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

The MBA Job Picture Brightens

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Bain & Co.'s senior director of global recruiting, Mark Howorth, says he's bringing in the largest class of both first-year summer interns and second-year MBA full-time hires in the firm's history. "Bain has had a record first half in terms of total business, and that directly translates to the number of people we need in the company," Howorth says. "It's a pretty healthy jump from last year."

Recruiters' increasingly confident attitude toward hiring is slowly trickling onto MBA campuses, where career services directors say they are encouraged by the uptick in full-time MBA and internship recruiting. At Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business (Tepper Full-Time MBA Profile), 120 companies have made job offers to second-year MBA students this year, up from 89 in 2008, says Ken Keeley, Tepper's executive director of career services. "This is significant. When I see more companies in the game, I feel pretty good," Keeley says.

Bounce for Finance, Consulting

Harvard Business School's Jana Kierstead, managing director of MBA career and professional development, says as the market loosened up this spring, more recruiters started to extend job offers to students. To help students take advantage, the school enhanced its job coaching program and launched a program this spring called Network Job Search Fellows, which gave up to $500 to second-year job seekers who had to travel to other cities for interviews. The school's efforts seem to have paid off; of those seeking full-time jobs (81 percent of the class), 85 percent had received an offer by graduation, up from 83 percent last year, Kierstead says. Meanwhile, full-time job postings were up 9 percent this April for second-year MBAs on a year-over-year basis, and summer internship postings for first-year students shot up 30 percent. Industries that had a hard time last year, such as finance and consulting, are starting to bounce back, she says.

"All in all, it seems people are feeling a bit more confident and are making plans to hire," Kierstead says.

Another top school where the job picture is brighter is the Booth School, where internship hiring is "significantly better than it was last year," says Julie Morton, Booth's associate dean of career services. So far, 90 percent of the first-year class has landed summer internships, up from 80 percent last year. Full-time hiring is also showing signs of improvement. By graduation last year, 79 percent of the second-year class had landed full-time jobs. As of May 27, about 80 percent of this year's graduating class had received full-time job offers, a figure that could increase by graduation on June 12, Morton says.

"At this point, I think we are certainly ahead of the game in terms of where we were last year," Morton says. "There is a lot of momentum, and I think students in general are feeling really good."

Upturn in Student Optimism

Indeed, it appears students are feeling more optimistic about their prospects in the job market, even those that haven't yet landed jobs. According to the GMAC survey, 33 percent of MBA grads indicated that they felt the global economy was stable or strong, a sharp jump from 9 percent the year before.

Chris Branin, 29, doesn't disagree, but he doesn't think the MBA job market is out of the woods yet. Branin just graduated from the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business (Darden Full-Time MBA Profile), and is looking for a marketing job at an online media company. Although he did some on-campus recruiting interviews this fall, much of his job search has been off-campus, targeting companies that don't typically visit MBA programs.

Branin was able to keep himself busy during the recruiting season, which is a sign that "there are jobs out there, and companies are hiring," he says. But finding the right job to match his expertise, education, and skill level has been harder than he anticipated, he says. "It's much easier to find a $50,000 a year analyst position somewhere than it is to find those jobs that come with an $80,000, $90,000, or $100,000 salary," says Branin, who worked as a circulation manager at The Washington Post (WPO) before heading to B-school. "My feeling is that it's not really hard to find a job. I think what is difficult now is to find the jobs MBAs are expecting to see when they graduate."

Damast is a reporter for Businessweek.com.