The side with the simplest uniforms wins.
The academic landscape at INSEAD feels like it is becoming increasingly fragmented by the week. It no longer feels like a school per se, but rather resembles an odd combination of social club, military staging base, summer camp, rehab center and community college. People drift in and out, courses are completely out of sync, and despite the obvious pressure on those of us who’ve not sorted out their professional situation to work something out, I sense that the nervousness and strain of months gone by have just leeched most of us to the degree that we can no longer muster the energy to be really stressed out.
A good friend recently poured out her heart to me, recounting misery upon insecurity upon frustration from the whole experience. It hammered home to me how hindsight really seems to prettify peoples’ views of past negative experience; I look back on the months gone by and have to force myself to recall the bleakness I found myself going through regularly. As she vented, I found myself thinking “yup, yup, been there, know it, yup, welcome to my tree house” and trying to figure out a way to make her understand that, hey, I know _exactly_ how you’re feeling. No, really. I do. Without sounding trite and contrived. Good luck with that.
While a colleague and I estimated today that maybe 50 percent of our class doesn’t have concrete job offers in hand just yet, I’m stunned by how many people (not a large percentage overall, but still) have not started networking yet. I’ll freely admit that it’s been a very rocky, difficult road for me, and not a process I’d recommend for the faint-hearted. If I’d known the type of challenge I was going to face looking for work outside of “channels”, I might have just stuck to the easily-grasped, quantifiable and structured consulting type of interview. Not that any consulting firm would have a clue what to do with me, and vice versa. So, at the risk of sounding vaguely pompous and presumptuous, since I don’t actually have anything myself yet, I’ll offer a few tips to make life easier:
- Start early. Way early. Like the month you get here.
- Make a spreadsheet. I made one sheet per industry, with company names, profile & products, locations, types of jobs, web sites, “official” HR contacts, notes, alumni, email addresses, dates, whom I contacted, to-dos and any other information. I’ve stopped updating it since I narrowed down my focus enough to not need it any more, but it helped tremendously.
- Use any resources you can. I used the alumni database, linkedin, openbc/xing, friends, colleagues, family, former clients and a number of other paths. It’s interesting how a lot of professionals who tag their linkedin profile with “open to contacts” have never actually received a networking request. One of my more promising job prospects came via linkedin.
- Never ask for a job, never send your CV right away, just send short, polite emails introducing yourself and asking for some time to ask questions about the industry. The gentleman I first contacted (not an alumnus) for the aforementioned job on linkedin based on his online profile, forwarded my profile to someone at the company who’d just bought his employer, who ended up interviewing me for a completely different job than what they first invited me to discuss.
- Your first contact probably won’t have a job for you. He may pass you on to a friend, who knows a former colleague, who works in a team whose client needs someone.
- Make friends with career services. Yes, they could do better. Everyone could. Face the fact that you’re most likely over the average MBA age, and that unless you’re going for very structured recruiting (like consulting) you will likely not be all that interested in management traineeship positions or internships. This means that you’ll have to network, a lot. They can help you meet people, identify contacts, or work on your presentation, but not unless you build up a rapport.
- Building on the former point, I’m sure many great positions are advertised via the on-campus recruiting process or on company websites. However, I take a fairly jaundiced view of this; I look at it like apartment ads in the papers. I subscribe to the theory that most good apartments are rented quickly to dynamic, innovative, ruthless people who take the initiative; what goes in the papers is often what’s left. Maybe I’m just cynical that way.
- Have 8 different CV versions.
- Go to all the panels and alumni presentations. Host as many companies and events as you can. Make contact before the events start. This is your chance to have someone’s undivided attention for a while, and chances are greater that they’ll remember you afterwards.
- Talk to faculty. Sometimes they know people.
- Try to do projects with companies. My media companies elective professor is some sort of grand high muckity-muck at a major consulting company and knows, I think, every senior media executive in the entire world. Through her I was able to set up an interesting project with a mobile handset manufacturer. Others help professors write cases. Whatever. It’s brownie points.
