Selections Interview with Joy Sever, Senior Vice President and Director of the Reputation Practice, Harris Interactive

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Selections: Why did Harris Interactive decide to participate in this, and how does Harris Interactive benefit from having partnered with the Wall Street Journal to conduct this extensive survey of recruiters?
Sever: They approached us and presented the idea to us. In deciding whether or not this was something that we wanted to do, we took a look at what was already being done, and I think we were surprised after reading and learning about the surveys that did exist. We knew about the impact that these surveys have, but I had never looked in depth at the methodology of the others. I think the approach that the Journal wanted to take, which was the recruiter perspective, we saw that as a challenge and something that would be a very visible research project. We thought it was something that would be a challenge, and it’s probably one of the most interesting projects I’ve ever worked on.

Selections: That’s interesting that you talk about wanting the challenge, because I know in one of his stories, Ron Alsop [of the Wall Street Journal] talked about how it turned out to be one of the most challenging projects he has worked on.
Sever: I would put it as one of the most challenging and most interesting.

Selections: What were some of the most significant challenges?
Sever: We wanted to do it very rigorously. We knew that this would really matter. And we knew that we had both of our reputations—the Journal’s and ours—to protect. We knew that a lot of attention would be brought to this. We knew that business schools greatly value their reputations. When we originally started, we had a project schedule of six months. That ended up being extended to two years. The challenge was, each time we looked at a particular way of doing something, we learned that in order to do it right, we would have to extend the schedule or try something else. Just to give you an example: Schools all operate in different ways, so finding the right contact people, making sure that every school was included, making sure that if a school came up with a particular way of doing things we shared that, so that all schools were given the same information and were working with the same material. Not all schools keep track of their recruiters in the same way. So, some schools gave us many names, and others didn’t. So, there were variations there. Recruiters move around a lot, and there isn’t this database of [recruiter] information out there, so we had to construct our own sample of recruiters. We were doing this internationally, so that when we would think we were ready to close, we would find out that there were holidays in Spain and would have to keep the survey open. We learned that how recruiters make their decisions is somewhat complex. When we thought that maybe we would be rating the schools on 10 dimensions, it turned out to be more than 20.

Those were some of the main challenges, off the top of my head.

We wanted to meet with as many people as we could. We wanted to hear what their concerns were, and we would learn about other biases that we might not have been aware of. So, we would meet with someone and they would say, “Well, are you paying attention to this?” And we would say, “Oh, okay.” So, we would build that into the survey. The analysis took time. All of those challenges were driven by the fact that we knew this would matter.

Selections: You talked about wanting to create a very rigorous methodology for your ranking. In what ways was the Wall Street Journal/Harris Interactive survey methodology more rigorous than other MBA ranking models?
Sever: I think it goes back to those three differences between our ranking methodology and the others. Broader universe. More recruiters. Trying to have as many criteria as possible so that we weren’t ranking schools based on one or two measurements. It was really across 27 different elements.

Selections: Why base your survey solely on recruiter input? Why not factor in input from students or business school deans or administrators?
Sever: First, we felt the recruiters were a significant enough stakeholder group to devote an entire survey to them. Second, that was challenging enough. It took us two years to do that. Three, those other groups that you mentioned, I don’t know that we can figure out a way to include their input without introducing bias. So, those two groups are ones that are most frequently felt to introduce responses that definitely have a kind of self-serving aspect to them.

Selections: I did read the article published on the CareerJournal.com site by John Lynch, Jr., a faculty member at the Fuqua School at Duke, about the bias he felt was present in your survey. I also read your response to his claims. Given his points, is there anything you would have done differently with the survey if you were to start over right now?
Sever: We welcomed all of the feedback we got, and we discussed every decision that we made very carefully. There were many things that we couldn’t do in the first year because of the nature of it being the first year, because of the nature of what we were trying to do, because of all of the challenges that I mentioned. We had to make decisions that were the best possible decisions for the survey that we were doing. There were definitely people who didn’t like the ranking. But we heard so many responses and comments from people who said and reinforced that, yes, we got it right. We got enough feedback and we knew how carefully we worked on this—that told us we did the right thing. In an ideal world or if the world of recruiting were structured differently, there might be things that we would have liked to have done differently. But we would never have published results if we didn’t think that we could stand behind them.

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