Thursday, July 2, 2009Redefine On-Campus Recruiting
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Judging from my experiences and from conversations with peers, it seems career-services offices at certain colleges across the country have, in recent years, devoted inordinate resources to recruiters from Wall Street while underexposing students to other professions. But the economic downturn is providing career advisers with a chance to redefine their mission, and the opportunity should not go unheeded.
The issue reminds me of a scene in I Love Lucy where Lucy and Ethel -- both housewives -- go to an employment agency. "What job did you have in mind?" the man behind the desk inquires. "What kind of jobs do you have open?" Lucy counters. "Well, what do you do?" the man repeats. To which Lucy responds, nervously now, "What kind of jobs do you have open?"
When you're poised to graduate from college, and you're unsure where you fit in the professional world, you begin to feel like Lucy. Enthusiastic but impressionable, you're likely to leap at the first attractive opportunity that presents itself.
And, for a while, Wall Street beckoned glamorously, normally in the form of "on-campus recruiting" (OCR), a process dominated by the finance and consulting industries and managed -- at least at my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania -- by the career-services office. In the fall of my senior year, when, amid the ferment that sweeps through the student body prior to OCR, I decided to explore consulting opportunities, Career Services granted me access to a state-of-the-art online job-search system and sent me to a whirlwind of information sessions, which led to an elaborate and lavish courtship by potential employers, involving cocktail parties, business cards, interviews, leather padfolios, and more interviews.
When, later in the year, I mentioned to Career Services an interest in international affairs, I was alerted to a job fair that primarily involved organizations asking me to volunteer abroad. When, soon after, I expressed a desire to enter journalism, Career Services recommended a handful of job-listing Web sites, advised me to find and network with alumni in the field through an online database, and periodically e-mailed me job postings through a more general listserv. All these suggestions were mildly helpful, and well-intentioned. But the support I received for international affairs and journalism didn't come close to the support I received for consulting.
The economic crisis appears to have upset the autumn ritual of OCR. As The New York Times reported in April,
The industry whose troubles are having the greatest impact on the rethinking of careers, especially at the nation's elite universities, is the one at the center of the country's economic downturn -- finance. For years, the hefty paychecks and social status on Wall Street proved irresistible to many of America's brightest young people, but the jobs, money and social respect there are much diminished today.The article went on to predict that students will soon gravitate toward public service, government, the sciences, and teaching the way they once did to finance.
But forecasting the next hot profession is missing the point. The larger issue is that it's easy for career-services offices to allow trendy employers with cash, manpower, and/or predictable hiring patterns to dominate on-campus recruiting (this applies not only to finance and consulting but also to organizations like Teach for America, which, at least at Penn, has a substantial presence and pull). Much harder -- but significantly more beneficial for students -- is ensuring that undergraduates are sufficiently aware of high-quality jobs in a variety of professions.
Solutions could involve collaborating with academic departments, professors, and alumni to cultivate more robust networking opportunities for students interested in industries that hire on an "as-needed basis" and are less likely to send representatives to campus. Career-services offices could simply make the wealth of information about these industries more easily available, rather than burying it on their Web sites or in their libraries.
Finance, consulting, and Teach for America turn out to be incredibly rewarding opportunities for many people, some of whom would not have recognized their interest in these fields without on-campus recruiting. That's great. But when students ask, "What kinds of jobs do you have open?" they deserve a comprehensive response.
Although I don't doubt your own experience and those of your peers, I think the key phrase in your post is that this is happening at "certain colleges" (and I wouldn't be so sure about "across the country").
In my own sphere the heavy Wall Street and consulting presence is, or was, mainly confined to the Ivy League, other top private schools in the northeast, and schools in or near major financial centers. (All of the schools you mention, and all of the schools in the NYT article, meet this description.) One of the reasons the lavish recruiting we used to see was so lavish is that it was thus confined: instead of hitting a large number of schools, they focus on relatively few, and (perhaps coincidentally) neither the recruiters nor the recruited have to travel far for events and interviews.
