What’s the value of a number? Numbers help us keep count and score, and can tell us how rich (or poor) we are. Numbers can keep us honest with goals vs. accomplishment. Numbers can be used to predict the future. We keep a lot of numbers in the MBA program – GPA, KPIs, Finance homework, rankings, placement, and a myriad of other things. All these numbers can be valuable to help us know where we are relative to our goals. We could not operate very well without them. So, let’s show you some numbers!
November is over, and with that Thanksgiving, nice fall weather, and college regular season football is done, and we now turn to projects and finals in December. How fast Fall Semester went! Let me start first with a big shout-out to all who accepted a job or internship in November!
Congrats to our November accepts!
On to overall cumulative Placement:
FULL TIME: Making progress, but lagging benchmarks. We are 10% points behind last year’s record breaking pace. The economy and intern-to FT conversion (more later) is having an impact here. We need to keep working hard given the environment.
INTERNS: Great month, ahead of all benchmarks! Keep up the great work, using your KPI goal-setting process, and class learnings to accelerate placement.
Let’s look at FT Job Offer Flow:
Job offers are a bit down from last year November, but not too far off. The dynamic between job offers and placement is interesting. Either we as a group are holding a bit longer onto job offers, or we are turning down offers and still hunting. The “Offer Density” metric is up – 1.4 vs. 1.3 offers per student with offers, a good result. With this economy and how it’s shaping up, Winter semester could be tough, so before you reject offers, I’d encourage you all to pay Perry, Shawna, or myself a visit and we can help you think through this.
Let’s look at International Placement through November:
International Placement is mirroring overall MBA placement – FT’s are lagging benchmarks, and internships had a great month and are tracking to benchmarks. Keep up the hard work!
I’d like now to show Intern-to-FT Conversion through November:
Through November, the FT MBAs are converting at a rate of 64% of all acceptances, and for total placement from conversions, it’s at 24%. The 24% is down 5% pts from last year, which was a lower year. Historically, we convert approximately 40% of total placement. Last year was 35%, and my guess is we are trending to ~30% for all accepts. This I believe is one key driver for the placement for FTs lagging benchmarks. Talking to several of you, it appears that given the uncertainty in the economy, several companies withheld FT offers until uncertainty can be resolved. This is another indicator suggesting we have our work cut out for us for FT placement.
Let’s turn to Internship Offer Flow:
This is a great result – internship offers are ahead on all key metrics vs. last year, and ahead of most 2 years ago. It appears firms are fine with extending internship offers, but are dragging their feet on full time offers until they can get better resolution on the job outlook and economy. Congrats to the 1st years, let’s keep this effort up!
Lastly, let’s show cumulative KPIs for the 1st years:
The by-track breakout is interesting – lots of variances between the tracks. Marketing and Finance are putting in the most effort, and the results are coming. I’d encourage all tracks to pick up the pace here – with more effort, more results follow. It’s not a perfect correlation, but high.
Well, there are the numbers for November. What did you take from all this? Feel free to send me a note for any insights you’ve gleaned from this, I’d love to hear your perspective. Keep up the hard work, and as we roll into December and the Holidays and a very well-deserved break, try to do some recruiting activity and take advantage of the down time some.
Best,
Rick