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JULY 13, 2000 B-SCHOOL Q&A: PLACEMENT Meet UNC's Placement Director "You don't have to fit into a box. We have so many students that ultimately choose consulting, marketing, or investment banking. It's easy to think that we're trying to push students there, and we're not. We're here for every student."
Q: What does your corporate experience lend to your position that other directors of career services may not have? A: I've found it incredibly helpful, particularly from a counseling standpoint. Many times, when I'm with a student, they have a question, and I'm able to think from the other side. For instance, if someone wanted to call a recruiter to negotiate a salary, I can say how I'd respond. Q: What are some common mistakes that you find students making? A: When students want to negotiate the time they start [a new position]. It's common for students to want to take some time off over the summer. One student was trying to negotiate a later start date than she expected to have, but was pushed back [by the company]. This student told me, "If I could take a couple of months to relocate, get settled, get an apartment in order, and then start, I'm going to be a much better employee." And I said, "Stop. Let me guess. You're probably single in an apartment." And she said, "Yes." From a corporate perspective, they think you can make that move in a weekend. You don't want to go into a negotiation talking about the week or month that you need to get settled. I don't disagree with her. I have empathy for the fact that she'd like to go to a new city and get a lot of things out of the way. But you can give the wrong signal to a company if they perceive that it will take you a month to get settled. Q: Are there other things that a student can stumble over? A: Negotiating salaries is another potential problem. When students get ready to negotiate, they believe they're negotiating with the person that they're calling back, maybe the person who signed that letter of intent -- for instance, someone in human resources. What they need to recognize is that it's most common that the same person has to turn around to sell to the true decision maker what you just asked them for, to be successful. And when you're negotiating, you have to think that way and be clear and effective in your communication about what's important to you and why. Q: So much attention is given to students' compensation packages. What thought do they give to leadership development and growth at their job? A: Actually, they're looking at it more than we probably realize. Part of it is because the compensation, in general, is good and competitive. Of the most recent graduates, 60% told me that the No. 1 reason for taking the job was job content. The next was company culture, at 18%. So I do believe that students are much more focused on where the job will lead them. Q: Kenan-Flagler's admissions committee has recently upped the ante, and expects applicants to bring more work experience to the table. What should applicants have in mind if they want to cast a positive impression on the Career Services representatives who are sitting in on the admissions process? A: They should put a lot of thought into where the MBA fits in their career paths. The applicants who do think that through are able to communicate that in the [admissions] interview.
Q: What is the ideal career experience to have when entering an MBA program? A: I don't know what the ideal job title is. What's ideal is that you've been out long enough to have had an opportunity to try a couple of different things, and to test yourself. And to, hopefully, have had good success, in what we call transferable skills, because most students are career changers. That person's going to be more successful than somebody who went into a company, took a job, and just stuck with that one job. Having had leadership opportunities or being in situations where you have to deal with change is good, too. To manage people and projects, even if they aren't direct reports, is another good thing to show. Q: UNC recently changed the first-year MBA core requirements. How does that change affect a first year's ability to market themselves for internship? A: It improves it, because they have the opportunity to take electives earlier. Q: Was that a problem in the past, that someone would be established as a finance major and they hadn't taken any of the electives yet? A: You would have only taken core courses that were offered to everyone. This year they were given two opportunities to take specialized modules. So they walk into internships more prepared, with some background in an area that's outside the core curriculum. Q: Regardless of the experience they have coming in, when the students do arrive, how early does the career center staff start working with them to improve their skills in interviewing, resume writing, cover letter writing, networking, etc.? A: We've already started. During the sell weekend, we introduced ourselves to admitted students. About three or four weeks ago, one of my directors started working with incoming students who will be going to The Consortium for Graduate Study in Management career fair for minority students. These new students, who will begin classes in the fall, were already receiving resume critiques and one-on-one mock interviews from career services. That's the best thing we can do to help prepare them for the job fair and those interviews. We also put together a resume book of both our rising second years as well as those incoming students. It will be distributed to the companies [at the consortium] when we arrive. Q: And when the rest of the students arrive on campus? A: We have a summer packet that we mail to them. They can also use Career Leader, a popular career assessment tool. Even though we know that they haven't arrived on campus yet, we encourage them to go ahead and get started on that assessment, which is Web-based. Our summer packet includes a large number of resources, books, and Web sites. If they're thinking about changing careers -- which we believe most of them will be -- they can begin to read and think about that. Then we'll train them, as soon as they show up, for an analytical-skills workshop this summer. Q: There's been a