The Admissions Insider.com

Straight Talk about Business School Admissions from Author/Consultant Paul Bodin
Posted on , Sunday, Aug. 20, 2006

Your First Semester at Business School Just Got Busier

If new MBA pre-recruiting service MBA Scouting Report has its way, you may have to add one more to-do to your first-semester B-school workload: getting “scouted” by corporate recruiters well before the spring internship season starts. Created by Maury Hanigan, CEO of New York-based Hanigan Consulting Group, MBA Scouting Report has helped clients like American Express, Johnson & Johnson, McGraw-Hill, and Deutsche Bank who seek a more focused recruiting process than resume books and campus presentations can provide. For each B-school targeted by a client firm—the company has scouted at Duke, Darden, Kellogg, Stanford, and Wharton – MBA Scouting Report sends a scout to spend one week on campus identifying through casual interviews the first-years in the client’s desired job function area (e.g., marketing) who meet the client’s criteria and show the most interest. By December 15 of the first semester, the client is presented with a one-page “scouting report” on the five to ten most promising students, at which point the client takes over, contacting the students directly, interviewing them, and, if all goes well, making summer internship offers.

MBA Scouting Report claims its approach provides clients with a yield (ratio of candidates hired to candidates interviewed) of 30 to 40% versus the 10% yield it says is typical, and an impressive 75% return on job offers extended. Hanigan's company claims its scouts, who have “either run an MBA recruiting program for a major employer, or were a director of an MBA career services office,” try to work through the schools’ Career Services offices (even meeting the students there, if desired), but if this is not possible, meets with students off campus. The scouts’ reports become the exclusive property of the client – MBA Scouting Report will not turn around and sell to Proctor & Gamble a report on marketing first-years it did at Darden for Unilever. (It will do a report on Darden’s finance first-years for P&G, however.) The flat-fee cost of each report depends on the school's size but is equivalent, the firm says, to the cost of “sending several employees to a corporate presentation” on campus.

Why is MBA Scouting Report’s approach preferable to companies' own efforts? The firm claims it can help clients who seek to get a head start on competitors by building relationships with potential interns early on, clients who can’t justify scouting at small or geographically distant schools or don’t have the resources to recruit at all the schools they need to, clients whose past aggressive recruiting efforts have not worked, and clients who want to scout specific schools for minorities or women. So if you've ever wondered what a baseball phenom feels like being scouted by The Bigs, this may be the closest you get to finding out.

Go to top