We don't have any preliminary data. All we can see is what [surveys] we opened and [what we] surmised. We're also interested to see what will happen to Bill Gates. He's been "the most-admired individual" from the MBA standpoint for the last six years. We'll see what has happened with the antitrust [case] and whether he has fallen out of favor. Microsoft has also been "the most-admired company." Gates' wife, Melinda, went to Duke. We did a test survey in 1987. Michael Milken was the most-admired person in the world, and Drexel Burnham Lambert was the most-admired company, which doesn't exist anymore. The two major things we ask in the survey are where are they are going and why they made that decision. We also ask about salaries in this section. The second group of questions is what we call timely or sexy questions. For instance, on the last survey we asked, "Who would you like to most sit next to on a trip from New York to Los Angeles?" Q: We're coming off a seesaw week in the stock market. Did the MBAs run to your office with doubts about their interest in dot-coms? A: No. [Laughs] But it brought a reality check. Before, the idea of working for a startup was more pie-in-the-sky. Everything was rosy. All of a sudden, they're thinking, "I'd better ask my hard questions and do my due diligence." So if they're going to go with a company, they ought to find out if it has sustaining power. Will it be there? Will it make money? Q: You have to keep a lot of people happy — students and recruiters. Their expectations have changed a lot. What are their new expectations? Are they more demanding than they used to be? A: Every year. As far as being demanding, it's [demanding] to keep up with the new economy. The demand is up. We've got all of these great Fortune 500 companies, but students want to know where Razorfish, Red Hat, and the hot dot-coms are. We had a staff meeting last summer to figure out how we would attack this new market. And we brought in a lot of new companies. We had a dot-com recruiting event two weeks ago that 23 companies came to. Q: Every school seems to have a startup career fair. Do they really satisfy student demand? A: No, but it was a quick-hitter to bring a bunch of companies together on a timetable they are used to. They traditionally hire late. We had 12 companies as our goal and ended up with 23. We set up interview schedules and had resume drops. We also went after some of the bigger players earlier in the year — for instance, Amazon.com and FreeMarkets. Students liked having the marquee high-tech, high-growth companies be part of the regular recruiting. Most of the companies had openings for both first- and second-year MBAs. Some large companies came out of the woodwork, like E-General Motors, and E-Bank of America — the fast, hot-growth divisions of some stable old companies that wanted to recruit as part of this event. Q: What have the recruiters expected this year? A: We have to keep them happy. This fall, I compared notes with my colleagues and they were facing the same thing: lots of schedules with gaps. Even the hottest companies couldn't fill their interview schedules. We were worried, so we did a lot of visits and made phone calls to keep them happy. If we could get the companies first-year recruits, they would do fine. Most of the first-year MBA schedules were packed this year. That tells us that there's a shift in the market. The recruiting season is starting earlier, and the recruiters are getting students as first-years by making offers at the end of internships. Those students come back to school far more selective. We ask students one question: how many interviews did you take this year? When I came to Duke in 1994, the average student had 15 interviews. This year, the average student will have four or five interviews on campus because they have an offer in their hip pocket. Q: Have you seen a lot of students go to the traditional companies as an intern and then decide that they were better suited for work at a dot-com? A: That's what we're accessing. We did a printout of our students the other day, and about 240 are placed. Most are still going to the major players. The dot-coms and the startups are not as big of a draw, though it certainly will increase a lot from last year. As a net percentage of the whole group? It may be 10 percent. A year ago, it was probably 4 percent to 5 percent. Q: There again, Duke has about 100 students to place before graduation. A: The verdict is still out for sure. But the main players who recruit here, year in and year out, seem to have done pretty well. They got their catch. Q: You alluded to this before. Let me ask it a different way. At the end of the 1990s, the recruiting season was starting earlier and earlier in the school year. This year, there's a healthy reversal, as dot-com companies recruit later in the season. What's happening at Duke? A: It's creating a catch-22. We will continue to see the mainstay companies recruit earlier [in the academic year]. But students are in a jam because it's too early for the dot-coms to be recruiting [and they have to decide what they want early on]. Some company recruiters are forcing students to "fish or cut bait." Others say, "We'd rather have you be happy. So take your time." I can also see that some of the bigger dot-com companies are moving their [hiring] cycles earlier, such as Amazon.com or eBay. For the second-year MBAs, recruiting never slows down. Now, I see a lot of students who are sitting on one traditional offer and one dot-com. Students face the dilemma of security wars. Will this company not be around in a few years and leave them sitting on $50,000 worth of [loans]? Students aren't getting a sign-on bonus from startups, but they are from IBM or McKinzey. Do they take hard cash [from a traditional company] or take a job with a startup that offers fairly significant stock options? Q: Those dilemmas have the potential of turning your office into ground zero. What do your counselors suggest to the students when they're debating offers? A: