They keep me coming back whether or not I'm hiring. And schools are hiring more directors from the business world rather than people who have spent their careers in academia. The Stern School of Business at New York University, for example, last year chose Gary Fraser, a senior brand manager at Nabisco and Stern alumnus, to run its career-development office. The reality is we're marketing our students and have to be the facilitators, the schmoozers with the buyers. I view each graduate placed as one more piece of our inventory successfully marketed at the highest price possible.
Recruiters acknowledge that the job of career-services director is stressful and often thankless.
Burnout is common, with a resulting high turnover rate. Recruiters who responded to the survey, however, believe career-services offices should be scrutinized even more, and they didn't hold back in their complaints. Stanford seemed to draw the most criticism from recruiters. Kaushik Roy, for instance, says he flew all the way from his technology company's headquarters in Massachusetts to California to make a presentation at Stanford. Not a single student showed up.