From Startup Dreams to a Cubicle Life

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"Some of my students who normally would have been an early hire at a startup—and on their way to becoming a founder—are showing interest in the rotational programs at large public companies," Wasserman says.

Norelli joined this type of program at GE Energy after completing studies at MIT. "They are able to get this broad base of skills that they can then see applying down the road in a startup," Wasserman adds.

At the South by Southwest annual technology and arts conference in Austin, Tex., in March—the event known for the debuts of Twitter and Foursquare—the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business (Ross Full-Time MBA Profile) sponsored a mixer for students interested in startup jobs.

GE's Drive for Entrepreneurial MBAs

GE (GE) advertised job openings at the SXSW event, part of its strategy to target potential MBA startup talent. The company has spent years honing its strategy.

Initially, a GE recruiter would visit a school such as the Stanford Graduate School of Business (Stanford Full-Time MBA Profile) and pitch student entrepreneurs. "But there wasn't much appetite for it. They would basically say 'Why don't you let us come up with the ideas and start the companies, and then you guys buy it," says Erin Dillard, GE's director of commercial development programs.

Since then, Dillard says, the company has developed a better sense of the kind of MBA entrepreneurs who are most open to their offer. The company now devotes campus trips to programs with those candidates. GE has had the most success pitching to MBAs focused on marketing and entrepreneurship, she says, and frequently hires from Cornell (Johnson Full-Time MBA Profile), Duke (Fuqua Full-Time MBA Profile), Indiana (Kelley Full-Time MBA Profile), Northwestern (Kellogg Full-Time MBA Profile), and the University of North Carolina (Kenan-Flagler Full-Time MBA Profile), among other schools.

Dillard says that this year, GE has doubled the number of MBAs it hired from entrepreneurship programs for its Experienced Commercial Leadership Program, in which Norelli chose to partake. ECLP targets MBAs with five-to-seven years of work experience and puts participants through three eight-month rotations within a GE business.

Microsoft Acquiring Entrepreneurs

Microsoft (MSFT), too, tailors its recruitment pitch to entrepreneurial MBAs. Half the candidates the company targets for openings say they hadn't previously considered applying to the software giant, say company recruiters. Microsoft's corporate development area, which was responsible for the company's $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype in May, often competes with startups and venture capital firms for talent.

"Even if they are only here for three-to-five years, that is actually a huge amount of work and return we are getting out of them," says Stacey Stovall, Microsoft's university staffing manager.

Indeed, large tech companies usually have an easier time drawing parallels between working in their smaller units and working at a startup, says Cheri Paulson, director of career development at Babson College's Olin Graduate School of Business (Olin Full-Time MBA Profile).

Sifting Unlikely Opportunities

Still, health-care, consumer-products, and financial-services companies are also willing to hire students with entrepreneurial goals and Paulson focuses on finding unexpected opportunities among them. She sorts through job listings across industries and searches for those with titles such as "market intelligence analyst" and "internal consultant"—anything that might describe a position evaluating internal strategy or identifying opportunities for new markets. These positions usually replicate the responsibilities of entrepreneurs, she says.

Maria Halpern performs a similar function at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School (Wharton Full-Time MBA Profile).

As the number of Wharton students looking for jobs at startups has increased, Halpern has developed new ways of identifying job opportunities for those students as the school's senior associate director of MBA career management. A big part of that effort involves tracking which startups are receiving the largest injections of venture capital, which often leads to new hires. A further strategy is to track emerging industries in search of smaller units created by—or acquisitions made—by large companies.

Many Wharton students are interested in cleantech, for example. With startup hiring scarce in that field, Halpern will often make candidates aware of parallel opportunities within the energy units of Cisco Systems (CSCO), IBM (IBM), or at the energy practice of a Houston consulting firm, for example.

Zlomek is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek.