INSEAD Recruitment Saga - Part I

So, here it begins. Something many wanted. A run down of how recruitment has been so far..how it has been for me, my learnings (or what I did not learn), opinions (like anyone cares) about that important phase of business school - recruitment/placement season!

First, let me talk briefly about how it was for our previous year 2007. The INSEAD 2007 recruitment/placement career report is not out yet formally on the web, but we have some details. I will link the actual report when it comes out. But what I can tell you unofficially and without hard data is that there are some impressive and interesting results in that report (like, um, nearly half-million dollar salaries, or over 100 going to a ...uhh.. important company) - unfortunately the internal document bears "confidential - internal" which means I cannot go further than that. I really wish I could point a few interesting statistics...career services, can I? :)

So, some initial points from this year for this part I post.

1. Finance sucks. Really. And really bad. - Finance recruitment suffered significantly for obvious reasons. If you are one of them who might ask "why?" then you should probably go back to your cave! It has been very hard for people to break into banking this time as banks froze recruitment. Some may say "but it was better in US school XYZ" - keep in mind their recruitment/internship happened in 2007. It's been good for our previous promotion as well - it's just that we got hit really bad.
2. Consulting companies continued to recruit - again, until the dust settles, we won't know the final numbers. But we are seeing many people with offers as they trickle in.
3. Industry is recruiting too - quite a few companies were on campus, and industry typically is very slow to decide. Many have interviews and we hope to see more and more offers come by as time progresses. They are sl...oooow in making decisions.
4. Salaries offered have been pretty good as well, and from what I know, there hasn't been a cut in salary levels. We'll know for sure only when 2008 report comes out next year.
5. Even in a bad economic situation - the school brand does get interviews.
   
   

Overall, we face a challenging economic situation, and P4 was very stressful. But I think things have not been as bad as I feared - many people got bunch of interview calls, and at least an offer or two. But it has been hard, the stories of huge numbers of people with multiple offers hasn't happened for us and I doubt it will happen.

In the next post I write more about the recruitment process. You can read about the consulting recruitment process at INSEAD in my post here. You can read my post on relevance of GMAT score, here. The part II will be on some observations of process, interviews, offers. My own story will come in the end.

With that, I leave you with my animated cartoon on how the whole process feels...

(you have to click the image to see the animation of all the stages of recruitment!)