It seems quite probable that now the OCR at top schools will come to resemble what it has long been at mid-tier schools--- not a well-funded organized "ritual", but an afterthought, minimally organized by the school, minimally staffed by representatives of large national organizations, and minimally attended by the graduating class. It is unfortunate; if anything, the trend should be in the other direction. A well-run OCR program is an asset to a school and to recruiters alike, and its value can only increase in a bad economy.
You suggest that professors and academic departments could be good resources for improving students' career guidance, but my experience was the opposite. I went to one such research university with lots of Wall St. and consulting recruiters. Not interested in either, I sought out career advice from professors. They, frankly, were well-intentioned but not that helpful. They all chose to be professors at a research university -- that was, for many of them, the only career they knew how to guide someone towards.
I think the other challenge is the the kind of type-A people who wind up at these kinds of universities are the kind who, in general, want someone to tell us what the right steps are to become "something." The attitude is "I want to the right university, now I need the right first job." We have a hard time adapting to the notion that for lots and lots of career there isn't a straight path that the career center can describe for you. There is no "right first job" to look for and lots of people go through their 20s trying different jobs. It's not just because the companies in other industries hire on an "as needed" basis, it's because there is no straight line from college degree to career in lots of fields.
I'm surprised poor Uri Friendman's editors didn't spare him the embarrassment of having his name attached to such a blatantly myopic piece that reads like many a senior's final op-ed in the college newspaper.
As the previous commenters have noted, the scenario Friedman lays out is pretty much limited to Ivy or similar colleges in the Northeast and is appealing to the sort of Type A student for whom the messiness of forging a career in something like the booming "all-things-internet" industry is completely unappealing. It's why so many similar students in the late '70s and early '80s flooded into law school: there was a very well-defined career path that seemed quite comforting to kids whose identities were forged on their ability to make straight As
But there's a real danger here: as Tom Wolfe pointed out in A Man In Full, many Ivy grads wind up being moderately successful middle managers at large companies precisely because it's easy for them to be seduced by the well-delineated career paths and name recognition value of these companies upon graduation and because they're smart enough to never completely fail at a job they're particularly unsuited for.
The solution is less recruiting, not more. Exploration and the need to forge one's own path, without any well-defined goals would be the best thing that happened to many of these kids. The uncertainty of living outside of their comfort zone would surely shake them out of their complacency and help them discover skills and internal resources they weren't aware they had.
The primary goal of many OCR events is to reinforce the visibility of colleges to major employers, thus reinforcing the college's claims that students matriculate from the institution to "Wall Street." Having a distinguished list of employers who recruit on-campus is a key selling point for colleges, who must compete for entrants each year, and must prove the value of the expense to parents. (Parents must see the end-game up front, to be convinced, if the college is not a major brand name).
Corporate participation at OCR events is significantly down for several reasons:
1) few companies understand their own needs, and have cash reserves to continue hiring despite lean times
2) college hires are justifiable to only the most significant employers, in the most visible industries, who have promotion paths built into their structure, with constant shifts in positions due to annual retirements
3) small firms with interesting opportunities find it difficult to get student's attention, and do not favor the OCR -- it is time consuming, and start ups need niche people, with highly specific skills. The OCR does not filter student enough to justify the time spent
4) OCR takes money to participate, plus time to travel. Many agile, interesting employers would benefit from young, motivated players but can't sequester management time to recruit sufficiently, therefore bypassing the college recruitment path altogether in favor of offshoring, and hiring-only-when-absolutely-needed
The recruiting world is moving increasingly online, hence reducing the time required throughout the OCR process. Last year the average recruiter spent $6,000 to source a single college graduate... That's a lot, when you must recruit hundreds, or thousands of young, eager minds (who are on facebook all day, anyway)
One reason why corporations pull back from college recruitment is that they find it hard to locate the person with the right 'fit.' They would prefer to locate a person based on a specific competancy, or area of expertise. The notion that someone bright, energetic, and only vaguely prepared to enter the industry is not a hot selling point. Industry says, give me a moderate expert at something, for a discount, and we can channel the talent.