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Détente in the Interview Room
February, 2003 by Tad Glauthier, MBA ’02 Students and Career Management Center staff are working together to change prospective employers’ experience with the recruiting process. The media gave MBA recruiting at Stanford a poor report card during the 2000-01 academic year. BusinessWeek downgraded the GSB to No. 11 in its biennial ranking of MBA programs, and the Wall Street Journal placed us at a bewildering No. 45. Both publications explained the School’s low rank primarily on the rationale that the recruiters they surveyed had found our students arrogant. I was a first-year student at the time, wondering how long my classmates and I would have to pay for the misdeeds of others–before our good intentions and the passage of time swept up the existing poor perceptions. After graduating last June, I spent the summer surveying corporate recruiters and studying media rankings of MBA programs for the Career Management Center (CMC) to understand the perceptions firms have of recruiting at the Business School. In particular, we hoped to find out which of the troubles with our reputation had vanished along with the dot-com exuberance and which had managed to outlive it. Some recruiters told me that behavior was not great at any of the top schools during the dot-com heyday. A number also said that at Stanford, professionalism had improved since that time. However, many voiced suspicions that the bad behavior would return in perfect step with a healthy NASDAQ. Moreover, they said that even in the current economy our candidates showed less flexibility in location, starting salary, and job title than students from the other top schools. Our class had fewer of the big-ticket infractions like missed interviews, but our general preparation for interviews remained problematic. It became clear that as of the 2001-02 recruiting season, the students had not entirely shaken the rap picked up two years earlier. Students are waking up to the challenge of changing our reputation for the better. Second years David Yao and Elaine Wong are leading a charge to improve interviewing professionalism. The co-chairs of the CMC advisory committee began this fall by conducting an awareness campaign around the issue, and as of this article going to print, were collaborating with the Student Association on next steps. First- and second-year leaders are now working on creating a vi-able, student-owned mechanism that will keep the tenets of good form in place. In the meantime, a new CMC policy has begun to address these issues. This year each student must sign "Student Recruiting Conduct Guidelines" to participate in on-campus recruiting or to use the resources of the CMC. This contract directly addresses many of the recruiters’ pet peeves, including timeliness and company-specific interview preparation. As the use of CMC services evolves from a right into a privilege, job-seeking students will likely become more conscientious in all aspects of interviewing behavior. Even a sea change in student behavior, however, may not be enough to efface all of the challenges to our reputation. As behavior and preparation improve, we may continue to see some recruiters frustrated by an even more common complaint: low yield on job offers. Stanford Business School is relatively small, so recruiters have to work harder to hire or even to interview as many students as they want. One investment banker who expressed general dissatisfaction with Business School candidates’ preparation said later in the same interview, "I always notice that when we do get people from Stanford, they’re head and shoulders above the other people." Recruiters consistently praised the interpersonal skills and the intelligence of GSB students–they just wished it were easier to recruit them. Some recruiters told me they were frustrated by the sense that students come to the GSB because they want to stay on the West Coast or because they want to be entrepreneurs. In fact, about half of the Class of 2002 remained in the West, and about 6 percent chose to start their own companies. While firms would like the School to make it easier to hire GSB grads, this would require altering the makeup of the student body. If we start trying to "harvest" graduates that the big firms want to hire, we become little more than an elite job-training program for banks and consultancies. We want businesses to welcome our graduates with open arms and checkbooks, but we must match the recruiting firms to the student tastes, not vice versa. The CMC is on the front lines, handling these challenges with recruiters. It monitors student preferences carefully to encourage the right firms to come to campus. Because there will always be some slack, the CMC also actively manages firms’ expectations about the yield they will see. In fact, under the leadership of director Andy Chan, the center has overhauled many aspects of its operations. Other changes include new furniture and Internet connections in recruiting rooms and a new online scheduling system. The CMC also has become more responsive to students and recruiters. The center staff size has grown by 30 percent to strengthen corporate relationships, student advising capabilities, and overall service levels. Staff even operate a table every day during lunch at the Birds, where they field student questions and provide drop-in career counseling. In the fall of 2002, the media rankings that somewhat reflect recruiter perceptions began to show improvement for the GSB. We made a resounding leap from No. 11 to No. 4 in BusinessWeek, and we made modest gains in the Wall Street Journal ranking to No. 39. (For Andy Chan’s response to the WSJ rankings and methodology, see the alumni website: https://alumni.gsb.stanford.edu/chan.html.) We are moving in the right direction. With the positive changes at the CMC and among the student leadership, I’m confident the business community will see a steady and certain improvement in the experience of recruiting graduates here. |
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Détente
in the Interview Room
