MBA Job Outlook Improving

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"I think it definitely looks and feels healthier than it did last year," she says. "I'm cautiously optimistic that come spring, things will look better than they did last year."

At the Marshall School, on-campus recruiting has been down about 15% to 20% so far this academic year, says Pete Giulioni, executive director of Marshall's Keenan MBA Career Resource Center. With tighter budgets, some recruiters are taking a different approach to finding talent, he says. For example, rather than come to campus, recruiters with openings are calling him directly and asking him to send them a package of student résumés.

"The spigot hasn't been turned off, so to speak, but employers are being much more cautious and very deliberate about their hiring and hiring patterns," he says.

Ken Keeley, executive director of the Career Opportunities Center at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business (Tepper Full-Time MBA Profile), has been keeping a close eye on the MBA hiring scene. He runs a program on his computer every Friday that tracks job and internship placement figures for students. As of Jan. 22, there were 71 companies that made full-time offers to second-year MBA students, the same number as last year, Keeley says. But of this year's second-year class, 44% have received job offers, down from 61% last year, said Keeley, noting that those numbers are slightly skewed because this year's graduating MBA class has 43 additional students.

"We've Hit the Employment Bottom"

Meanwhile, starting salaries are down slightly, with offers now averaging $103,382, down about $700 from last year. Says Keeley: "My take would be that we've hit the employment bottom, unless something dramatically changes in the next few months."

Like many career services officers, he's expecting that there will be more recruiters who will want to interview students come March and April. And he's aggressively taking steps to ensure that students get a chance to meet with them, organizing the school's first-ever spring break career fairs in New York and San Francisco this March.

"We're going to try to capture some of that just-in-time recruiting activity by going back to the New York and West Coast markets on our own," he says. "There will still be a lot of good students available in March, April, and May, so we are going to make it as easy as possible for companies that might want to recruit students."

Career services directors' hunches may not be so far off. Nearly 70% of MBA recruiters expect that their business will improve in 2010, according to a recent survey of 317 employers conducted by the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), which administers the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT). Meanwhile, more than one-third of employers, 35%, said they plan to hire more recent MBA graduates in 2010 than they did in 2009, while 45% say they plan to hire the same number of MBAs this year and only 20% say they expect to reduce MBA hiring. A year ago, the estimates were far more downbeat, with only 19% of employers surveyed by GMAC predicting an increase in MBA hiring.

Busy Spring Expected

Recruiters say they are in the midst of finalizing their employment projections for the year, but many expect a busy spring hiring season ahead.

Susan Shald, director of talent sourcing for Gallup Inc.'s consulting division, says she expects her firm to continue to hire MBA students this spring, especially in key areas like business development. While the firm has cut back on some "less significant campus visits" in the last year, she says she's moving forward with plans to visit several schools this spring, including the Marshall School, the University of California at Berkeley's Haas School of Business (Haas Full-Time MBA Profile) and the UCLA Anderson School of Management (Anderson Full-Time MBA Profile).

"I think the fall was a bit tighter, but I am seeing things pick up a bit. We are seeing an increase in need for our services and, as a result, we have more postings," she says.

Ann Nowak, director of recruiting for professional programs at Liberty Mutual Group Inc. (LMG), the policyholder-owned property and casualty insurer, says her company is also still hiring, but that the competition for the company's openings is stiff. Unlike some recruiters, Nowak says she has not cut back on her recruiting schedule at all this year. Rather, she has used this fall's quiet recruiting season as an opportunity to introduce more students to her company and, as a result, has done more work with the company's core schools.

"We have more opportunities, but the flip side is that we are seeing a tremendous uptick in the number of applications for positions," says Nowak, noting that her company is receiving about 1,000 résumés a day for job openings, up from 350 a day last year. "MBA students have always had to be really good, but now you have to be even better in how you approach the company."

Staying on Recruiters' Radar

That's advice that many MBA students still looking for jobs are taking seriously as they continue their job hunts. Christopher McFall, a second-year MBA student at the Wharton School, is looking for a job in the real estate industry, a sector that has been particularly hard-hit by the economic downturn. He was able to secure a paid internship at a real estate firm in New York last summer—most of his peers had to take unpaid ones—but did not receive a full-time offer after the internship.

Most real estate companies don't hire until the spring, so he has been trying to stay on recruiters' radar in the meantime, says McFall, co-president of Wharton's Real Estate Club. He typically goes to New York at least twice a month to meet with companies, and last week attended a real estate career fair on campus. There were about 40 to 50 recruiters at the fair, down from last year's 70. Many of the recruiters encouraged him to keep in touch, but told him they are not hiring yet; others said they were still not clear on their needs.

Despite the uncertainty, McFall says he is still determined to pursue his dream job—as an acquisition manager at a large property owner—even if it takes him a little longer than he'd like.

"I would say I have good days where I feel great about what I'm doing and I have bad days when I wake up and think about all my friends who have concrete plans for next year and panic a little bit," he says. "But the more I talk with people and the more meetings I have with professionals in my industry, the better I feel about waiting it out."

Damast is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.

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