Leadership Spotlight

The 2006 MBA career placements indicate a job market that has returned to pre-millennial strength. But MBA Career Management's new director, Michelle Antonio, W'91, is intent on putting systems in place that work for good markets—and bad.

This year 94% of reporting 2006 graduates who sought job offers received them. 92% accepted them, for a median compensation package of $137,000. Nearly a fifth of graduates (19.2%) accepted non-U.S. positions, as median compensation for international

jobs ($143,000) was buoyed by more competitive salaries in Asia. Those excellent numbers are about the same as 2005, but they are a far cry from the 80% job acceptance rate of the difficult 2003 market, when Antonio joined Wharton MBA Career Management (MBACM) as a senior associate director.

Antonio, an undergraduate alumna of the school, has now experienced both kinds of labor markets, both as a career consultant and as a job seeker. She graduated from Wharton amid the hiring slump of 1991, and later benefited from an employment boom when she earned her MBA from the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business in 1997. Prior to rejoining Wharton, Antonio served as an MBA recruiting director at Deloitte Consulting, a consultant at Bain &

Company, and an account executive at Information Resources Inc.

"The biggest priority we're working on this year is to make the recruiting process more efficient for both students and employers," she says. "With the economy back on the uptick, the hiring marketplace has become very competitive again. Employers are all jockeying to attract the best and the brightest, and last year that led to a proliferation of events where every employer tried to outdo their competitors."

While that sounds like an advantage to job-seekers, in practice a heavy recruiting schedule can take over student calendars, leaving too little time for the academics and extracurriculars that drew them to Wharton.

Antonio's goal is to decrease the burden of recruiting on students and employers, while maintaining mutual access. To help, MBACM pushed back the start date of club recruiting events until Q2 of this year and introduced a new bidding system so students are able to bid for interview slots.

The changes are part of a long-term plan to create a flexible system. "We don't want to beg companies to come when the economy is bad and turn them away when it's good," Antonio explains. "We want a model that is sustainable and works in many situations— to maintain strong relationships with the employers at all times and focus on quality of contacts and interviews, as opposed to quantity."

As in many good employment years, MBA students turned to traditional employers—consulting (28.7% of jobs accepted) and financial services (44.2%, including 26.0% to investment banking and increasing interest in private equity/VC/buyouts and hedge funds). The technology (5.2%), health care (4.9%), and consumer products/retail (4.9%) sectors were strong, and there was continued growth in the numbers of students pursuing careers in media and entertainment (3.5%) and real estate (4.6%).