As part of its ongoing Tech@Tuck Web 2.0 Speaker Series, Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business earlier this month hosted a conference examining the changing landscape of career management. The event helped uncover the ways in which Web 2.0 is reshaping not only how business school graduates build and shape their careers but also how companies recruit employees and build their workforces.
“Web 2.0 and Career Management,” which took place on April 10th, was organized by the Tuck Center for Digital Strategies and the Thayer School of Engineering. Keynote speaker Surya Yalamanchili, director of marketing for social-networking community LinkedIn, helped galvanize the day’s discussion, explaining the ways in which social-networking sites help bridge the gap between members of the millenial generation and the older generations that are competing to recruit them.
Yalamanchili’s address was followed by a student competition entitled “The Future of Recruiting,” in which teams of Tuck and Thayer students were called on to help solve some of the greatest recruiting challenges facing companies today.
In advance of the competition, Tuck’s career services department surveyed recruiters at a range of Fortune 1000 companies, including Wachovia, Amazon, PetSmart, Harrah’s, Fidelity and General Mills, to name a few. According to recruiters, the hardest parts of their jobs involve competing for a limited pool of talent, tracking candidates, recruiting in parts of the world where their companies aren’t well known and simplifying the job search process.
Once the competition got underway, student teams set out to help companies address these challenges using Web 2.0 technologies. Competing for $2,000 in prize money (provided by competition sponsor IBM), student teams came up with creative ways for companies to embrace social networking, blogs, wikis, avatars and RSS feeds to revolutionize their hiring practices. They presented their solutions in a series of three- to five-minute web-ready podcasts to a panel of judges made up of executives in the space.
Wachovia and PetSmart each listed competing for a limited pool of talent and getting students interested in their companies as among their greatest challenges. PetSmart, in particular, hoped to find ways to increase the acceptance rate among business school students to whom they extend job offers.
One student team suggested a two-pronged solution for PetSmart. The first part of the strategy involved creating a website that would give prospective applicants more of an inside look at the company through posted bios and interactivity with current employees about company culture, what they like about their jobs, etc.
The second component would be to create a web board similar to one that is now used by students who are admitted to Tuck. Basically, all admitted students go onto the web board, where they get to know one another and begin to create a bond with the school – which can help be the deciding factor as they choose among several MBA programs.
The same concept could be used for job offers, the student team proposed. Because companies haven’t yet employed this kind of tool, students receive job offers in a vacuum. They don’t get to connect with others who will be joining the company from other MBA programs. Establishing such a web forum could be just the connection that would convince prospective hires that they would be joining an exciting team and organization.
“With Web 2.0 you could build that community so that the applicants themselves could convince one another to accept,” says Teran Martin, a first-year Tuck student on the team.
Martin was paired with a Thayer engineering student for the competition, which he says was one of the most rewarding aspects of the experience. “For me it is great when you can work with other MBA students, but it’s really unusual when you can actually go outside of your school,” he said. In the course of this competition, engineering students helped business students bring concepts into reality, he said, building actual applications from the business solutions the teams developed.
Another company, Eaton, a leading manufacturer of electrical and powertrain systems, indicated that its greatest recruiting challenge is screening candidates for ethics. Rather than simply asking how students handle ethical decision-making in the course of job interviews, one student team proposed that Eaton use Second Life, an internet-based virtual world, to present interview candidates with an actual ethical situation. Through this Web 2.0 technology, the company will get to see how the candidate would react, rather than just asking about it.
“Until now, Eaton has worked on the assumption that the best indicator of how you’ll perform in the future is how you performed in the past,” said Rebecca Joffrey, Tuck associate director of career services and an organizer of the event. “This student team called for a paradigm shift, pointing out that observable behavior is also a very good way to judge candidates’ ethics,” she said.
Joffrey, too, cited the pairing of engineering and business school students as one of the competition’s greatest strengths. “This is the first time that I know of that we’ve done a joint collaboration between Tuck and Thayer, and the pairing of students from both schools was really powerful in terms of the project outcome,” she said. “Both sides bring completely different skills,” she says.
The other aspect of the competition that really set it apart from other events was the active dialog created between the judges, the students and the professors, Joffrey said. “In a sense it was a very Web 2.0 way of exploring an issue because it was completely collaborative on every level,” she said. “Students would present, judges would ask questions – it was really a back and forth.”
And the dialog will continue. “This project has a longer life that just here at Tuck,” Joffrey said. Companies named their problems, students gave their solutions, and in June she will attend a recruiter conference where she will report back to the companies. “It’s really the continuation of the dialog in a more Web 2.0 way,” she said.
For a listing of future Tech@Tuck Web 2.0 Speaker Series events, click here.
