How Kellogg Grads Find a Home

Roxanne Hori has been director of the Career Management Center at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management for 10 years. She had been associate director for five years before that and has worked in human resources for the school and at a bank in Chicago.

Hori and her team regularly invite recruiters to campus to pick their brains about the types of students they seek. Of the 509 full-time students seeking employment in the class of 2005, about 95% had jobs three months after graduating. Hori attributes Kellogg graduates' success to their highly developed interpersonal skills. She recently spoke with BusinessWeek Online project assistant Meredith Bodgas. An edited excerpt of their conversation follows:

How is the job market looking?
It's looking good (see BW Online, 12/30/05, "A Heady Job Market for MBAs"). People feel confident about it, and the students are positive. Everything goes in cycles, but right now, signals show it'll be good for at least the near term.

Which industries will be looking for MBAs this year?
The services industry will continue to seek MBAs. Recently there has been an uptick in interest from consulting and investment banking firms. Manufacturing and consumer packaged goods companies have been steadily employing our graduates, even when many companies couldn't do much hiring.

What companies usually come to recruit at Kellogg?
It's an eclectic array. From banking, we get the typical large players, like Goldman Sachs (GS ) (see BW Online, "Making the Grade at Goldman", Morgan Stanley (MWD ), and JP Morgan Chase (JPM ), but we also get many boutique firms, like William Blair.

It's the same with consulting. Large shops like McKinsey, Booz Allen, and...

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