Silver Lining?

Last week my company posted two new openings. By Monday we had received over 500 resumes for each position. This is unprecedented. Even during bad times that followed the dot-com-bust in the early part of this decade, our company didn’t receive more than a hundred resumes for any position, my manager quipped, as he proceeded to give me a stack to filter for potential hires.

We’re hiring an intern and a FTE. I had to look through the intern resumes that had already been prescreened by HR. In this pile, I am found a lot of MBA candidates from the Class of 2011. Some of them have impressive backgrounds and are from top-tier schools (in the top 10).

In all, I have over 71 such resumes that I counted this morning. This exercise was bitter sweet – I felt bad that these guys had to struggle so hard, and I felt good because I wasn't one of them and had the security of a well paying job.

While doing this, I recalled that two weeks ago I was at my friend’s engagement party and his father in law, an former Goldman executive, shared his outlook on the economy, and employment. His take was that the economy will not add jobs, the well paying jobs that MBAs want, until late 2011 to early 2012. Businessweek’s article “MBA Intern Hiring Is Slow to Recover” made his analysis more plausible as did accounts I’ve heard from some friends at Stanford, HBS, MIT and Duke.

I’ll share something that a friend from Stanford said this weekend on a phone call - “Everyone is getting an internship, but most people have to settle for something that they didn’t imagine doing when they started their MBA”, continuing further to share that he will be doing  a marketing internship at Du Pont in Tennessee. He wanted to break into healthcare finance. His PoV is echoed by a bunch of people who I have talked to in Cambridge at HBS and MIT.

Such a situation affects not only the top schools, but also the mid-tier schools and is in stark contrast to the the assessment that business schools had made only in February of this year. See BusinessWeek’s article titled “MBA Job Outlook Improving” published earlier this year.

So, while I realize that the information I may be sharing with you is anecdotal, and that there are huge differences between internship and fulltime hiring, I also see a silver lining.

Perhaps I’ll get in next year and graduate at a time when MBA hiring is strong. Perhaps, I won’t have to regret spending hundreds of thousands of dollars without a commensurate return on my investment. Perhaps not getting into b-school this year was a blessing in disguise. Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps… =P

1 comments:

V said...

hmmm..i liked that song! used to play in a comedy series called 'couplings'

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