Special Report March 17, 2010, 2:13PM EST

Fight for Jobs Easing at Career Offices

With improved offer rates, a pickup in recruiting by banks, and growing MBA interest in nontraditional sectors, placement offices at Europe's top B-schools are more upbeat

Lisa Bridgett acknowledges she's one of the lucky ones. Since graduating from Switzerland's IMD business school in December, she has landed a job as senior director of e-commerce for Ralph Lauren (RL). The 35-year-old even turned down a second offer from another luxury goods outfit. But her achievement is due to more than just luck. "I had more than 60 interviews," says the law graduate, whose previous career included management consulting at Accenture (ACN) and a stint as a music industry marketer. "Where companies would normally have three or four interviewers, it would go to seven or even eight people having to vet you. My job search was an extremely busy time."

Across Europe, scores of MBA graduates like Bridgett are finding risk-averse companies will hold up to 10 interviews with each candidate before signing new recruits. But the hard slog eventually pays off. Some 93% of Bridgett's IMD classmates have received job offers as of February, vs. 89% at the same time last year. "We're pretty happy," says Katty Ooms-Suter, Lausanne-based IMD's director of MBA admissions and career services. "We got the feeling that the market was picking up, carefully."

While figures aren't definitive—especially because recruiting now drags on for months after graduation—job offers for the December 2009 class at Fontainebleau (France)-based INSEAD rose 7% compared with July 2009. At London's Cass Business School, both financial services and consulting have rebounded, helped by students being less fussy about the roles they're willing to take. And for schools with two-year programs, like Barcelona-based IESE, banking and consulting are providing more summer internship opportunities than last year.

Encouraging Signs

There are encouraging signs in other industries, too, particularly health care and pharmaceuticals. "Some sectors are aggressively recruiting and they're back to paying high sign-on bonuses," says Sandra Schwarzer, director of the careers department at INSEAD. She picks out biotech, renewable energy, public administration, and nonprofits among other positive sectors, and says she is confident recruiting will pick up in consulting, as well.

Some of the career changes achieved by graduates this year have been a pleasant surprise. "I've seen switches I wouldn't have thought possible in an economy like this," says Schwarzer. She cites a former member of the military taking a retail sales marketing position, and a financial-services consultant going into health-care marketing. "We've seen it all," she says.

That said, the job market remains tough overall. While banks are back on campus, they're still making fewer offers than before the downturn. "We haven't recovered the number of positions," says Gloria Batllori, MBA director at Barcelona-based ESADE. At London Business School, fewer students are expected to get jobs in finance again this year, below boom-time levels of up to 40% of graduates. That's despite recruitment drives at Barclays Capital (BCS), which is expanding in the U.S., and Nomura (NMR), which acquired the European assets of failed Lehman Brothers.

Career Services in Overdrive

To help students find work, career services departments have gone into overdrive, bolstering their staff counts and directing additional resources at nontraditional MBA sectors outside of banking and consulting. Oxford's Saïd Business School has invited representatives to campus from potential employers as diverse as Louis Vuitton (LVMUY) and the U.N. to participate in informal career panels.