Aug. 9, 2005
Employers Step Up Courtship of M.B.A.s
By Ronald Alsop
With the job market rebounding strongly, Procter & Gamble knew it needed a fresh pitch for recruiting summer interns last fall at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business. Instead of formal presentations and similar mass-marketing approaches, the consumer-products giant experimented with more targeted tactics modeled after its successful promotion of well-known brands.
Recruiters kept in close touch with their best M.B.A. prospects through a steady stream of friendly email messages, calls and holiday cards reminding them how to apply online for a marketing internship. Marketing majors from Indiana's Bloomington campus also visited P&G headquarters in Cincinnati to get a feel for its corporate culture and observe a day in the life of a brand manager. The highly personalized strategy paid off: P&G hired three of its top intern choices. Now, the company is considering expanding the campaign to full-time hires and other campuses.
Although many M.B.A.s consider P&G a plum place to work, company executives believe they face stiffer competition for the best B-school talent -- especially from management consulting and investment banks. "Before we tried this approach, we hadn't done as good a job of developing relationships and closing deals," says Scott Mautz, associate marketing director for health care at P&G and a Kelley alumnus. "It stung a little not to get the rock stars we had worked so hard to hire."
Both recruiters and b-school officials describe this generation of M.B.A.s as cynical and media savvy, with a short attention span for canned corporate spiels. Attendance has been dwindling at traditional campus-recruiting events. Busy students figure they can skip the speeches and simply research companies on the Internet.
Other recruiters agree with P&G about the need for a more personal courtship of M.B.A.s. "There's a cacophony of noise out there as M.B.A.s are inundated with information from more recruiters," says David Sanderson, global recruiting chief at Bain & Company Inc., a major management-consulting firm in Boston. Beyond the usual presentations to a mass audience, Bain also connects its consultants and partners with specific M.B.A. prospects and stages events and dinners for smaller, targeted groups of students.
Maury Hanigan, a college-recruiting consultant in New York, is forming a new venture called M.B.A. Scouting Report that's like a matchmaking service. A national network of talent scouts who formerly worked in corporate recruiting will help companies quickly pinpoint their best matches at specific business schools. "Recruiters don't really want to put on a cocktail party for 100 students," explains Ms. Hanigan, who is talking with such companies as McGraw-Hill Cos. and Goldman Sachs Group about the service. "They're tired of interviewing 10 students for every one they end up hiring."
At the Kelley School, Goldman Sachs already takes a targeted approach. Its recruiting team focuses on private wealth-management candidates, mailing personalized invitations to select students for an intimate, upscale dinner. "Successful recruiters understand and are responding to the preferences of this new keep-it-brief, high-tech group of students who expect more personal attention," says Dick McCracken, Kelley's director of graduate career services.
Working closely with career-services staffers, P&G recruiters treated their task at Indiana much like a brand-management project. They used the slogan, "P&G marketing: career rocket fuel," in every student communication. They reinforced their message through "influencer marketing" -- calling on Kelley School professors and administrators to urge students to consider a P&G career.
The recruiting team attempted to portray P&G as a creative, cutting-edge marketer. Recruiters dispelled any perceptions of stodginess by keeping things light. In a brochure for students, one recruiter listed meeting Barney the purple dinosaur on a Luvs diaper assignment as one of the two highlights of his P&G career. An email attachment P&G sent to students was labeled "shamelessplug.doc."
As P&G does with product advertising, the big manufacturer had to deliver recruiting messages when targets were the most receptive, Mr. Mautz says.That meant times like Christmas vacation when M.B.A.s lacked academic pressures but were starting to think about the height of intern-recruiting season in January. "We communicated between test periods," Mr. Mautz adds, "and were careful not to dump a lot of junk emails on them." He borrowed heavily from the strategies he used as brand manager for the launch of the heartburn medicine Prilosec OTC.
Rebecca Godlove, an Indiana marketing major, especially liked P&G recruiters' sense of humor and helpful tips during her preparation for interviews with the company. "They were really interested in me as a person, not just as a recruit, and they gave me a very good understanding of what life would be like as a brand manager," recalls Ms. Godlove. She finished her summer internship last Friday, working on P&G's Mr. Clean brand in Cincinnati. P&G's recruiting campaign "was such a different experience from the usual corporate receptions and presentations that all started to sound alike," she says.