Well, time to hire a sylist as well as a resume coach. For those of you bummed out by last post, about how many kids are skipping b school to make millions in hedge funds, it must be great to know that if you do go to b school, well, Whirlpool will be breathing down your neck

The New

Battle for M.B.A. Grads

As the competition gets more intense, recruiting companies get more creative

By RONALD ALSOP
September 17, 2007; Page R1 THE WALL ST. JOURNAL

The New

Battle for M.B.A. Grads

As the competition gets more intense, recruiting companies get more creative

By RONALD ALSOP
September 17, 2007; Page R1

The heat is on for corporate recruiters.

With demand growing for M.B.A. graduates, it is a seller’s market out there, making it tough for many companies to meet hiring quotas using old tried-and-true recruiting methods. At a time when career opportunities are so plentiful that students can afford to turn down even six-figure offers from investment banks, it is especially difficult for traditional manufacturers to make an impression.

So to improve their odds, recruiters are visiting business schools earlier and more often, raising starting salaries and touting their company’s dedication to work-family balance.

THE JOB MARKET FOR M.B.A. TALENT

PODCAST:¹ The Journal’s Ron Alsop sizes up how competitive the M.B.A. job market is for companies right now, and talks about how business-school students can make the most of employers’ current scramble for talent — and how they can go wrong.

• Listen Now² | iTunes Archive³ | RSS Feed⁴ | More Info⁵

What’s more, some also are breaking from the traditional routine of on-campus presentations and cocktail receptions and trying something new: virtual recruiting. They are mining for résumés online, arranging video interviews and using instant messaging to cast a wider net and connect more effectively with today’s tech-savvy students.

“M.B.A. recruiting is a dinosaur,” says Greg Ruf, chief executive officer of MBA Focus, a consulting firm that promotes an online résumé database to corporate recruiters. “To be successful in the future, recruiters will need a different skill set. Rather than being event planners who are transaction-oriented, they’ll need to become more adept and comfortable with technology and the online world.”

Consider appliance maker Whirlpool Corp., of

Benton Harbor, Mich. The company continues to do on-campus recruiting at its “core schools” –

Duke

University, Harvard University, Indiana University, the University of Notre Dame, Michigan State University, Ohio State University,

Northwestern

University, the

University of

Michigan and the

University of

Chicago.

RECRUITERS’ SCORECARD

⁶

• See the complete ranking of top schools⁷ in the survey. Plus, see Who’s recruiting where.⁸

• Search the data⁹ and compare the top schools¹⁰, plus see a pay-off calculator¹¹ at CareerJournal.com¹².

• See the complete Journal Report on Business Schools: The Recruiters’ Picks¹³.

But the company recently extended its reach to schools such as Dartmouth College, the University of California at Los Angeles and Berkeley, the University of Texas, the University of Southern California, the University of North Carolina and Clark Atlanta University by reviewing résumés online and conducting 45-minute telephone screenings of the most promising candidates. It brought its top picks to Whirlpool’s offices for formal interviews.

Whirlpool also is experimenting with a technology in which students answer a set of questions via a remote PC-based video camera. The recorded interviews are stored on a secure Web site that only a Whirlpool recruiter can access.

“I believe recruiting will become more and more virtual,” says the company’s recruiting manager, Tiffany Voglewede. “We cannot afford to recruit only from our core schools because other schools, including some small schools, have amazing students.”

While the new recruiting techniques expanded Whirlpool’s pool of M.B.A. prospects, the company still fell “a few short” of its goal of 30 to 35 full-time hires this year, according to Ms. Voglewede.

Whirlpool isn’t alone. More than half of the respondents in a Wall Street Journal/Harris Interactive survey of recruiters conducted online between December and March said they were less successful in hiring their top M.B.A. picks this year.

Troy Eggers, associate dean for executive education at Columbia Business School, talks with WSJ’s Ron Alsop about the increased investment in executive education and what kinds of programs companies want for their future leaders.

Make It Engaging

Mr. Ruf says that while “millennial-generation students want to be contacted virtually,” online recruiting needs to be personal and engaging to work. Given the deluge of information students receive daily, they may consider a generic corporate pitch to be nothing more than spam. He suggests that corporate recruiters reach out to top prospects with a personalized email that might include a link to the company’s career Web site. The best career Web sites, Mr. Ruf says, provide a sense of the corporate culture and a look at specific jobs, often through video interviews with employees, alumni profiles, case studies, virtual tours and podcasts.

Some companies are updating their career Web sites to get more in tune with today’s students. Whirlpool, for example, is launching a chat feature on its site, assigning employees from different departments to answer questions at designated times. “Today’s college graduates want someone right there when they have a question,” says Ms. Voglewede. “Many college students have expressed their preference to communicate interactively with someone rather than just read someone’s observations about the company.”

Technology companies, not surprisingly, are among the most active online recruiters. International Business Machines Corp., which recruits at more than 100

U.S. universities, is planning to increase its online efforts, particularly for its Extreme Blue internship program. The company is setting up meeting spaces and islands in a virtual community called Second Life, where it plans to hold events such as recruiter question-and-answer sessions, educational lectures and online interviews. Students can log on, create avatars to physically represent themselves and visit IBM island. Senior business leaders, engineers and inventors, who often can’t travel to campuses and job fairs because of work demands, will be able to participate in such virtual events.

