Recruiting season at Instituto de Empresa

As I may have mentioned in previous blog posts, job recruiting as facilitated by Rotman basically involves companies visiting campus whenever and then you applying for jobs as they are posted on the Rotman careers website.

Here at IE it is interesting to note that the website IE uses for you to search and apply for jobs is the EXACT same one that Rotman uses. I guess good MBA schools share similar tastes in job tools.

Everything else though is a bit different. IE has 1 specific week where ALL companies that recruit at IE come to campus. Rather than each company having info sessions whenever, IE has a career fair: each company that recruits at IE has a booth on campus during 1 or several of the days of the week and you come to the booth and talk to the companies.

What I like about this approach:

-You don’t need to sit through tons and tons of info sessions where every company says “we’re the best ever! You can grow your career here like nowhere else! Everyone likes working here!” So you have more time to allocate to other things in your day :-)

-Although if you do like info sessions, some companies that recruit at IE do do them as well.

-The chances of you getting to talk to an employer one-on-one are much higher given you don’t have 100 people who just sat through an info session trying to speak to the same 3 people at the exact same time with this being the only time you will get a chance to speak to the recruiters (given they have a booth at the fair as well).

-Companies can weed out people with poor communication skills right away.

-You know you will have been exposed to all of the companies coming on campus by the end of career week so can plan accordingly (i.e. if a company you want to meet isn’t on the career fair guest list, you can plan appropriately to meet them separately).

What I don’t like about this approach:

-Talking to a recruiter in one company while the recruiters from every other company can see you is kind of awkward. Like say you weren’t as articulate or polished as you would have liked with company A. Company B’s recruiters can see this in plain sight. So when you go visit company B’s recruiters they may already be biased against you.

-The recruiters are at the career fair all day. If you meet the recruiters at the end of the day they might be totally wiped and uninterested in talking to people anymore, thus reducing your chances to connect well with them.

-If you can’t be at IE that week for whatever reason, you’re screwed (unless you take the initiative to find a way to meet the companies you are interested in a different way).

Anyways, after getting exposed to the corporate world from the North American point of view at Rotman, it was also pretty cool seeing things from the European side here at IE. It is interesting to note that apparently MBAs are in relatively high demand in Spain despite the employment crisis. Like, my IE classmates have been telling me they have had no problems getting interviews/job offers thus far. Interesting…Another reason why an MBA is valuable ;-)