Melinda Allen is the assistant dean of Admissions & Career Management at Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management, a role she assumed in June, 2004. From 2002 through 2004, Allen served as the director of the Career Management Center at Owen. Before joining Vanderbilt, Allen held several positions at the Career Management Center at the Emory University Goizueta School of Business.

Allen recently spoke with BusinessWeek Online reporter Jeffrey Gangemi about how to do well in job interviews and other issues of importance to B-school graduates. Here are edited excerpts of their conversation:

Q: What do you ask students to do before they get to campus?
A: They visit a Web site that contains the Career Leader self-assessment tool, as well as descriptions of some common MBA career paths that are available to them and what kind of backgrounds are usually associated with those fields. We also discuss job-search strategy, with the goal of exposing students to the range of jobs early, so they can start whittling down their interests into a more focused search.

Q: What's the most important piece of advice you give to students who are beginning their search?
A: Listen to yourself and be diligent. It's easy to get caught up in what everyone else is doing. We really ask students to look at their own values. We need to determine what's important to the student, because that's how you find job satisfaction. If a student is looking to switch careers, that's where the diligence comes in. The most important thing is never giving up and staying positive. If you're not selected for a job, it's nothing to take personally.

Q: How do you teach interviewing skills?
A: The key to interviewing is being able to translate your skills and your experiences to the position for which you're interviewing. You do that by looking at the job description and drawing lines between what they're looking for and what you've done. We use the PAR method, where the student asks, "What was the problem, action, and result?"

After doing research about the [job] opportunity, they create two or three competencies for each of the job criteria. We also tell them to sell themselves. At the end of the interview, we tell them to ask for the job.

Q: How can a student make up for a lack of relevant work experience?
A: More often than not, students are turned down for their inability to relate their experiences to the company. The person who is interviewing you has very little time to form an opinion. Therefore, the onus is on students to convey why they are right for a given job. The recruiter shouldn't have to figure it out on his or her own.

Q: Are certain MBAs having more success in the job search than others?
A: Those with great communication skills are always successful. Also, companies are concerned with achieving gender and ethnic diversity. Being a woman or a minority will never hurt your chances of landing a job.

Q: How do you educate international students about their job prospects?
A: We have an international camp in the summer before classes begin where we work with students on the items in the summer prep packet to give them a head start. We also do an international symposium, where we bring in an immigration attorney to discuss visa issues. International alumni who are working in the States also attend the symposium to describe their own experiences. Remarkably, our international students have done just as well as our domestic students across the board.

Q: What types of recruiters do you attract?
A: We're very strong in finance, so we have Bank of America and UBS, among others. We're also strong in operations, so we see American Express, as well as Dell, Deloitte, Dupont, Home Depot, and Harris, a gaming company based out of Las Vegas, among others [here's a listing].

Q: Who's missing from your list, and how are you looking to attract them?
A: At any given time, we have around 200 companies on our list. To attract them, we do direct mailings, phone calls, and other outreach. We're often on the road visiting companies as well as bringing alumni back to try to build a pipeline into their company.

The on-campus recruiting model is only one part of recruiting. We spend much of our time developing other ways in. We'll try anything. For example, we held on-campus-style interviews in New York City. We rented out a floor and invited companies at no cost to them to come and interview our students.

Q: What's your placement percentage, and how do you see that changing?
A: We've already had 22 new companies on campus this year. We've had more companies on campus this year to date than we did all of last year. We're 20% ahead of where we were last year. We had helped place 91% of our students by three months after graduation last year.

Q: Are average salaries up or down?
A: They're up significantly. Our average last year was $74,000, and we're now running at $87,000. That has a lot to do with the kinds of companies that hire in the fall, and it's skewed to a degree, but we're confident that our average will be up significantly.