Corporate world changes its recruiting strategy

For many years, Ford Motor Co. has drawn new employees from more than 400 of the nation's best colleges in an annual rite of spring that is as ambitious a recruiting effort as anything corporate America has ever produced.

And very soon, that broad-based approach will be as obsolete as the Edsel.

By early in the next century, Ford will consider graduates from perhaps only 80 to 100 colleges and universities as the company changes its recruiting strategy, trading breadth for depth. Ford officials say that recruiting at fewer institutions promises new efficiencies. And the narrower focus will be further sharpened by new curriculum standards the company is now developing. Most colleges and universities now on the hiring list will just not be able to keep up, Ford officials say. Ford is not alone. Driven by cost-cutting pressures and by the effects of downsizing, which has altered the set of employee skills that companies say they need, corporate America is rethinking how and why it comes to campus, and what it wants when it gets there. The cost controls and job cuts in the 1990s pushed many companies to shrink their training and recruiting departments. But the smaller workplace now had its own new demands: recruits had to arrive ready to start work, and to be able to work in new ways, because the middle managers who once would have trained them were mostly gone. Those forces, in turn, are beginning to influence higher education, which has responded by adding internships, cultivating closer relationships with corporations and seeking advice on curriculum. "These corporations are ever more competitive," said Peter Likins, the president of Lehigh University, "and they're saying, `We can't afford to hire someone and then take two years training them how to function -- you have to do it.'" Witness, for example, the evolution of the corporate internship. Internships -- paid or unpaid work-study experiences, often over a summer -- have been around for generations, especially as a vehicle for engineers and business majors to get hands-on experience. But the numbers have exploded in the 1990's. This year, an estimated 40,000 student internships were available nationwide, a 30 percent increase in just three years, according to Peterson's, an education research and publishing company in Princeton, N.J. Once optional enrichment experiences, internships have begun to merge with corporate recruiting. "With pervasive downsizing, companies feel they need to do more with less, and internships are a low-cost way to preview candidates before they hire them," said Mark Oldman, who started compiling internship lists while a student at Stamford and now makes a living as co-author of two annual guides, America's Top Internships and The Internship Bible, both published by Random House. The surge in internships has created new opportunities for people like Jim Morabito. Morabito, a 22-year-old accounting major at Ohio State University, had worked for four different companies before he even started his senior year this fall. He knows more about the workplace -- and what kind of career he wants -- than his parents' generation did until years after college. At Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., internships have been broadened to include the liberal arts -- and have become, beginning with this year's freshman class, guaranteed in writing. At Lehigh, in-class projects in the engineering department now mimic the cross-discipline teams of the 1990s workplace: marketing and art and architecture students work side by side with engineers. At the University of Minnesota, undergraduates in business connect with a corporate mentor as early as their freshman year. "The 600-year-old model of the university as an island is no longer applicable," said Ronald H. Smith, a Ford executive who has worked with five universities to develop a specific Ford curriculum for the next century. "What we're trying to say is, `Look, you're a major supplier to us and we have needs that have to be met, and here are some joint things that can make it better for both of us.'" Many colleges try to accommodate, fearing that their prestige, if not their survival, is at stake. Keenly aware of the consumer mentality about higher education, colleges want to be able to assure parents that for their $100,000 investment, John or Jane will get not only an education but also a job. But the tighter bonds between companies and colleges are also inspiring fear among many educators about the advance of a winner- take-all culture, where the best companies recruit only from a handful of the best schools, which consequently attract only the best students. "I think there are going to be winners and losers, unfortunately," said E. Gordon Gee, the president of Ohio State, one of the nation's largest public systems, and a partner school with Ford. "But I'll be very crass: I want to make certain in this world that we are on the `yes' list." How corporations and colleges connect has long been a mirror to America's economic life. From the late 1800s through World War II, recruiting was an extension of the old-boy network: if the boss was a Yale Man, then Yale men had the right stuff. The system broadened after World War II, with the college enrollment boom of veterans on the G.I. Bill and an explosion of corporate jobs. Now the recruiting pool is shrinking again, but the effort has become more intense, with companies connecting earlier with students, sometimes years before graduation. At Arizona State University, American Express is paying computer science students to work on a programming project, trying to develop ways to translate data in mainframe computers into smaller, connected computer work stations. The company gets to look over prospective talent long before graduation and perhaps gets a computer problem solved as well. Research has become one with recruiting. At Lehigh, engineering students in Professor John B. Ochs's class are working this semester for Johnson & Johnson, the pharmaceutical giant, trying to design a new hypodermic injection system. "They get to see what kind of work we do, how we interact as a group," said Caryn Aulenbach, a 21-year-old mechanical engineering student who is considering an internship offer from Johnson & Johnson. At the International Business Machines Corp., which is hiring 1,800 new graduates this year, the most since the late 1980s, recruiting is no longer the sole province of the personnel department. The company recently asked several hundred managers across the country to take on new responsibilities as "campus relationship managers." The idea is to cultivate a bond with one school -- often the worker's alma mater -- to deepen recruiting relationships outside traditional channels. The job must be done on the manager's own time in addition to other IBM responsibilities, though the company pays expenses for things like telephone calls and campus visits. At Cornell University, each faculty member in the business school is designated a personal liaison to one company, a kind of conduit to the corporation. College officials say that given these relationships, one of the great campus debates of the coming decade will be over who is making the decisions. "You do not want to give the opinion that a CEO yanks the chain of a college president and the curriculum changes," said David Ward, the chancellor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The key word for both sides, he said, is compromise. "Once you get faculty in a room with the staff of a private-sector company, they can often come to an agreement among professionals," he said. Yet Ward said he sometimes had to draw the line. As companies have been given entree into discussions of curriculum, some push too far and too hard. Still, some educators and corporations say that all these fears are exaggerated. Likins at Lehigh said he had found evidence of a deep affirmation of the role of traditional liberal education in the new corporate demand. In the old-style corporation, he said, a new employee straight out of college could work years in minor jobs with limited authority, and was schooled and groomed along the way in preparation for management. Graduates could be narrow technical specialists; there was time to grow on the job. Now, new employees are sometimes thrust quickly into decision- making that demands complex moral and business choices, he said. "They need more ethical training because now they're in decision- making positions immediately, not after 20 years," Likins said. "We're getting corporate executives talking to us about ethics. Do you know how wonderful that is?" Many aspects of the new recruiting world had an accidental birth. "A lot of organizations, when they were laying off folks, realized they had laid off too many, and everybody was doing three jobs," said Trudy Steinfeld, director of the New York University office of career services. "They started calling and saying, `Do you have some students?'" What began more or less as temporary work -- filling a niche in a downsized corporation -- became a new link between the school and the corporate world. New opportunities, however, have also meant new fears as internships have evolved from an academic add-on to a crucial job connection. "I really don't know anyone who hasn't had an internship," said Anne Ho, a 21-year-old finance and management major at New York University. "You would be in trouble." Many students say, however, that earlier connections with employers are in fact a reassuring touch. Morabito at Ohio State said he had shopped for internships for their variety -- one term in Chicago at Price Waterhouse, another term in Mansfield, Ohio, at Sprint, for small-town life. And now he has accepted a job with Andersen Consulting, which means he is now enjoying his last year of college with a sense of exploration -- a departure from the old pressure cooker of senior year that his parents' generation knew. "I can sit back and ask the questions I want to ask," he said."I don't have that pressure to be perfect."

Copyright 1996
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