OCD Advice on the Off Campus Recruiting Job Search

As we approach the end of the fall semester, the bulk of on campus interview activities for graduating students also approaches. Of course, we've already cranked up workshops and counseling for the off-campus search process and we have also begun our outreach to our Alumni, Boards and friends of the school to alert them that we want Ross to be first in line for any postings that become available as we get closer to graduation in the spring.

Similar to the economic recovery, this year's graduating students do appear to be doing slightly better than did last year's group which faced the beginning of the economic crisis. Obviously, if you are still in the search, partially complete summary data is of limited use as you continue to pursue your job search efforts.As always, we like to give you the information that we do have without regard to what positive or negative breaking economic news might be hitting the headlines.

Current Stats for the Graduating MBA and BBA Classes: As compared to a year ago at this time, over twice the number of students have reported their current status. This increase is a result of our early push to gather data on how many students returned from their summer experiences with internships. The increase, however, also makes it difficult to compare data from year to year as it is not always the case that someone who has reported in has an offer or, conversely, that someone who has not reported in does not have an offer. Accordingly, we urge everyone who has either not indicated their current status (or who has had their status change since they last updated it), to go into iMpact and fill out the survey so that we can continue to update information and to provide more comparable data with last year.

For the graduating MBAs, at this time last year, 122 students had updated their status in iMpact and only 71 of those students indicated having received an offer. That figure represented 16% of the graduating class and 58% of those who had responded. This year, 251 students have indicated their current status in iMpact - an increase of 129 students as noted above. Of the group of students who have reported, 104 students indicate having received an offer. That increase of 33 students with an offer as compared to last year, represents 23% of the graduating class and 42% of those who have reported.

157 BBAs have reported their status this year as compared to only 55 at this point last year. Again, this threefold increase in students who have reported makes the data risky to compare, but 99 of the 157 BBAs indicate an offer in hand this year. That figure is 63% of those responding and 29% of the entire class. In contrast, at this point last year, 33 of the 55 BBAs reporting indicated an offer in hand representing 60% of those responding and 10% of the class.

We will continue to update you as the year (and hopefully, the economy) progresses. Please do update your information in iMpact.

Business Week Listing: A few of you inquired last week about a Business Week article listing the % of graduates with job offers 3 months after graduation last year. In the listing, Ross showed up as 26th. The article itself spurred some blog discussion and a few questions from students. As we have talked about many times over the years, because our graduation date is so much earlier than our peer schools, we will have a higher % of graduates without offers in any such listing. In essence, we have to stop counting the last Friday of April while other schools continue to count even into the 3rdweek of June. In order to address the potential misperception that the BW article generated, we posted a note on the BW blog highlighting the above.

Posting #25 of 26 from 4 November on Bw.com: "If I had written this article, I would have included the date of measure for each of the schools. The schools all subscribe to a standard (promulgated by the MBA Career Services Council) that requires that statistics be reported as of "three months after graduation date". Graduation date varies widely from school to school. Three months after graduation can be as late as the third week of September for some schools. For us here at Ross, our graduation date is typically the last Friday in April. Obviously, a lot of people can find work between April and September and, in fact, do.

To drive it home more directly. If two jobs were posted by a company in early March and students from two schools pursued those jobs and earned offers before the end of April, those jobs would count in the statistics of both schools. If that same company posted those same two jobs in June, however, and students from two schools pursued those jobs and earned offers, the offer would count only in the statistics of the school with the late graduation date. In this sense, the ranking is obviously not comparable and favors the schools with later graduation dates. In particular, because very little hiring takes place during July and August because of vacations, if schools are able to include portions of September (when hiring traditionally surges) in their data, their data will look disproportionately better.

I believe that if there were a way to get a consistent measurement we would find that the data are very different than what is reported here and, in fact, are much closer than the article implies.
BW has merely taken the data reported by the schools in compliance with the MBA CSC standards and listed the schools in the order of that data without clarifying that the measurement dates are different for virtually each school in the listing."

After our clarification, only one further note was posted for several days, "Thank you! That is actually very informative."

Internally, just to be sure that our peer schools weren't, somehow, reporting better results, we went through the exercise of comparing data as of identical dates and found that the other schools are right on par with Ross as of any given date. In addition, a comparison of the graduation dates of our peer schools shows that (not surprisingly), generally speaking, the later a school graduates, the better its data appear in the BW listing with June graduation dates showing better results than April/May graduation dates.

Our thanks to those of you who brought this to our attention and, as always, let us know how we can help you by emailing ocd@umich.edu.