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Posted from my mobile device "Size matters at business school—especially when it comes to job recruiting.
Small academic programs—such as those with fewer than 200 students per graduating class—tout a superior faculty-student ratio and personalized recommendations for student job-seekers, but they are often omitted from a busy recruiter's circuit. Firms will visit smaller schools if they are highly ranked but not many beyond the top 10 or 20 schools overall.
As a result, students at smaller programs may have to do more legwork than their peers at larger institutions to land interviews. Instead of relying on on-campus recruiting events and a vast alumni network, they may need to travel to other cities for job fairs, send blind résumés or forge connections with guest speakers, adjunct faculty and distant acquaintances. The schools' career-services offices are also getting creative, such as teaming up with other small schools to host events that provide more exposure to potential jobs for their students.
Consulting firm Bain & Co. visits about 15 U.S. campuses per year—and generally avoids schools that have fewer than 150 students per graduating class.
Bain says it looks at all factors when mapping out visits, including size, reputation and whether it has successfully hired students from a school before. The company has been known to hire 30 or 40 students from a single school for summer internships and full-time positions combined, so it looks for economies of scale when planning visits.
"If we don't physically show up [at] a school, we don't tend to get a lot of applications," says Mark Howorth, senior director of global recruiting at the consultancy. "You have to show up to prime the pump."
Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs Group Inc.—a perennial top destination for business school graduates—visits 15 to 20 U.S. schools including Harvard Business School, University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and University of Virginia's Darden School of Business for most of its M.B.A. recruiting. (Goldman's individual private-wealth-management offices also recruit at other, local schools.)
Sandra Hurse, who oversees Goldman's global campus recruiting for investment banking, securities, investment management and investment research, says the company chooses schools for talent and proximity rather than for size. Still, this year, the smallest school the company visited for corporate M.B.A. hiring was Yale School of Management, with 231 second-year students.
Jim Dixey, director of graduate business-career services at Texas A&M University's Mays Business School, says students are often "shocked" when they are told just how much legwork they will need to do to land interviews.
The business school had 67 students in the group that graduated in December, and about 85% of full-time job offers in the past two years came from companies that never visited campus. Still, big firms such as Exxon Mobil Corp. and Dell Inc., both based in Texas, make regular recruiting visits.
Mr. Dixey's office reaches out to students months before they arrive on campus, often connecting them with alumni in their fields of interest. The school also hosts a website for job postings. He recommends students attend career fairs organized by minority-student groups even if they aren't actually members of those minority populations and tells students to join any industry affinity groups on social-networking site LinkedIn to expand their networks.
Angela Marinos, a December graduate from Mays, landed a full-time position at Spectra Energy Corp. in Houston after that company visited the school. She says she was "lucky" because she wanted to work locally in the energy industry, while classmates who didn't want that narrow track "were at more of a disadvantage."
Her classmate, Joseph Donnelly, agrees. Students were "absolutely not" aware of how assertive they would need to be in the job hunt, says Mr. Donnelly who recently started a job with Exxon Mobil in Houston.
To compensate for their smaller pools of potential hires, some small schools team up to host recruiting events. Emory University's Goizueta Business School, with 134 students in its second-year class, participates in the annual Southeastern M.B.A. Schools Interview Forum in Atlanta alongside four other programs to give students access to companies that don't come to their campuses, such as medical-equipment company C.R. Bard Inc. and Nissan Motor Co.'s North America unit.
Govind Kaushal, a 2011 Goizueta graduate, landed his job at eBay Inc., after spending more than $500 to participate in a multischool interview event known as "Day in the Bay," in San Francisco.
Though Goizueta helped coordinate the job-application process for a number of Bay Area companies, Mr. Kaushal was still responsible for paying his own way to the daylong session of face-to-face interviews. Mr. Kaushal interviewed for five positions at the event.
Mr. Kaushal says it is hard if you are coming to Goizueta and want to land a job at a tech giant such as Google Inc. or eBay. "There's a lot that you need to do on your own," he says."
24 Feb 2012, 11:14
