Career services' new policies push back job offer deadlines

With hundreds of companies slated to visit campus in the coming months to begin their annual recruiting efforts, seniors can be found hurrying between meet-and-greets with consulting firms, investment banks and other companies.

Armed with freshly printed resumes and practiced smiles, these students are putting their hopes in the hands of recruiters who often give them nothing more than a business card and a handshake.

Some, however, do not need to attend these meetings. Those lucky few can sit back and consider offers from their employers from last summer. Ling Hu '01 is a member of this group, already having received a job offer from Goldman Sachs. She says Goldman has not put undue pressure on her to accept its offer too quickly.

"Giving kids more time to figure out what they want to do after graduating is wise because it's only the beginning of the school year," Hu said. "By not imposing an early deadline it's beneficial for both the student as well as the company because students have a chance to explore other options and companies end up with people who want to work for them."

But this employment philosophy is not always the norm. During the past few years, schools like Harvard, Yale and Princeton have imposed recruiting regulations on companies that work with their respective career services offices to give students more time to consider job offers. If the companies do not comply, they can face a university's censure.

According to Princeton's Office of Career Services, companies must give their summer interns until Dec. 1 to accept an offer for full-time employment after graduation. If students get any offers through fall recruiting, however, they do not need to make a final decision until Feb. 1.

Career services director Beverly Hamilton-Chandler said if a firm is unwilling to give more time for an offer set to expire or "explode" before the University's deadline, that firm will be prohibited from doing any recruiting on campus for one year.

"We try to do everything we can to avoid suspending," she said. "It's not in anybody's interests to do this."

Hamilton-Chandler said since the deadline rules at Princeton are relatively new, companies sometimes inadvertently make offers that expire before the deadline. Still, there have been no instances since the policies were enacted in which a company has been unwilling to reconsider their early deadlines, she said.

"It's an issue of firms not being fully aware of the policy," she added.

Merrill Lynch changed its deadline for summer interns this week after learning of the University's new policies, according to Hamilton-Chandler.

Kelly Smith, head of college recruiting for the investment banking division of Merrill Lynch, said her company originally made offers with Oct. 1 deadlines to some summer interns.

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But after learning of the University's policy, Merrill Lynch officials changed the deadlines to Dec. 1 and e-mailed all the students to inform them of the change.

Rob Holmes '01 — who worked at Merrill Lynch as a summer analyst — said he was concerned at first when he was told about his original October deadline and called the career services office for advice.

He said the new University-enforced deadline makes sense for both parties because "students wanted more time and firms didn't want to lose their kids."

Barbara Hewitt, associate director of the career services center at the University of Pennsylvania, said exploding offers "have been a very big issue" at her school.

She said it is difficult to enforce offer deadline rules because Penn career services officials prefer not to ban a large company from recruiting on campus.

Harvard University's recruiting office already has barred two companies from campus recruiting during the past two years because those companies were unwilling to follow Harvard's recruiting guidelines, said assistant recruiting director Paul Boisselle.

Nevertheless, he said most companies are willing to comply with a school's recruiting regulations. "It's a matter of informing the recruiters of our policies," Boisselle said.

Many firms try to give students more time to decide than is mandated by the universities. Morgan Stanley Dean Witter's vice president for firm-wide recruiting Eileen Grabowski said, "If a student feels they are unable to meet that deadline, it's our hope that the student would talk to us so we can work through the issues together."