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Dinner at Tiffany's
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January 16, 1998: 8:19 p.m. ET
From ski trips to tropical cruises, top recruiters splurge to snag elite MBAs
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - Sure, it's a nice job search if you can get it. And Trevor Moody got it: an all-expenses-paid weekend at Manhattan's Waldorf Astoria for Moody and his wife, courtesy of a corporate recruiter.
"There were chocolates waiting for us on the bed," Moody recalled of the two-day retreat in the Fall of 1995. "I think obviously they were trying to make New York look attractive."
Moody, then a second-year MBA student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, had been flown in from Boston, and ferried to the Waldorf to schmooze with Booz.
Booz, Allen & Hamilton, that is -- a consulting powerhouse that ranks 155 on the Forbes Private 500. The company's recruiters had Moody in their sights for a job. If snagging him meant splurging on a his-and-hers suite at the Waldorf, the logic went, such was the price of courting a Master of the Universe-in-training. (Moody ended up taking a job at a smaller firm.)
A smorgasbord of enticements
Nowadays, job-search junkets -- long the mainstays of executive echelon recruiting -- dot the academic calendars of America's elite business students. With the competition for top talent intensifying yearly, particularly in high-tech fields, Corporate America routinely lavishes its most promising prospects with a smorgasbord of enticements intended to nudge a wavering MBA their way.
But these are limited-opportunity lavishers. Career placement workers estimate that fewer than five percent of America's nearly 250,000 graduating MBAs are privy to the VIP treatment in any given year.
Recruiters regale the chosen few to fancy 100-person banquets complete with crooning accompaniment by the Harlem Boys Choir (Booz, Allen & Hamilton); wine-tasting primers led by private sommeliers (Ernst & Young); rock and mountain-climbing expeditions (Netscape); or ski trips to Lake Tahoe (Oracle). Even the occasional Caribbean cruise.
"It's a three-hour ordeal, and actually a waste of time," said Jim Roberts, a second-year student at the Wharton Business School, referring to the half dozen formal dinners he has attended this recruiting season at some of Philadelphia's highest-rated restaurants.
 Did you say sushi? Top MBA recruiters cater to every culinary whim of their most promising prospects.
In the merciless calculus of courtship, firms spend anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000 (or more) wooing prized candidates. The fawned-over MBAs, in turn, may spend upwards of a third of their final semesters crisscrossing the country in pursuit of the business student's golden fleece: the perfect corporate fit.
The 'Herding Dynamic' at work
The system can be brutally efficient in weeding out the unwanted. But that's the point. Because the brightest MBAs tend to cluster around the same high-profile companies, they encourage what Ilse Evans, the director of the career development office at MIT's Sloan school, calls a "herding dynamic".
"For every company that's wooing the student, they're doing so because they know the student is to die for," said Evans, whose school drew 240 recruiters to campus this year. "The students are sweating like mad. It's the 80-20 story: 80 percent of the companies want 20 percent of the students and 80 percent of the students want 20 percent of the companies."
Job-placement statistics lend credence to the herding hypothesis. Take Wharton, for example. Among the dozens of firms that hired the school's graduates in 1997, a few juggernauts held pride of place: McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm, hired 49 students; Goldman, Sachs & Co., an investment banking firm, 28; Bain & Co., a consulting firm, and Morgan Stanley & Co. Inc., a brokerage firm, 24 apiece; Andersen Consulting Strategic Services, 20; and Merrill Lynch, 20.
On the technology side, Microsoft, Oracle, Intuit, Sprint, Hewlett-Packard and AT&T Wireless all made impressive showings. The median starting compensation, after signing and first-year bonuses, was $130,000.
 Recruiters say most goal-oriented MBAs are motivated by prudence - not perks - in choosing an employer.
Bad people are expensive
Recruiters staunchly defend their tactics. What may seem like needless largesse to an outsider, they say, is actually part of a finely tuned campaign aimed at ensuring candidates will gel with their corporate cultures. "The only way to expose recruits to your firm is to expose them to your people," says Ken Keverian, the vice president in charge of North American recruiting for Boston Consulting Group. To do that, Keverian adds, "we'll get together not only in our office, but also outside our office in a more social setting."
Keverian minces no words about recruiting costs: "You know the old adage that good people are expensive, but bad people are more expensive."
If you're talking about Oracle Corp. -- a $6 billion company, with a hot Silicon Valley zip code and a human braintrust measured in gigabytes - "bad people" can be very expensive. They can cost the company millions of dollars in lost clientele and credibility, says John Nolitt, Oracle's director of national recruiting.
For that reason, Nolitt said, "When we bring in 20 people, they better be superstars."
Randi Bresciani, the head of the college recruiting program at Netscape, said that if she thinks a recruit will make "a significant impact," the company will use creative persuasion.
At exam time, for instance, Netscape might send its recruits CARE-style parcels stuffed with goodies such as chocolates and coffee. Those summoned for a "flyback" to the company's Mountain View, California headquarters may receive gift certificates to a cyber-café in Palo Alto or a free visit to a local indoor rock-climbing club. "It can be more personalized," Bresciani notes.
So does the wooing work? The consensus among recruiters is an emphatic yes -- and no. While money and benefits are important, they say, your typical MBA from a top-flight school is not prone to making knee-jerk career decisions based on a pecking order of perks.
"I firmly believe that the cutsy kinds of things don't really sway the real thoughtful students," said Keverian. "While I think you need forums for people to get to know you, they're not going to join you over a few thousand dollars difference in recruiting cost."
A goal-oriented generation
In fact, says Kip Harrell, the executive director of University Relations for US West, the MBAs he interviews are specific about what they are looking for. And many, he said, are simply too busy to fritter away valuable time during their company visits on leisure activities.
While that may be so, some recruiters insist they feel captive at times to the marketplace. Julie Billingsley, the manager of human resources at ZS Associates, an Evanston, Ill.-based consulting firm with 280 employees in six offices, said she feels the constant pressure "to craft an offer that's competitive" in order to draw top MBAs she knows may be juggling five or six other choices.
Billingsley describes her firm's culture as "casual" and "collegial". Yet when it comes to recruiting, she concedes, she makes a beeline for the A-list schools. "When you're introducing so and so from Harvard, and so and so from Wharton to a client," she explained, "you have that extra brain power…Those degrees buy some credibility."
Then there are exceptions like Moody, the Waldorf weekender from MIT. After initially taking a job at a big-name firm, he ultimately joined the Wilkerson Group, a medium size consulting company in New York whose offer he had previously rejected.
"I called in 1996 and said, `Remember that offer.' They said, `Yes.'"
Turning philosophical, he mused: "I ended up going with the lesser level of schmoozing."
--By staff writer Douglas Herbert
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