How One Premier European B-School’s Career Team Coaches Students To Get Hired

Spencer Hamilton knows the transformational power of an MBA. It helped move him from oil rigs in the North Sea to a London law firm, into a headhunter role for international NGOs.

As head of Global MBA Career Services & Corporate Relations at EDHEC Business School in Nice, France, he now helps students do what he once did: Pivot.

“Many MBAs want to make a change in their career. That’s really difficult to do if you rely on the kind of traditional method of clicking ads on LinkedIn, MBA Exchange, or any of the other job sites,” says Hamilton. “Machines are looking for people who fit perfectly into what the job requires, and job changers don’t often fit so perfectly.”

At EDHEC’s Global MBA, the career search begins as soon as students arrive on campus, continues throughout the entire 10-month program, and extends for a year after they graduate. The goal is getting MBAs in front of as many different companies and people as they can in order to show how hiring actually works and how they can position themselves accordingly.

“I’m a really big believer in getting the MBAs to be able to show off what they can do in front of hiring managers or referrers, and getting them to understand that doing that is more important than handing out a CV,” Hamilton says.

CAREER SERVICES BAKED IN

EDHEC’s approach to MBA career services is built around Lead360, a professional development track integrated directly into the Global MBA curriculum.

“One of the things we did when we were building Lead360 was decide that careers shouldn’t be a separate channel sitting alongside the MBA,” Hamilton says.

Within Lead360, EDHEC’s CareerSMART framework gives MBAs a structured path for students to follow.

• S – Self Assessment: This begins with a one-day, intense business case the cohort must work through. Observers record feedback which becomes a baseline for the behaviors LEAD360 will help the MBAs improve over the year.
• M – Marketing Strategy: What do the MBAs want to do and why would they be good at it? That’s understanding the product. Then, MBAs identify the market for that product – the companies they fit and where they want to live and work.
• A – Analyzing the Sector: Students research how the industry works, what problems employers are trying to solve, and where their experience fits within it.
• R – Relationship building: Beyond networking with the companies EDHEC MBAs encounter in the core program, the careers team organizes three city treks where they can connect with employers: Luxembourg in October, Amsterdam in February, and Paris and Brussels in April.
• T – Targeted Job Search: MBAs have a limited amount of time to devote to a job search. When students say they are considering consulting, private equity, and fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) at the same time, Hamilton tells them they are drawing a rectangle that is very wide but not very deep. If they narrow the focus, they can go deeper. For example, they might decide to concentrate on FMCG, speak to more people in that field, and ask better questions to understand it fully. Even if the answer turns out to be no, they have explored it thoroughly and can then move on to another path with clarity.

CareerSMART also includes two multi-day workshop periods in October and January, covering networking, interviews, and employer expectations, along with mock interviews led by alumni.

“We say that a job exists because a hiring manager has a problem,” Hamilton says. “You need to find out what that problem is, and then you have to solve it.”

WHY EDHEC TELLS MBAs TO STOP APPLYING ONLINE

Hamilton’s years as a headhunter taught him that applying through job portals can be a losing game for career changers.

Recruiters very often have to cut 100 resumes down to 10. They are looking for a reason to say “no.” But when a recruiter – or even better, the hiring manager – is impressed with a candidate they’ve met and believes in, the quality of the CV is secondary, says Hamilton.

“It’s all about that connection that you can make with someone, and the ability to show them that you get their pain point.”

Instead, he advises MBAs to avoid the online portals altogether. If they must submit the formal application, they should have spoken to somebody influential in that recruitment process before clicking submit.

In this vein, EDHEC MBAs get plenty of opportunities to demonstrate their capabilities through the curriculum. For example, the Sustainable Impact Challenge is a required 5-month course in which MBAs work with real companies to solve a real business problem. While incorporating classroom lessons on topics such as sustainable business models, business ethics, and the carbon economy, they’re showing off real job skills in presentation, pitching ideas, teamwork, and problem solving to employers who may be looking for someone just like them.

Similarly, EDHEC’s Global Business Hackathon is held in Paris every year. This year, it invited eight companies with a live business problems the MBAs had a day to solve.

“Afterwards, we often hear companies say things like, ‘She was really impressive—can we speak to her?’” Hamilton says. “They’re making that judgment not on a piece of paper, but on what the student actually delivered in 12 hours. That’s a clear win.”

MAKING CAREER SERVICES PERSONAL

EDHEC’s MBA cohorts are intentionally small, around 70 to 80 students. They’re also highly international, typically representing 20 or more countries.

That gives the school the luxury – and the responsibility – of personalizing their career services to the individual. Access to Hamilton and his colleagues is key. His office door is literally almost always open.

“There’s a sign that says, ‘if the door’s open, you can come in for five minutes.’ No matter what I’m doing, I’ll stop. And I keep that promise,” he says.

If the conversation requires more time, students can scan a QR code to his calendar and book a full 30- to 45-minute session.

Students meet one-on-one with the careers team roughly four times during the year and also work with external coaches drawn from executive search and international leadership roles. Those coaches join classroom “Ask Me Anything” sessions before meeting students one-on-one.

ODE TO THE TRIMPLE JUMPERS

While some MBAs seek a degree to break into management, others are looking for a much sharper pivot. These are the triple jumpers, MBAs looking to change their role, sector, and even location. It is considered the hardest reinvention of them all, and at EDHEC, it often accounts for about half the Global MBA cohort.

The ambition comes with tradeoffs. International candidates enter a hiring market where employers often have simpler options closer to home. Candidates need clearer positioning, stronger proof of value, and often language preparation before they are competitive.

Take France as an example. Even in global companies, workplace culture expects everyday conversation to be in French. Students who cannot manage it may still find opportunities elsewhere in Europe, such as Luxembourg, Amsterdam, or Berlin, but the search becomes more targeted.

EDHEC’s coaching, then, pivots from merely finding openings to helping students understand where they realistically fit and how to prepare for the move they want to make.

The proof, of course, comes in the outcomes. For the EDHEC Global MBA Class of 2024, 72% had a job offer by graduation and 86% had them within three months. They joined employers including Amazon, Mars, PwC, Jack Wolfskin, Schneider Electric, and Brown Brothers Harriman. About 12% launched their own ventures in sectors ranging from fintech to sustainable energy.

Of the 78 Class of 2024 grads, 67% changed location, 56% changed industry, and 62% changed function. Forty percent completed the full triple jump. And, they spread across the globe with 62% working in Europe, 14% in Asia, and 11% each to North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean.

For Hamilton, the measure of success for EDHEC Careers is not necessarily on how quickly MBAs find a job or the salary they earn after graduation, even if it is a focus of many MBA rankings.

For some, success will be the high salary. For others, it might be landing at a smaller company in Frankfurt because they dreamed of working in Germany.

“Simplistically, I want our MBAs to achieve whatever it was they wanted to achieve when they arrived here. I really want to create happy MBAs,” he says.

“The pleasure comes a year later when we meet them at graduation, and they tell you about the position they landed in their dream city. That’s the payoff.”

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