The Career Fair Goes Global -- Virtually

Seven top U.S. schools turned to the Net from Apr. 14 to Apr. 16 to show off 791 MBAs who had registered with the MBA7 Global Career Forum to touch base with 28 recruiters in Asia, Europe, and Latin America. The companies were seeking candidates for 62 jobs.

Chicago Graduate School of Business, Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School, Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Columbia Business School, Harvard Business School, Stanford Graduate School of Business, and The Wharton School pitched in to support the effort to entice companies to check out students who want to work outside the U.S. after graduation.

Companies such as Banco Bilbao, Viscaya Argentaria, Royal Dutch-Shell, World Economic Forum, and L'Oreal each paid 1,000 euros to go online to answer questions from students in chat rooms and to present their job opportunities. To take the next step, companies could interview students on the phone, online, or via videoconference.

JOINT DATABASE.  The idea was to "give our MBAs access to a group of companies that don't come on campus, in many cases because distance makes it prohibitive for them," says Julie Morton, associate dean for MBA career services at the Chicago Graduate School of Business. To prep her students, Morton held sessions on how a virtual career fair differs from traditional career fairs, including lessons on chat room etiquette.

It will take some time to gauge the fair's success for the students, but some schools hope to hold another one in the future. Jackie Wilbur, director of career management at the Sloan School, says the fair worked in showing the MBAs that the schools are comfortable with "coopetition." Notes Wilbur: "We cooperate, but we compete, too," adding that for the first time the seven schools have created a joint database that allows all their graduates of the schools to see which foreign companies hired students in the past.

Isidro Villarreal, a 28-year-old, second-year Columbia MBA from Mexico, used the fair to make contacts in Latin America and Europe, regions he says aren't well represented when recruiters come to campus. "It's very efficient," he says. "You have the chance to look at many companies and positions in a short period of time." That may not be as good as a face-to-face meeting, he concedes, but "this is a good start."

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Gay and Lesbian MBAs Turn Out to Talk...

More than 500 MBAs traveled to Beverly Hills, Calif., for the sixth annual Reaching Out MBA conference for gay and lesbian MBAs on Apr. 2. That was record attendance, according to organizers, who say their conference is the one place where gay and lesbian MBAs have a chance to meet in such numbers to talk about the challenges of working in a traditionally heterosexual business environment.

The conference covered everything from interviewing -- should you "out" yourself when seeking a job? -- to politics. Hilary Rosen, former chairman and chief executive officer of the Recording Industry Association of America, urged attendees to vote in next fall's Presidential election.

During the three-day meeting, "the issue of gay marriage was brought up again and again...as a metaphor for equality in the workplace," says Jonah Brown, a 31-year-old second-year MBA at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business, president of Reaching Out MBA, and one of the conference organizers. "If we're fighting for opportunity to work [in Corporate America], it's just as important to fight for equality broadly for all members of our community."

TWO MUST-DOS.  A second theme was the "importance of not making the assumption that straight colleagues are going to be so shocked or surprised" when they hear that you're gay, says Brown.

More than 50 schools were represented by students who traveled from as far away as INSEAD and London Business School. According to Adam Welch, 28, a second-year MBA at the University of Michigan Business School and co-president of the school's seven-year-old Open for Business club, gay and lesbian MBAs' job hunts include two must-dos that heterosexual MBAs often overlook. Finding partner benefits is a top concern, he says, followed closely by determining whether a company practices nondiscrimination when it comes to sexual orientation.

Both McKinsey and Credit Suisse First Boston offer in-house networks for gay and lesbian workers, for instance. Both were also among the 33 sponsoring companies at the conference that paid at least $2,500 to support it. Others included Booz Allen Hamilton, Citigroup, Ford Motor, Goldman Sachs, and Sun Microsystems. The conference raised more than $200,000 -- 20% more than in 2003.

"WHO YOU FULLY ARE."  Brian Rolfes, director of professional development for McKinsey in Canada and a founding member of GLAM -- Gays and Lesbians at McKinsey -- says corporate sponsorship of such events stems from the fact that gay and lesbian MBAs often have different questions than their heterosexual counterparts might pose at a big school recruiting event.

Rolfes advises that "being able to bring who you fully are to the interview process and to your résumé is important.... If someone indicated they were president of a gay and lesbian MBA group at Harvard, we would see this as an example of a leadership quality we look for in the people we hire." He adds that "the level of [a job applicant's] 'outness' has to be a personal choice, dictated by their own comfort level."

The conference will be held again in the spring of 2005, at a place and time yet to be announced.

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...And Kellogg Gets a Gay Student Leader

Kellogg Graduate School of Management's student government, the Graduate Management Assn., elected its first openly gay president, first-year MBA Saqib Nadeem, 27, at the end of the winter quarter in late February.

Nadeem says that "in an MBA program...the students typically come from the largely conservative, testosterone-enameled, corporate world, not to mention that the class at the top MBA programs usually includes upwards of 30% international students, the majority of whom come from very conservative countries." One would assume, he adds, that MBA programs are not "the least bit ideal place for gay individuals, out or not."

FIRST EXPOSURE.  Kellogg is different, he adds. "My election is a testament to the open and accepting" Kellogg culture. The school's administration, he notes, has always supported the school's Gay Lesbian Management Assn. (GLMA), as have students and professors.

"I have met numerous students who had no exposure to a gay individual before. But the most important thing was their unwavering willingness to get out of their comfort zone and get to know me as a person, judge my leadership skills and not my sexual orientation, and question what I had to offer to them and to the school -- and not whether I was making the right decision in selecting my life partner."

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