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Good grades and graduate degrees fall short of indicating success in the real world, according to leading recruiters at Google and the British Army. The recruiters spoke to 49 school representatives on October 14 at the Graduate Management Admission Council’s second-annual European Professional Development Conference, hosted by IESE Business School in Barcelona.
At the conference, titled “Selecting for Success,” the recruiters not only shared what they do and what they look for, but also how they define what they’re looking for. The audience, with moderator David Bach, professor of strategy and economic environment at IE Business School, asked the recruiters, “What do they know?” In other words, “What do you want from us and our students?”
Schools should select students with strong non-academic skills, and then take the time to help them demonstrate such skills to employers, the recruiters said. “An MBA is arguably becoming a commodity,” said Alison Parrin, Google’s career development program manager for Europe the Middle East, and Africa. “You spend a lot of time in bringing them out academically, but you don’t necessarily do all you can to give them the employability skills that come out in interviews.”
Panelist Lt. Colonel Eilean Cunningham, head of operations at the British Army Recruiting Group Headquarters, explained her team’s pursuit of the best people—the people with the “X-factor,” something beyond educational achievement that helps a candidate stand out from the rest.
“Whilst intellectual potential is important, it is not everything,” Cunningham said. “We need particular people with a certain something; people we can rely on who are flexible and can deliver with calm reflection and authority under pressure.” She runs a national recruiting operation that searches for 15,000 young men and women into the British Army each year, including some 700 graduates for officer training at the country’s elite Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst.
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