Elite for Hire - Company Business and Marketing

Industry Standard, The, Oct 16, 2000 by Meredith Alexander

Tuck Business School just opened a spanking-new site, TuckJobs.com, for its alumni. Erin Cochrane, director of career services at Tuck, says the aim is to incorporate interactive job-searching features and content about careers: "Ultimately, I'd like to be competitive with the best commercial sites." She doesn't intend to charge for the job postings, but sees the site as part of Tuck's mission to better serve its alumni and students rather than as a money-making venture. Nevertheless, she wants TuckJobs.com to be her alumni's Monster.com. "If our alumni use those [sites], often the jobs aren't of the caliber that our alums are seeking," she says. "I have those high-caliber postings."

So with all the new alumni-based services out there, will more top grads really use these methods to find new gigs? Some will, but no matter how savvy new Web-based recruiting services for elite prospects become, employers will have to face the reality that word of mouth is still a top form of job intelligence in this community. Companies determined to create a pedigreed staff from one or two alma maters may have to resort to more aggressive tactics -- such as hiring professors.

San Francisco's Intelligent Markets, an e-commerce infrastructure software company did just that. It recruited the CEO's brother, Dan Huttenlocher, a professor of computer science at Cornell. On leave from Cornell and now VP of software development at the company, he's brought on board six of his former students. The team interacts well together, he says. "They were educated in the same program, so I think they have a common vocabulary," Huttenlocher says.

Whether it's smart to hire several key employees from the same school is another matter; today it seems many Internet and e-commerce companies care less about diversity and more about getting a sure thing: an experienced and highly educated manager from a big-name school. The online recruiting sites are more than happy to deliver the goods -- if they can figure out how to make a buck.

Where Are the Alums?

A sampling of alumni job-related sites and services.

* Tuck School of Business: Tuckjobs.com, a site devoted to alumni placement, posts up to 100 jobs, updated weekly. (www.tuckjobs.com)

* Columbia Business School: Online postings on its Web site list more than 100 jobs, an online job posting form for employers, networking, career resources and special-interest listservs. (www.gsb.columbia.edu/alumni)

* Harvard Business School: Publishes Jobs, a biweekly print and online publication for job postings. The Alumni Advisory Network holds more than 25,000 names and is available online. (www.alumni.hbs.edu)

* Stanford Business School: Publishes a biweekly print and online newsletter, free for lifetime alumni association members. (http://stanford.edu)

University of Chicago Graduate School of Business: Offers job-posting services. (http://gsb.uchicago.edu)

* Kellogg Graduate School of Management: Biweekly job postings are now searchable online. (www.kellogg.nwu.edu/alumni/eservices.htm)