- Make contact with executives on campus. They don’t bite. We hosted advanced management program participants for dinner twice during the year; everyone had a great time and got some nice contacts out of it.
- Go for companies that may be a bit off the radar — this gets said again and again, but several of aforementioned managers mentioned that they didn’t know where to find good people for management jobs. *Waves hands around wildly
- Give help and contacts to colleagues as much as you can. Sometimes it bites you in the ass, but even if nothing comes out of it, you obtain some perspective on what you have going for you.
Then again, who the hell am I to give out advice.
I recently made a number of job-related trips to Paris, including a media trek to a publishing house and a TV station, and for an interview at a travel booking infrastructure solutions firm. The latter job, organized through a linkedin contact who passed me on, would be a killer, although it had little to do with the position I was initially invited to interview for. It looks like I did exactly the right thing, taking some initiative and suggesting to my interviewer (who’d not heard of INSEAD, oops) that an hour-long chat plus CV were not great means for getting to know a candidate for a managerial strategy position, and that it might benefit both of us to let me put together a case presentation on a topic of their choice. Nice move — they loved the idea, although writing presentations in French on a topic you’re not too confident in while suffering from a miserable cold and trying to work on fifty other deliverables is not necessarily my understanding of “fun.”
Summer ball was last week; a magnificent array of pomp and extravagance, at the Fontainebleau chateau. A huge transparent tent in the center courtyard, light show out front, lounge music upstairs and a hall with live band and dancers made for some great entertainment; the magnificent firework over one of the small lakes behind the castle gave it a ridiculously decadent spin. That, and I finally had the opportunity to put my ninja-like bow-tie-tying skills to use for the benefit of all humanity. Apparently, despite the (for us) astronomical entrance price, the whole affair ended up substantially in the red; maybe the hundreds of alumni swarming around town for their five- and ten-year reunions ought to have ponied up a bit more. They certainly did a bang-up job draining the bar.
The Great Gatsbys
On a fun note, we seem to have chosen well to leave around 3:30. The breakfast-for-survivors must have run out insanely quickly; rumor has it that one of my colleagues kicked an alumn in the family jewels for attempting to steal his scrambled eggs. That’ll show him. At our 2 p.m. lunch the following day we still saw bleary-eyed stragglers running around town in tuxedoes, reeking of jet fuel. Stay away from open flames, please.
I decided to not join the grad trip, for its price (which, although decent value for money, is fundamentally incompatible with the fact that my poor aged laptop just blew up — shortly before a backup, and, naturally, right after I’d scanned in 2 periods worth of papers and thrown away the originals) and for the time. I really need to spend some time with my family and friends, organize the move to Paris, and generally wind down. It’s unfortunate that I’ll miss the Le Vivier sailing trip after graduation (July 3) as well, but spending time with my folks, especially given that my grandfather might make it over, takes precedence. Next time. I’ll just throw myself into the social scene with wild unfettered abandon for the rest of my indenture here.
The weather’s turned miserable again, leaving us enjoying any rays of sunshine on INSEAD’s lawn. The nice people who organized Latin Week didn’t let the clouds get in the way of having a mariachi band (I bet the Cadbury-Schweppes CEO lecturing in Amphi B wondered what the hell was going on.) I can now tell graduates of competing business schools with authority that my business school has more mariachis than your business school.
M. Dupeu’s geese have decided that my car is the antichrist, and a duck laid her eggs right by the main entrance of the Le Vivier medium house; smoker’s corner at parties and general high-traffic area. I built her a house so she wouldn’t fly away all the time. I’ll miss the animals here when I move out. Not the rooster, though.
I think I’ll try for graduation speaker. My poor performance grinding out yearbook profiles for colleagues (again, while filthily sick) didn’t make me feel that my writing skills are up to par, maybe I can use the practice. Let’s see what happens.