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JUNE 19, 2003 B-SCHOOL Q&A: PLACEMENT Landing Jobs for Kellogg MBAs Career Management Center Director Roxanne Hori says ongoing outreach to alumni, partners, and CEOs is key to finding opportunities for grads
She's finishing a year that's reminiscent of her earliest ones at the school, as her office struggles to find jobs for the 600 Kellogg students who are collecting their MBAs this month. On May 30, Hori spoke with Mica Schneider, BusinessWeek Online's management education reporter. Here are edited excerpts of their conversation: Q: You've had more than a dozen years of experience in recruiting. How would you characterize the 2002-03 recruiting season? A: Exhausting. It has been a challenging year for employers, students, and career-service folks. But it has also been a time for people to reflect on what they really want to do, because job opportunities are limited. Q: Did you say that it has been a tough year for employers? A: Well, there's uncertainty in companies. Recruiters are proceeding cautiously, making sure that they don't make any missteps. They don't want to make more job offers than they can deliver on, and they don't want to mislead students. Even though the perception is that it's a buyers market, the reality is that savvy buyers want to make sure they're crossing all their Ts and dotting all their Is. And since the talent pool across all the B-schools continues to be strong, employers are finding that they have to screen even more effectively, which is hard when the quality is really good. So they're trying to find numerous ways to touch base with the students, to see the students in more settings. Q: How is recruiting for full-time jobs in 2003 panning out at Kellogg? A: It's very challenging, yet I just got several e-mails from people who have received job offers and are trying to choose between them. From September to May 2003, we're up about 5% year-to-date on our full-time job postings. The biggest change this year is that employers are taking a lot more time to make their decisions. Companies are evasive as to why, but a lot of it is because managers are trying to control their compensation budgets. It also seems to me, in talking with students and companies, that there's some pressure for MBAs to hurry up and apply [for a job], only for the students to wait to hear [from the employer]. Once the student is called in for an interview, they find themselves waiting again for feedback, or a second interview. Then the students are waiting a long time before they hear a decision. I'm also hearing from more people than I have in the past that if they do lose out [on a job] it's to internal candidates. My hope is that we'll be where we were in 2002 -- with 83% of the class with a job offer by graduation -- but we're still several weeks away from graduation. Q: Has Kellogg's ascent in BusinessWeek's 2002 rankings -- to No. 1, from No. 2 in 2000 -- helped to attract more recruiters? A: There are a couple reasons we saw an increase in the number of job postings. One reason was the rankings. Another is continued efforts [to help the MBAs find jobs] from Dean Dipak Jain and his outreach to alumni, partners, and CEOs, as well as the combined efforts we've had with alumni relations. We also have recruiter roundtables paired with alumni events. We try to help the alumni, but then we ask them to let us know if they hear of any job offers at their companies. We're much more visible and clear with that message than we have been in the past. Q: How do you set your MBAs apart from the ones coming out of other top B-schools? A: On an annual basis, we find ourselves saying that the current class is better than the last group. So what we do to distinguish our students from the others is a lot of outreach to companies. With students and the dean's office, we continue to be out there, in front of recruiters. We're nurturing old relationships, making new ones, giving companies a way to have a presence on campus, and making sure they can find creative ways to be seen by the students. We've made it very easy for companies to post a job. If you send us a job posting now, we'll bundle résumés of students interested in the area and send them to you to look at, so that you get a manageable number of résumés. Each student also knows that their résumé has been sent to the companies. We've also tried to participate in more treks, [taking students] to cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Boston to meet with companies. And for the first time this year, two of my team members participated in Kellogg's Global Initiatives in Management classes, which take place in the winter term. They also went to either China or Eastern Europe with these classes. They went so that when the students visited a company, the company's executives also met a recruiting contact from Kellogg. Some good stuff has come from it internally, and we're in the process of following up with those contacts. Q: Are summer internship-seekers having any more luck that this year's graduates? A: Summer internship postings are up 33%, compared to the same time last year. Q: About 82 Kellogg MBAs complete an accelerated, one-year program each year. How do they perform in the job market? A: The students in our one-year program compare favorably with the students in the two-year program. The challenges they face in this tight job market aren't different. A small number of these students are returning to family businesses, and some are sponsored. And not a lot of them are job-changers.
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