Best Practice: An Unusual Career Innovation Helps Questrom Students Land The Jobs They Want

If business schools have a secret sauce that makes them so popular, it’s the career outcomes they deliver for students. Unlike almost any other school or department on a university campus, business schools realize that their job isn’t done when a degree is given to a student at a graduation ceremony. It’s done when that graduate lands a job.

Questrom School of Business Dean Susan Fournier at Boston University gets it. She has doubled down on the school’s career services function, heavily investing in one-on-one coaching and bringing together industry relations, career services, and alumni initiatives.  In that effort, Questrom has created an innovative way to equip students with the best possible prep for a job interview as well as a headstart in a new job.

Questrom has recruited a group of former corporate executives who counsel the school’s students on a chosen industry and specific job, helped with networking connections, and prepared students for industry-specific interview preparation and mock interviews.

$50-AN-HOUR EXECUTIVE CAREER CONSULTANTS

Many business schools today have hired career coaches and so has Questrom. But what makes its Exec Connect program different is that its career consultants are in addition to its career coaches. They are not volunteers but rather paid part-time staffers who have been applied, interviewed, and have been hired into their $50-an-hour positions.

The innovation comes out of a major review to examine career staffing at the school and how it could be dramatically improved. “We have a dean who is very focused on career outcomes,” says Monica Parker-James, whose recruitment and position came out of the review. Parker-James is the associate dean for industry relations, career services, and alumni initiatives.

“The dean asked us, ‘What do we need to do to stand out in the space?’ Other schools might have alumni come in to speak to a class or host a trek at their company,” notes Parker-James. “We wanted something focused on greater impact. What we see with volunteer gigs is there is no way to keep people engaged. Someone changes a job and it’s transactional. You come to speak in a class and you don’t see them for another year.”

‘HOW CAN WE HAVE A LASTING IMPACT?’ ASKED DEAN SUSAN FOURNIER

Dean Fournier asked, “‘How can we have a lasting impact?'”

“We have to make executives staff and hire them,” replied Parker-James.

Initially, Fournier wondered why a former partner from KPMG, for example, would want to work with students at a business school.

Parker-James had a ready answer. “They have a genuine interest in giving back,” she said. “They want to share their expertise, and they want to see the results of what they are doing. They want to know that they are changing lives. There was some skepticism that we would get C-suite folks to apply for ten-hour-a-week jobs and pay them the equivalent of lunch money to do it. But we were flooded with applications after reaching out to folks who wanted to get involved and then it was word of mouth.”

PAYING FORMER EXECUTIVES TO COUNSEL STUDENTS WAS KEY

Paying the executives for their guidance was, Parker-James believes, crucial to the success of the idea. “They feel like they are part of Questrom in a way that they would not if they were not paid staff people,” she says. “They are on all the team threads. When we have group emails, they get them. When we have a student dinner and we would like members of the careers center to come, that goes on team chat and they are in it.  They really care.”

Questrom’s professional career coaches do the basics with students, helping them come up with elevator pitches, clear and concise resumes, and general session prep that would include mock interviews. Then the executive career consultants leverage their specific industry know-how to give students a leg up. “A career coach doesn’t necessarily know what it means to apply to a tech company for a product manager job,” reasons Parker-James. “So the executives work with students to translate their skills and competencies into a specific function in a target industry.”

The pilot program has gotten the thumbs up from students using the service. “I was able to put my best foot forward with insights from someone who has been in the industry for many years,” says Yaa Agyemang-Otu, an MBA student from Ghana who spent time with her career consultant before an interview for an internship  “A 30-minute meeting expanded to two hours. He was that invested in helping me be ready. It really made me confident in going into that interview.” She landed the internship.

‘THE MISSING PUZZLE PIECE: EXECUTIVE CONSULTANTS’

Richard Waldman, one of a half dozen career consultants, agrees. He brings to his conversations with students more than 40 years of experience in corporate banking. “When I was of the age of these students, something like this did not exist,” he says. “There were no mentoring programs. There was no professional in your field who you could contact. There was nothing. My attitude today is if I can make these lives better with my 40 years of experience why not try to make their lives better.”

He recently consulted with a female MBA student from outside the U.S. who was interviewing for internships in the financial sector but had a computer science background. “I spent time going through the component parts of the specs for the job at a well-known financial services company,” recalls Waldman. “We covered derivatives, fixed income, foreign exchange, equities, and trading. Then I went a step further and went on the firm’s website to figure out which parts of the firm had these five areas in them. I intended to show the student where these functions are housed and what the people who work in these areas do.”