recent emphasis on the individual career search, especially among MBAs that are looking to work at companies that are nontraditional recruiters, such as startups. How do you keep in touch with students that don't stop by the office, and what services do you offer them? A: One of my most important messages is that you don't have to fit into a box. We have so many students that ultimately choose consulting, marketing, or investment banking. It's easy to think that we're trying to push students there, and we're not. We're here for every student. But if you're on an independent search, you probably won't be next door in an interviewing room. You're going to be writing cover letters and sending resumes, and you're going to spend much more time and need to understand how to use the alumni database to network. You probably won't have your interviews on campus. Q: Where were the majority of your students placed this year? A: 36% of our students chose finance-related positions, including investment banking and industry finance. Positions in marketing and consulting make-up another 53% of this year's employment. As a total, 94% of the Class of 2000 had accepted positions at graduation and another 5% had received one or more offers. So, 99% of the class accepted or received an offer at graduation. Q: Have there been any differences between the first and second years in terms of their interests? A: One thing that tends to impact students is that there are consulting firms who believe that it's difficult to offer as many internships as full-time placement. And if you think about their business and the relationship building, generally you're talking about long-term projects. I can understand that it's a little awkward to insert someone into the team in June and pull them back out in August. So there are more students taking full-time positions in consulting than [working as] interns in consulting. Q: What types of industries are MBAs going into during that first-year internship? A: Many of them will go into marketing or some type of industry -- finance, e-business, or e-commerce. They're looking for experience that they can transfer into a variety of industries. We counsel them to focus on the skills. How can I get experiences that are different than what I had before I came back to B-school that will complement and make me more marketable to a firm? Q: In 1999, 42% of the graduates reported that they'd be working in the South. How does Kenan-Flagler resist the temptation to keep Career Services local? And where are the companies coming from these days? A: A part of what is shifting at Kenan-Flagler is associated with what you mentioned before, admissions. The director of admissions has a well-thought-out strategy to ensure we see and admit the best students from all parts of the world, not just the Southeast. This year we already saw a significant shift in student interest. Employment in the West doubled this year versus last, with 12% of our students choosing positions in the West. Employment in the Southeast went down 19% (from the 42% reported) in 1999. Employment in the Northeast has continued to grow with 25% of our graduating class choosing jobs there. Q: What companies does the B-school lack? This summer, if you were able to recruit your top 10 companies to recruit on campus, which ones would they be? A: We've been working on our recruiter strategy. We look at each functional area to determine what our relationship is with a company and how we move them on the continuum. We want to take them from somebody who would post a job with us to someone that will come on campus. For instance, we have been cultivating our relationships on Wall Street. We take our students to Wall Street in January for interviews with some of the companies who don't come on campus. That's our way of getting our students in front of them, believing that if they get a chance to look at our students and see what they can do when they compete, then it's just a matter of time before we'll get these companies on campus. Q: What about nontraditional recruiters? How are you tapping into that pool? For instance, dot-coms. A: Two years ago, when I came here, every time we heard about a job posting from a company, we would send a mass e-mail to the entire class. Depending on the status of a student's job search at that time, whether they paid any attention, and probably the volume of e-mail they received that day, I found that many times they were missing those opportunities. This year, we introduced a customized information system to our students. We included a way for students to make personal queries. Now, a startup will call to post a job, and we will add it to this system. Students can query by function, industry, geography, or whether it is a full-time or intern position. Q: What needs to be fixed in the career center? A: My focus is on the timing and delivery of services, because I'm confident about the services that we're offering. But we can always help students effectively manage the process. Especially with the curriculum changes. They're going to have even more pressure to perform in the classroom quickly, and we'll do anything we can to coordinate with faculty and career clubs, to make sure that we're not stepping on each other. This past year, probably for the first time, we worked effectively with the career clubs. What I found when I came into this position was that a lot of the students weren't aware of what this office was doing and made assumptions based on that. And many times, when the clubs determined what they were going to offer to students -- brown bag, seminars, training, that type of thing -- the [event planners in the clubs] didn't know what Career Services was doing, so they went off and created their own agendas. Q: Mindy, is there anything you'd like to add? A: Any time you change jobs, it's a little scary. General Electric was my benchmark. And I'm so happy I made the move. Not that I didn't like GE -- I don't want to give the wrong impression. But I'm happy that I was able to join a quality organization. There's an incredible amount of enthusiasm right now at Kenan-Flagler, and it feels good to be a part of that energy. 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. 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