This is all new. I try to deal with their penchant for risk and ask how risk-averse they are. We walk through a checklist to determine what it means to turn down an IBM or McKinzey job offer. Are they married? Do they have kids? Then I ask them how willing they are to put themselves on the line. We have gotten a lot smarter in this business. We held a workshop earlier this year called, "How do you value stock options in a pre-IPO [company] and factor in the dilution effect?" If my staff was asked last year what that means, they would have said, "Huh?" Now, they know how to talk [about] it, and they know how to help students with their compensation packages. We also call on startups to know what they're doing. We know to ask them where they are in their life cycles, how their seed financing is, if they've been through first-round financing, or when their projected IPO date is. Our students are particularly concerned with the number of people employed at the company. Q: What's the magic cutoff? A: Ten. Typically you can get an equity position if you're one of the first six to 10 employees [at a new company]. After that, it tends to revert to number of shares. Q: Has the career center mentioned the number issue to companies when they come to campus? A: We sure do, and they ask. The good startups are well aware of the competition. We're seeing companies such as General Mills offering stock options. Andersen and Bain offers a brand-new compensation model, where they take positions with companies that they consult with in the small dot-com world, almost like a VC firm. They will reap some pretty significant rewards. They're taking that money and putting it in a pool to be given out [to employees] in various degrees. They don't even know how they're going to give it out yet. That's how new this is. They have sent out letters to the students, so we know it's out there. It gives them huge leverage, and I can guarantee that McKinzey and BCG and others are taking very strong note. I guarantee that by next year, we will see a lot of mainline companies giving stock. Q: In 1998, you increased the number of on-campus recruiters from 160 to 330. Where does that number stand now for on-campus recruiting? A: 381. Q: Surely companies are interested in their yield rates on campuses, too. When they don't hire their target numbers at Duke, do they naturally weed themselves off campus? A: Yes. We have lost more traditional companies — for instance, manufacturing companies that couldn't get their take here. Instead, they're moving down through your rankings to schools where they can find good candidates. Q: What types of companies does Duke lack? A: Very few. Every year we survey our students and then we hit the road. This year, we're going to 13 cities to make sure that our main companies are happy and that they'll be back. We also call on companies we'd like to have on campus. Q: Duke offers its international MBAs a workshop focusing on their career needs. What are the school's priorities with that group, some 25 percent of the student body? A: We had two high priorities this year. One was to increase the number of high-tech, high-growth companies visiting campus. And the second was to increase our service to international MBAs. Q: What are the specific needs of the international students? A: Sometimes the [English] language is difficult, and [obtaining] a visa. It's not as much of a stumbling block as it was five years ago, but we bring an immigration lawyer to campus to teach them how to go to a company — especially a smaller company who may get scared by the visa — and say, "I've talked with a lawyer. [Obtaining a visa] is not that big of a deal. I can process it if you sponsor me." The majority of students stay in the U.S. Q: Have those students been unhappy in years past? A: Not so much complaints, because they always ended up getting placed. But there was this visceral, "You're not doing as much for me and I have more obstacles and hurdles to overcome." We hired an international counselor dedicated to both first- and second-year international students. We did an international career fair and a job fair on campus with Darden and UNC. Twelve companies came this year, and 30 are booked for the fall two-day event. A number of other top-10 schools have heard about the program and want to participate. We've also called international companies around the world. Q: Indeed, Duke has quite a presence in Germany now with its Cross Continent MBA program, offered via distance learning between Frankfurt and North Carolina. A: It's huge. We have picked up Siemens, Deutschebank, and Ericsson as exec-ed clients. Q: How do Duke's first- and second-years differ from one another? A: With each succeeding group, we notice far more interest in the new-economy-type businesses. Q: What will change in the 2000 to 2001 academic year? A: We feel good about our strategy. We know who the players are. We know who we want to attract. And we're pretty good at it. Our two career fairs were big successes, so those will grow. We know that there is some course work that needs to be offered. Companies are saying, "Your students are good, but they need this." So we're now getting those [requests] into the curriculum. Q: What do the recruiters say that Duke grads lack? A: A knowledge of how the technology part of the Internet works. We have had courses on e-commerce, e-marketing, etc., but the dot-com founders have master's in computer science. When they start asking our students questions, if the students don't know about technology, the company views that as either a lack of interest or intent. We're teaching them how to design Web sites, e-commerce strategy, what are the routers involved, and all that stuff that neither you nor I will ever know how to put together. Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | MAY Learn about your online education options |
 Copyright 2000 , by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.Terms of Use | Privacy Policy |
MBA Insider
Printer-Friendly Version
