CA: Do you have any advice for prospective applicants in terms of what they might do in advance of the MBA program to be better prepared for the job search process? In your experience, do you find that students who have done x, y or z before arriving on campus have a more successful experience with career services and the job search as a whole?
DA: The clearer that applicants are with their stories in terms of where they want to go with their career—whatever their story might be—the better. And there should be some relationship with that plan to their past.
I play a unique role in our application process. All of the candidates that are recommended for admission—I read their files. What I look at is the résumés they have provided and the paragraphs they write that say what they are going to do with their MBAs on a short-term and long-term basis. As a former recruiter, if I can diagnose something in their path that connects them to those future goals, then I give a thumbs up.
For somebody who is a double switcher—so looking to change both industry and function—and there is nothing on their résumé that describes a passion for the path they want to take forward, then it is going to be very difficult for them from a placement perspective. If you want to be a double switcher, you need to credibly demonstrate how and why you want to go in that direction. That’s the best advice I can offer.
CA: What about students who hope to pursue entrepreneurial paths straight out of school? What particular opportunities/challenges do they present for your team? Are there special resources in place through the MBA Career Center?
DA: Absolutely. One of the 14 industries we help our students prepare for is entrepreneurship. Now, we can’t help them create their business plans—we have an entrepreneurship center at the school that does that. But what we can do for them is source jobs or internships with startups—so that they can get the hands-on experience of what it’s like to work in a startup environment.
We also have our Venture Fellows Program. This is a new program through which venture capital firms take on individual students to work in one of their portfolio companies. The students come in the second semester and promise to work a full year with the firms, including through the summer. So they gain a full year of experience working in a startup environment. It provides the students with an experience that they otherwise wouldn’t have had. What a wonderful thing to be able to say to someone who wants to start their own business, “We are going to give you bona fide experience with a real venture capitalist firm. Given the success of the program so far, I can’t imagine that it won’t grow. So yes, we do support the students who want to become entrepreneurs.
CA: There’s been a huge shift toward greater hiring by tech firms at many MBA programs in recent years. How has this impacted your overall career services offerings? Are there specific programs, interview prep, etc. for students targeting tech jobs?
DA: That’s become a much more popular sector for us as well. Because we are a smaller program, we don’t have a lot of on-campus recruitment that happens in the tech sector. That said, we plan to utilize the technology I mentioned earlier to expand our offerings through webinars that help students understand the industry. We also offer a career trek to San Francisco and Silicon Valley allowing students to visit many of the top tech firms and startups. It’s definitely a growing industry that more and more of our students are interested in.
CA: What other interesting trends or shifts have you been observing—both in terms of companies who are hiring more or less and student aspirations?
DA: One interesting trend we are seeing is in the consumer product space. Fewer and fewer of these firms are interested in doing on-campus recruiting. More and more they seem to be sourcing their talent through career fairs or alumni connections.
What that means ultimately is that we have to help our students come up with a customized plan. The cookie cutter “you go off and you do your on-campus recruiting and your summer internship” is no longer the primary path in this space. There is a conversion taking place. I won’t say that those days are over, but I think we are going to see more and more dispersion. We will see less and less of the big numbers of hiring by fewer companies. Just recently I had a conversation with our senior associate dean about this—about how we can help our students craft custom approaches to ensure that every student is getting what he or she needs.
You can’t have a herd mentality anymore. It’s not necessarily relevant, and it may not be right for you. You need to be doing a number of different things at certain times to be successful. I hope we are positioning ourselves well to serve students amid these shifting circumstances.
CA: What do you lose sleep over with regard to the MBA Career Center and what it offers?
DA: This year I feel like we are arriving at the right formula. It’s taken me five years, but I am awake at night a lot less. It has taken some time, but even when you make change happen it takes time for it to take hold. You learn and you tweak each year. But that’s what’s exciting about it—I don’t know how I could come back and do the same thing year after year.
Each recruiting season you change and you try different things. You can’t be afraid of risk. You have to be open to trying new things—that’s the best way to continually improve.