Shortly after her interview, the MBA student was offered the job, even though she had no financial experience whatsoever on her resume. “The student value is absolutely there,” says Parker-James, “and it is the missing puzzle piece. The students can have all the competencies and all the skills but if they don’t understand what they are likely to come up against in a particular industry or the nuances of what offices hire for which roles, they aren’t going to make the connection. There is no way a professional career coach would know all of that.”

‘I ALWAYS TELL THE STUDENTS IT’S ALL ABOUT DIFFERENTIATION’

In any uncertain job market, getting that insider’s edge can make a difference. “It is a difficult job market today, both for undergrads and MBAs,” believes Waldman. “Over time, the job market is cyclical. It goes in ups and downs. And in certain industries, some challenges lead to more or less employment. I always tell the students that it is all about differentiation. You need to figure out how to differentiate yourself from all the other people who want that job. To me the more you can quantify for a potential employer, the better off you are, and then I will tie it specifically to what the employer is looking for.”

One of the issues in putting the system in place is the coordination between the professional career coaches and the executive consultants. “It was a challenge to get the back and forth between the consultants and the coaches right, and for students not to have the perception that they graduated to the consultants after working with a career coach,” notes Parker-James. “You have different support for different things and you need to make sure you use the right resources for what you need. It’s not a handoff. There is a huge system of support and you need all of it.”

After the sessions with the student interviewing for a finance job, Waldman inputs his conversation into a software platform at Questrom. “This way the next person she speaks with can see the path of what has been discussed,” he says. “I try to go above and beyond that and I will separately write in a Microsoft Teams chat a message to a specific MBA career coach who has worked with this student. I let the coach know what we talked about in detail. By doing that I am hopefully enhancing the knowledge of the career coach who is not trained in finance. That should accelerate his or her ability to direct more students my way. We are tightening the bonds together.”

A TOTAL REVAMPING OF CAREER SERVICES AT QUESTROM

Parker-James meets with the consultants weekly for an hour on Zoom.  “We discuss what they are hearing and what can we be doing better. “It is a pilot and we are interacting to get the best possible outcomes. One consultant told me, ‘I love the one-on-one meetings with the students but I also would love an opportunity to get involved with the student clubs and meet with faculty.’ We found that student organizations are incredibly important to career outcomes through our early-career alumni surveys. Funding student organization activities was not super high on any priority list. Now it’s very high because we realize that we have these super dedicated, very engaged students who bring in alumni who were members of their clubs when they were there.”

The recruitment of executive consultants to counsel students, moreover, is not in isolation. It’s part of a major upheaval in career services for students. Questrom now has four MBA coaches plus a senior director of MBA coaching. The school also has five undergraduate coaches and an associate director. Questrom plans to expand its group of executive consultants from the current six to ten, each with specific domain experience in key industries such as finance, accounting, marketing, technology, and healthcare, among other fields.  All together, they bring more than 175 years of professional work experience to the game. Questrom also employs six industry relations managers, up from four, and hired an executive director so the school can hold more industry networking events.

The big investments in career services were preceded by a major reorganization. Parker-James, who was once executive director of industry alliances at Questrom, was recruited back to Questrom from Harvard Medical School, into the newly created associate dean role.  The school created a new business unit that brought together industry engagement, alumni initiatives, and career services. Before the reorganization, the career services staff had been aligned with academic advisors in separate undergraduate and graduate departments. Industry engagement–meant to cultivate relationships with corporate partners–was in a silo.

“Susan said, ‘That is not the model,'” adds Parker-James. “‘The model is to bring together everyone and increase cross-talk and cooperation. We need our own resources focused on creating community and supporting students. And we need to more deeply engage alumni.’ Now we have all the people thinking about how to set up our students for success, all in the same unit.”

“It has been a game-changer,” adds Parker-James. “When I came here two years ago, we had one full-time MBA coach and a contractor and no director. In 2023, we saw a 52% increase in one-on-one career coaching appointments over 2022. We had 300 recruiters from 125 companies on campus in the fall and engaged 86 new companies in one semester. Undergraduate engagement in recruiting and networking events is up 39% in the Fall of 2023 over the Fall of 2022. We are in a much better position to support students than when we had a skeleton crew. We have a dean who has invested heavily in the things we can control and students are benefitting from that investment.”

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