Looking Up June 3, 2010, 2:10PM EST

The MBA Job Picture Brightens

Overall, far fewer MBA students are graduating with jobs, but top-tier schools are starting to see an uptick in recruiting activity

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The job market for MBA graduates appears to be slowly bouncing back at a growing number of top business schools, with increased on-campus recruiting, an uptick in job postings, and more students walking away at graduation with a job offer in hand. At some of these schools, career services directors say recruiting is returning to levels not seen since before the global recession and economic meltdown threw a wrench into the once-buoyant MBA job market two years ago.

One school that has seen this firsthand is the MIT Sloan School of Management (Sloan Full-Time MBA Profile), where second-year on-campus recruiting opportunities increased 40 percent this year, a figure comparable to the fall of 2007, and job postings have rebounded by 34 percent since last year, says Jackie Wilbur, senior director of Sloan's Career Development office.

"Hip, hip, hooray, this is happy news," Wilbur says. "The school year started off really slowly, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that the number rebounded to where we were a couple of years ago."

Other schools, including Harvard Business School (Harvard Full-Time MBA Profile) and the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business (Booth Full-Time MBA Profile), are also reporting upticks in recruiting and job offers. But the good cheer is not spreading quite as fast throughout the rest of the management education world, where the job market for 2010 MBA graduates remains sluggish, at best, at the vast majority of business schools. According to a new survey released this week by the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), even more students than last year are poised to graduate from their MBA programs without a job offer.

For the study, GMAC surveyed 5,274 recent or soon-to-be B-school graduates at 174 schools worldwide. Only 40 percent of full-time two-year MBA students seeking jobs had an offer in hand by mid-spring, down from 50 percent last year, at the height of the financial crisis. Of the job-seeking part-time students, just 22 percent had secured a job, down from 38 percent in 2009. Executive MBA students saw the biggest decline, with only 23 percent of those seeking jobs reporting an offer before graduation, compared with 44 percent last year.

Stirrings of Life

Still, there are signs that the tight job market could be loosening a bit, says Dave Wilson, president and chief executive of GMAC. More employers indicated in a recent recruiter survey that they plan to hire newly minted MBAs this year—55 percent, compared with 50 percent in 2009—and a growing number are indicating they'll make higher salary offers this year over last, Wilson says.

"The economy is on the rebound, but people are hiring very cautiously, and I don't think they're running out and hiring staff at the same clip as they have in the past," Wilson says. "The people we surveyed who are looking to hire in 2010 say they plan to hire more students, so at least we're going in the right direction."

The most robust hiring this year is expected in consulting and health care, where 73 percent and 80 percent of employers, respectively, said they intended to hire MBAs, according to the GMAC recruiter survey.

At pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly (LLY), spokesman Mark Taylor says the company is continuing to recruit B-school students and is currently in the process of hiring several MBA job candidates for this summer. "We continue to seek out top-talent MBAs from targeted schools around the country, and we anticipate doing so in the future," Taylor says.