Ivan Kerbel has led the Yale School of Management (SOM) Career Development Office (CDO) for the past two years, but his experience in the field dates back much further. Most recently, he served in MBA career management at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and before that he worked as a consultant at Katzenbach Partners, an organizational behavior and people performance strategy boutique started by Jon Katzenbach and fellow McKinsey colleagues.
Kerbel knows the MBA job search intimately from the student side, too, having gone through it himself as an MBA at Wharton. He is also a graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), as well as a proud Yale College alumnus. We appreciate his making time to explain in detail for our readers all that Yale SOM has to offer its students as part of the career development process.
In the interview that follows, you will learn why Kerbel sees the small size of SOM’s alumni community as an asset, the steps his team took to prevent the school’s placement rates from slipping even during the worst of the economic downturn and more. Enjoy!
Clear Admit: How do you view your role as director of the Career Development Office? Is it to administer workshops? Counsel students? Counsel companies? Manage the entire office and oversee its various functions? All of the above?
Ivan Kerbel: I view my role (and that of my team) as complementary to the function performed by our faculty; it entails a deliberate effort to augment the educational value-add of the academic program by offering a similarly high standard of professional development, skills-building and advisory/mentoring services. My goal is to help our students mature professionally, become well-informed and street-wise and transition smoothly from being scholars to being businesspeople once again across the spectrum of for-profit, non-profit and public service careers.
Of course, a large part of what makes this effort rewarding is the opportunity to interact with employers (both in the U.S. and abroad), to understand and guide their efforts to recruit Yale MBAs and, thus, to play a small part in shaping the future of their enterprises. I enjoy the process of gaining fresh insight into and helping realize the aspirations of our students, of responding to the real-world business needs of our recruiting partners and of collaborating with fellow CDO staff members to leverage the accrued wisdom derived from our collective professional experiences.
CA: Now, about your team. How many placement professionals do you have? Is this a relatively constant figure? If not, how has it changed in recent years? How might it change in the near future?
IK: The size of our team has held steady over the course of recent years at about 10 to 12 professionals. It is important to note that the senior associate directors (seven of them) who constitute our Relationship Management team have both an internal-facing function (advising Yale SOM students and alumni) and an external-facing function (sourcing new opportunities and expanding our employer relationships for a portfolio of industries… e.g., marketing/consumer products, media & entertainment and retail, fashion & luxury constitute one portfolio, managed by a single senior associate director).
The fact that each of my team members has both an advisory/mentoring function as well as a business development function is critical, I believe, because it allows us to bring real-time marketplace knowledge and relevant industry experience to the task of advising our students, while also allowing our direct contact with students and professional club leaders to inform and guide employers as they formulate their recruiting strategies for Yale SOM.
Creating this structure, and bringing onboard a team of professionals who have broad experience in career management, recruiting, talent/leadership development and/or who have themselves earned MBAs and come to Yale SOM from line leadership positions in the same industries they cover as CDO team members, has been a hallmark of our efforts during the past two years.
Last, we’ve recently hired a senior associate director to work across all industries specifically on the career search process and questions of international students, as well as to expand the number of international job opportunities for our entire student population. In conjunction with three capable events and recruiting coordinators and administrative support staff, each of our relationship managers also manages internal projects and initiatives… for example, overseeing our first-year student Career Advisory Board and second-year Career Coach programs.
CA: Can you provide prospective applicants with an overview of the recruitment process at Yale SOM? When does it start? How does it unfold?
IK: During the summer prior to the start of the school year, students receive a number of CDO communications and pre-MBA assignments (e.g., career self-assessment diagnostics) and undergo programs as part of our existing partnership with the Consortium for Graduate Study, if applicable. MBA Orientation and the first few weeks of school entail a CDO curriculum focused both on expanding students’ awareness of potential career paths as well as helping them begin to define their job search strategy. A sequential program of CDO Industry Primers and subsequent “CDO Fridays” introduces students to second-year student, alumni and employer perspectives and helps them build their research, networking and presentation skills.
In October, students attend employer networking nights and corporate presentations. During November and beyond, some travel to New York City for “Days on Wall Street” and attend a multitude of industry- and region-specific treks (in 2010-2011, student-led treks included visits to London and Hong Kong, to the West Coast and to Boston, Houston and Washington, D.C., among others, and focused on industries as diverse as consumer products, education, energy, finance, health care, international/economic development, technology and venture capital/private equity).
In December, students submit applications to campus-based job opportunities in investment banking and management consulting, as well as other “traditional” MBA employers. Internship interviews commence in early January and continue through the end of the spring semester; a sizable contingent of students pursues internships and fellowships for which the selection process occurs in April or even May.
CA: How has the economy impacted recruitment at Yale SOM? How have you and your staff remained flexible or adapted in order to help students navigate a more challenging job market? Have you encouraged flexibility on the part of students themselves?
IK: Yale SOM’s placement rates have held steady during the economic downturn (in 2009 and 2010, our full-time offer rate was 92 percent at “three months from graduation,” a benchmark number that earned Yale a BusinessWeek #1 and #10 ranking for that category (the top ten schools were within 5 percent points of one another in the most recent BW survey). One thing that I believe helps our students contend with and compete during tough economic times is Yale’s academic emphasis on integrating the disciplines and training students to think holistically about managerial problems, a skill that allows them to effectively border-cross and successfully transition across industries and functions in times of economic turmoil.