“Technology is part of the DNA of today’s younger generation,” says Karen Calo, IBM’s vice president for global talent. “They’re naturally attracted to things like Second Life and expect IBM as an innovative company to be there.”

But IBM, of

Armonk, N.Y., also is increasing its physical presence on campuses. At certain schools, it is organizing “power panels,” where IBM executives join with local companies, government officials and business partners to discuss job skills and opportunities.

“I’m not sure Second Life and other new technologies will ever totally replace traditional recruiting,” Ms. Calo says. “You can only see students’ intellectual curiosity, excitement and body language in a face-to-face situation.”

Wooing Candidates

While some companies aren’t ready to give virtual recruiting a try, most understand the need to go beyond formulaic techniques to succeed in today’s hot job market.

Nearly two-thirds of the respondents in The Wall Street Journal/Harris Interactive survey said their companies are trying new tactics to boost hiring rates. About 44% of the respondents said they are simply trekking to more schools. Others said they are recruiting earlier in the school year and staying on campuses longer, sending more senior managers to formal presentations and social events at the schools, and paying employees to refer promising M.B.A. students. Some companies are assigning “buddy” employees to top prospects to help woo them and making a bigger effort to convert summer interns into full-time hires. They also are emphasizing flexible work-life balance policies in interviews.

Some companies are aiming to form stronger relationships with their top prospects through more intimate events — dinners for 10 students, for example, rather than mass cocktail parties. They also are making a more concerted push to close the deal once a job offer has been extended.

Opera Solutions, a boutique consulting firm, assigns each of its M.B.A. picks to a “cultivation team,” a group of employees who offer the student advice and information about Opera and its projects and arrange visits to the company’s office.

“In a market with lots of job opportunities, we wanted to ensure that the students who are offered positions get intimately familiar with the firm and the culture to increase acceptance rates,” says Dhiraj Nayar, a principal at Opera in

New York. “This effort has helped recruit students who in some cases had offers from other top consulting companies.”

Money Matters

Money, of course, always matters in the recruiting race, and companies are raising the stakes to land the most coveted M.B.A. students. About 69% of recruiters in the Journal survey said their companies increased starting pay this year. Nearly a third of the survey respondents said they offered salaries of more than $100,000, up from about 24% last year and 17% in 2005.

But rich compensation packages don’t guarantee success in a heated market. “I heard more companies talking about the number of reneges this year,” says Maury Hanigan, president of MBA Scouting Report, which sends “talent scouts” to campuses to identify the best potential hires for clients. “It was a real surprise,” she says, when a dozen M.B.A. students reneged on a major investment bank after having accepted its job offers.

Harder hit are industries that lack the pizzazz of a Google Inc. or Apple Inc. and can’t compete with banks and consulting firms on salary. “This year, we didn’t have as many students applying for our M.B.A. internships,” says Linda Breed, senior manager of employment programs for Pfizer Inc.’s world-wide pharmaceutical operations. “There is a lot of competition out there, and the pharmaceutical business is not the hot industry to go to. It is seen as more staid, old-school.” Pfizer hired 13 interns for finance, short of its goal of 15 to 17, and it recruited only three marketing interns instead of the six to seven it had targeted.

To fight back, Pfizer is reaching out to potential M.B.A. interns as early as possible. This summer, it took some of its interns to orientation programs and career fairs to interact with incoming M.B.A. students who might want internships next year. “We’re establishing relationships very early and extending offers to incoming students to come in for an interview at Pfizer as soon as they’re settled in school,” says Ms. Breed. Pfizer recruiters even attended an event this summer for future minority M.B.A. students who won’t start classes until fall 2008 and won’t be available for internships until 2009.

Finding Balance

Some companies are using work-life flexibility to attract M.B.A. recruits. Before deciding where to place M.B.A. hires, Deloitte & Touche USA LLP asks them to list the top three cities where they’d like to work. “We’re trying to accommodate them as much as possible, but the majority of the individuals want to go to big cities — New York, Chicago and San Francisco,” says Diane Borhani,

U.S. national campus recruiting leader. This year the accounting and consulting firm hired almost 400 M.B.A. graduates for full-time jobs, about 20% more than in 2006.

Deloitte also is experimenting with digital video approaches to recruiting, such as interactive simulations about working in teams on business cases. It also plans to incorporate into its campus recruiting efforts a series of short videos in which employees share stories about their experiences at Deloitte. Given the growth of sites like YouTube, Deloitte felt the videos could be useful in recruiting and retaining graduates.

But Ms. Borhani believes there is no substitute for personal contact. Deloitte recruiters and executives are spending more time at their more than 40 target schools, getting to know students better.

“There’s a fine balance between how much you use technology and how much you do in person,” she says. “Students still want to hear and talk to people directly.”

–Mr. Alsop, a Wall Street Journal news editor, served as contributing editor of this report.

Write to Ronald Alsop at ron.alsop@wsj.com¹⁴

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 7:19 am and is filed under Hall of Fame. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.