Class of 2004
2004-05-11 | 8:02 a.m.

from WSJ:

MBAs in Class of 2004

Enjoy More Job Offers

By JANE J. KIM

As the economy heats up, so are job prospects for graduating students with MBAs.

University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, for example, said that the number of students who will be graduating with job offers this year is about 25% to 30% higher than last year. Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management said job postings have been up about 35% to 50% each month since September. And at least two-thirds of second-year students at New York University's Stern School of Business have job offers, compared with about 50% to 60% of the class that had offers at the same time last year, Stern said.

"It's so much better to be the Class of 2004 than the Class of 2003," said James Weiss, a 29-year-old MBA candidate at Wharton who recently accepted a full-time offer as a consultant for Bain & Co.

Banks and consulting firms are among the most active recruiters, said Peter Degnan, director of MBA career management at the Wharton School in Philadelphia. Thanks to a rising stock market, improved trading activity and better deal flows, investment banks are hiring more people to fill their needs, he said. Meanwhile, consulting firms are hiring people to work on a larger pipeline of business and projects. Of course, Wall Street and the consulting firms were among the most aggressive in slashing headcount during the market downturn, so a strong uptick in business is likely to have firms scrambling to fill already lean staffing levels, experts said.

For the 2004 full-time and summer internship classes, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has hired about 30% more full-time associates and 25% more interns than it did last year, said Aaron Marcus, head of campus recruiting in the Americas for the firm. And as economic conditions continue to improve, hiring for full-time 2005 MBA slots should increase by another 30%, he added.

Compared with previous years when Goldman's hiring levels have remained largely flat since 2001, "this is a dramatic shift," Mr. Marcus said. "The business climate has improved...and the firm has been doing well, like most of Wall Street."

Indeed, fewer corporate recruiters are blaming a weak economy for constraining their hiring plans this year, according to a new survey sponsored by the Graduate Management Admission Council, or GMAC. In a survey of about 1,300 recruiters, 50% of respondents reported constraints as a result of economic weakness for the current academic year, compared with 57% in 2002-03 and 69% in 2001-02. Meanwhile, the percentage of recruiters who didn't hire any new MBA graduates also declined to 12% in 2004 from 23% in 2003.

Indeed, hiring activity across all job areas increased significantly this year. Finance positions made up 62% of all jobs that recruiters offered to students this year, up from 56% last year, according to the GMAC survey. Some of the largest gains are being reported among marketing and accounting jobs.

Although banking and consulting are showing strong gains, companies are also looking for MBAs to fill positions in corporate finance, marketing, health care and pharmaceuticals and real estate. "Technology and telecommunications companies are back on campus" -- the first time since 2001 -- as well as new consumer product and manufacturing companies, said Wharton's Mr. Degnan.

"We do sense that the mood is much different," said Gary Fraser, assistant dean of career development at Stern. "The people who don't have offers are engaged in job-searching activities whereas last year, there were a lot of people who had given up."

"A year ago, people were happy if they had one offer," said Roxanne Hori, assistant dean of career management at Kellogg. This year, people are trying to decide between two to three offers, she said.

Not only are companies hiring more, many are also diversifying the way they're recruiting students. Besides conducting on-campus interviews, more companies are hiring candidates through job postings, said Julie Morton, associate dean of MBA Career Services at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, where the number of second-year students with job offers in hand is running about 10 percentage points, or 25%, ahead of last year.

Last month, a group of business schools that included Chicago, Columbia, Wharton, Harvard University, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Kellogg held a three-day virtual career fair where firms -- primarily overseas companies -- "interviewed" prospective candidates through Web casts and chat rooms.

Although hiring levels haven't quite reached the peak they did during the late 1990s when nearly every MBA candidate had multiple job offers, they are approaching historical levels, the schools noted.

Indeed, today's MBAs may have learned to hone their job-search skills by watching how difficult it was for those before them to get offers. "As we came into business school in 2002, we were bombarded with information that the market was down," said Gina Jaeckel, a second-year MBA candidate at the University of Chicago. "My class had a mindset that (jobs) are not going to be handed to us on a silver platter.... We have to focus." As a result of having a targeted job search and an offer from her summer internship, the 32-year-old decided to interview with only one firm last fall.

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