Our office, especially during 2009-2010, viewed every two- to four-week segment of the school year as an opportunity to respond to student government and employer feedback to reshape our curriculum, initiatives and resource investments; we held a Spring Career Rally in 2010 (a concentrated effort to see every member of the graduating class one-on-one during a focused time period), collaborated with the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and the Yale School of Public Health on an inaugural cross-industry career fair, retained the services of Weil & Wein to increase our mock interview bandwidth, inaugurated a series of lunchtime Quick Questions sessions and purchased additional resources and online services (e.g., most recently, InterviewStream).
Of course, the most important step we took was to increase the size of the Relationship Management team in 2009 from three professionals to the previously mentioned seven… a step that has allowed us to be more effective at job-sourcing and advising students while deepening our knowledge and ties with a wider set of organizations and boutiques in all sectors.
CA: How does your team counsel students regarding the interview? Is there a formal mock interview process? How are interview schedules administered? Is there an established policy regarding how closed and open interviews should be conducted? What facilities are available for interviews?
IK: Interview training at Yale SOM takes a number of forms: a formal presentation and workshop as part of the CDO curriculum, a behavioral mock interview program organized and funded by our office, additional sessions on professional networking and information/tools that help students excel at phone and online interviews. Professional clubs also play a large role in conducting technical mock interviews for specific industries, and CDO Relationship Managers also work with individual students over time on their presentation and pitch.
Our philosophy on MBA interviews is that their format should reflect as closely as possible real-world conditions and that the related knowledge and skills we impart to our students should be useful to them after graduation – not just in the somewhat artificial “tournament format” of the dedicated interview periods peculiar to business school. We do not encourage employers to hold “open” interview schedules (though they may do so, if they wish). We found that having students bid for guaranteed “open”/reserved slots on employers’ interview schedules led them to be good at auctioneering rather than to be good at all of the advance preparation, due diligence and networking required to be selected for an interview. In addition, past experience showed that instances in which open schedules actually helped employers identify and hire a “diamond in the rough” or in which students were able to utilize the format to “break into” an opportunity that might otherwise have been closed to them were simply too few and far between. As mentioned earlier, our goal as a career development office is to train Yale MBAs to take on challenges in the context of business school that are also mirrored in the real world and to ensure that, as alumni, they can tackle and overcome the many challenges we know they will face during the course of their careers.
CA: What kind of role do alumni play in Yale SOM’s recruiting process? How integral are they to your office’s success? Is alumni participation a major part of your placement platform?
IK: Yale SOM’s alumni network is small (at about 6,000 individuals), relative to larger business schools, and though one might assume this is a handicap, I think it helps our alumni to be engaged at a higher level. They are incredibly responsive both to individual students and to CDO outreach; many also participate in the Yale SOM Alumni Association Mentoring Program, and there is an enviable concentration of Yale SOM as well as Yale College alumni at most of the market-leading organizations where our students seek employment). In 2009 and 2010, Dean Sharon Oster called on SOM alumni to support the efforts of current students to secure internships and full-time opportunities; the new relationships we established with hundreds of alumni who responded to that call have carried forward, and there are instances in which, for organizations that do not have formal MBA recruiting processes or resources, our alumni have volunteered to offer referrals, answer students’ questions and even organize and conduct interviews.
In 2010, our office created and has since managed an official Yale SOM LinkedIn group. We view direct contact with alumni, whether as part of students’ broad career exploration or more specific job-search effort, as integral to their experience at Yale, and I believe that no Yale SOM student undergoes the two-year program without once relying on alumni for input. This is equally true for the “traditional,”, on-campus recruiting process as well as for the more independently-driven and/or off-campus job search.
CA: Do you have any advice for prospective applicants in terms of what they might do in advance of the MBA program to be better prepared for the job search process? In your experience, do you find that students who have done x, y or z before arriving on campus have a more successful experience with career services and the job search as a whole?
IK: Students who do well in the search process have made a concerted effort to define their “professional intent” before investing in a business education. Too many MBA candidates view the placement statistics for specific industries at each school and extrapolate their individual chance of garnering an offer in that field (or at a particular firm) from those figures. Our experience shows that this is not sufficient, and that our most successful students make an additional effort (beyond leveraging the education, market-making function and/or brand power of the school) to assess their prior experiences, genuine interests and abilities and to think strategically about areas of growth and opportunity for which they possess competitive skills and in which they will likely make a great contribution. Those who accept individual responsibility for the enormous investment of effort and care in the job search, and who recognize their own unique agency in achieving their career goals, tend to be the most competitively successful.
I would encourage students to think of the job search and their academic endeavors not as separate, competing elements of the MBA experience, but as integral to the process of “becoming an MBA.” We believe that all aspects of a student’s effort – learning in the classroom, extracurricular involvement, the job hunt, etc. – should inform and strengthen one another. Last, and perhaps most easily executable, I recommend anyone planning to embark on an MBA to first become a consumer of business news, to choose a set of publications or blogs and to start diligently reading corporate annual reports, Wall Street analyst reports, consulting firm white papers, articles in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, BusinessWeek, New York Times DealBook, etc. It helps tremendously, in the MBA context, to be able to speak cogently about marketplace trends and other important business news of the day.
