(FORTUNE Magazine) – Last April the global head of recruiting at A.T. Kearney crowed to FORTUNE about the gaggle of MBAs who were ditching the derailed dot-com train to come work for his consulting firm. Bob Chrismer even joked about possibly having 1,000 summer interns. Well, nobody at Kearney is laughing now. It recently announced that start dates for 130 of its class of 2001 hires, 60% of whom are MBAs, are being pushed back for the second time--indefinitely.

With a small army of new MBAs gathering dust for almost a year now, "we've not been active in recruiting 2002 MBAs," says a Kearney spokesman, who points out that his firm has plenty of company. Not wanting to repeat last year's rescinded offers and "apology" bonuses, many traditionally strong MBA employers severely scaled back hiring. Primary beneficiaries of the dot-com exodus in 2000, consulting and I-banking in particular were floored by a combination of overhiring, recession, and the terrorist attacks.

"We've had more companies rearrang-ing schedules than ever before," says Jamie King-Belinne, associate director of MBA career services at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. IBM, her school's No. 1 recruiter last year, scheduled interviews, then canceled, then rescheduled. At least it showed up: Many companies with long-standing ties to top B-schools didn't recruit on campus this year, encouraging students to visit them or interview by phone. Others participated but had few firm offers. "It was ugly," says King-Belinne. "We're still licking wounds from last year."

Just how ugly? In a recent survey of 56 B-schools conducted by the MBA Career Services Council, 89% said that recruiting for grads was down last fall compared with the fall of 2000, and 59% said it was down a whopping 26% or more. Intel and Hewlett-Packard have slashed B-school hiring in half, Boston Consulting Group has cut back almost 30%, and, says Yale's director of career development Mark Case, banks like Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and J.P. Morgan Chase didn't even show up.

The most salient question, then, isn't where MBAs want to work. It's who will hire them. "The 'ideal' employer has a lot to do with who's hiring," says Claudia Tattanelli, CEO of Universum, which conducts our annual survey of MBAs' most desired places to work. Many MBAs aren't tempting fate. "A lot of classmates are returning to their summer internships, while those who didn't have one seem at a disadvantage," says Michael Polay, a Harvard second-year who has accepted a job in business development at Walt Disney; he was a "cast member" last summer.

Fortunately for the rest, opportunities do exist--they just have to work harder to find them. Students willing to broaden their geographic, industry, and (perhaps) salary expectations have found eager employers; similarly, employers normally scorned by top MBAs received rapt attention this year. Consumer product firms, small hedge funds, pharmaceuticals, defense contractors, biotech outfits, government agencies, and even nonprofits have all benefited from the climate change.

Take Raytheon: Last year the defense contractor needed until June to fill the five finance slots it reserves for MBAs, says John Kovach, VP of executive leadership and global HR. This year those slots are already taken, and Kovach has room to hire the seven other MBAs he made offers to. Over at Merck, which brings on 50 MBAs annually for positions in finance, marketing, and HR, director of university relations Angela Knight saw a 50% increase in participants at its informational sessions. "They see us as more stable than consulting," she says.

Stability has been the watchword on campus. After seeing classes above them get burned, MBAs now yearn for the safety of brick-and-mortar behemoths like GE, Citigroup, Coca-Cola, and Johnson & Johnson--each of which went up at least 15 places in the rankings. (And then there's Arthur Andersen, the embattled auditor whose meteoric yet peculiar rise up the rankings this year can be largely attributed to a more visible presence on campuses and its insistence on being listed as Andersen in the survey.) Those firms not only provide security but also usually allow restless MBAs to switch divisions if the first job proves unsatisfying. "MBAs want to know they can grow, that the firm will invest in them," says Universum's Tattanelli. That explains why 55% of the 2,800 survey respondents expect to remain with their first employer longer than three years, up 13%.

B-school students are also ditching brand-name biases and focusing on the work they'll do, not where they'll do it. Los Alamos National Laboratories, the White House Office of Management and Budget, the CIA, and the National Park Service are just a few of the nontraditional employers popping up on the radar screens of Columbia, Tuck (Dartmouth), and Yale. At Stanford, meanwhile, the percentage of students going into nonprofit or government jobs has increased perceptibly. "As long as they're working with smart people, [MBAs] are openminded," says Erin Cochrane, director of career services at Tuck. MBAs are also less picky about geography. Last year students at McCombs formed a group called Austin Power that focused on finding jobs in town; its president now works at Microsoft. Some students are setting their sights even further. Indiana University's Kelley School of Business held an employer fair last month--in Shanghai.

Widening the net naturally requires more legwork. "A few students expected an offer with little or no effort on their part," says Intel's MBA recruiting manager Lisa Weathersby. "They got a reality check." But on the whole, MBAs responded well to the new environment. "The general mood was patience," says one second-year at Tuck. It may pay off. Most career counselors and recruiters agree that next year's prospects are brighter. Says Tattanelli: "After three years of chaos we're returning to a normal cycle of things."