We have also retired our old recruitment system, which managed the whole life cycle of recruitment from the student and employee perspectives. Basically, it was where employers would go to post jobs, students would apply for jobs, signups for corporate presentations were managed, and students would go in to report that they had gotten offers. But the technology in this space had really aged—it was about 15 years old.
Now, a newer, more seamless, fluid, intuitive solution has come on the market. It’s run by 12Twenty, a group of former MBA students who were looking for a better recruitment system. They deployed a module that they build around employment reporting and then sold it into about 80 different schools. Every school needs to do employment reporting—there is certain governance that we all have to be in compliance with—and they rolled out this new reporting module that was in compliance.
Now they are placing bets on deploying an entire life-cycle recruitment system. We are one of the first three schools to deploy it, and we have been working with them in a beta sense. Our system is called McDonough Career View.
Already it has allowed us to do so many things the old system couldn’t. For example, students can create a target company list that is dynamic. Let’s say I put Bain on my target company list. The system will automatically pull into my profile whenever Bain has come to campus in the past, how many students it has hired—basically it’s serving up real-time intelligence based on prior intelligence in that system.
Not only that, but it’s intuitive enough that it will actually will let you pick metro areas to source jobs for. So you can indicate that you only want to pull jobs for Virginia and Maryland, say. That is technology that has not been out there before.
It’s also much better from an employer perspective. Now companies can very easily pull their own résumé books. In the past this was very clunky—you had to be a super admin to get a résumé book. We find it’s happening with much more frequency by more employers now because it is so easy to do.
We are leading the market on this new generation of technology, which I am really excited about. The feedback we have gotten from both employers and students has been terrific on McDonough Career View, and I really believe this will become the standard for the industry.
CA: What does it mean to be associate dean and managing director of career services at McDonough? What exactly is your role? To counsel students? Counsel companies? Manage the entire office and oversee its various functions? All of the above?
DA: We support all of the MBA programs at Georgetown, so that means the full-time program, which has 500 students, and the evening program, which has another 360 students (three classes of 120 each). We also support the Executive MBA program, which has about 100 students, and the Global EMBA program with ESADE, with another 40 students.
My role is to oversee all of the activities we offer, both in terms of the career coaching and the career curricula. My focus on the executive side is on executive branding. On the MBA side it is on both job searches and promotions. Many people in the evening MBA program, for example, are not necessarily looking to change jobs but rather to be promoted. So for those students we help them to create that promotion campaign. My personal role is centered far more around leadership of the organization than on actual coaching.
CA: What part of your job do you most love?
DA: I do a little bit of everything every day. There is a lot of diversity. Whether it’s meeting a new employer, moderating a Forté webinar at lunchtime or doing a little student coaching—no two days are the same.
CA: Now, about your team. You have a pretty unique office structure, yes?
DA: Yes. I have deployed more of an industry model in the office with certified career coaches who bring specific expertise in certain industries and functions. I have been here now for five years and came to Georgetown from American Express, but over the course of my career I have run recruiting for four different companies. As a result, I know the value of having an industry-specialized model. And as I mentioned earlier, we are also now starting to infuse the functional view as well through the functional inventories we have our incoming students take.
We have five full-time professionals focused on both employer relations and career coaching. In keeping with our industry model, each of those five is an industry expert. The two most popular industries are consulting and financial services.
The career advisor for each industry has responsibility for all the employer relationships within that industry as well as for coaching students. We have a hybrid, flexible model, and our advisors also have about seven or eight part-time coaches who support them. So there are five full-time Georgetown employees who manage relationships with employers, and they have a network of part-time coaches they bring in, enabling us to “flex” to meet coaching demand. This is another of the best practices I’ve taken from the corporate world.
The financial services coach is ex-Goldman Sachs, the consulting coach worked at Booz Allen Hamilton, the not-for-profit coach came to us from the World Bank. We have hired people who can speak with real authority.
We do have one coach specifically dedicated to career clarification. She is an assessment specialist. And we also have a three-person international practice, which means that our international students have three part-time people dedicated to helping them navigate visa issues. We have established this international practice over the past couple of years.
I think it’s very important to have the proper infrastructure in place. This group supports both the full-time and evening program, so our evening program students get exactly the same service as our full-time students. In addition to our industry practice leads and our part-time coaches, we also have an operations staff of four people and a curricular team of two who deploy the job search course, the webinars and other seminars as needed.
