Selections Interview with Mark Case, Director of Career Development, Yale School of Management

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Selections: How are such things as leadership ability and potential value to an employer measured?
Case: The most obvious way to gauge this is through the essays, recommendations, and the in-person individual interview. The potential value to an employer, which is what I pay the most attention to, is sometimes tough to gauge on paper, especially if an applicant is indicating a desire to switch career paths—which is a fairly common reason for people to come to business school. This is why the demonstrated leadership and self-reliance components are so important for an applicant to be able to effectively stress in essays and in the interview. Yale SOM is a very small community, and individual fit is very important. The class collectively values cooperation over competition. These circumstances make it so “gunners,” those who are very aggressive, go against the grain, are trend-setters—these people are not comfortable in our culture. So people who gravitate toward team-based communities do well here, as well as people with a passion for learning, social responsibility, and community service. That is a delicate balance, to build a class that is both intellectually driven and career focused. But ideally, we want both elements to exist in spades in any class we admit. Class size varies between 200 and 210 in each class, so it is one of the smaller programs among the top MBA programs out there. It is a program that thrives very much on respect for the individual and on the cooperation of individuals.

Selections: Are you concerned about your ability to place incoming candidates, and do you ever think about having a bigger role in deciding who gets into your school?
Case: It goes without saying that the ability to help incoming candidates find jobs and discover career paths that are best suited to them is always going to be a career services concern. On any given day, having a bigger role in admissions decisions is going to run across a career services director’s mind, depending on who you are dealing with from one moment to the next and what issues are being addressed with respect to balance in the mix of employer contacts, students’ accessibility to alumni who can help them network, and so forth.

All of that said, people in my role do not want to see a “vanilla” class admitted. A business school has to be willing to take risks from a career services standpoint in admitting applicants who have a typical work experience or who perhaps appear disjointed in some aspect of their career. In many cases, these applicants can become among the best graduates a school can produce. Generally, applicants of this type that look atypical have strong self-reliance, have entrepreneurial and leadership capabilities that they illustrate convincingly in their essays. Essays are important. Short of that individual being in front of us, the essay is the first indication of an individual’s ability to fit.

A member of my staff serves on the interview team. He is one of my associate directors.

Selections: What kind of people do you find easiest to place?
Case: People who develop a healthy career focus and who are willing to unlearn old ways of seeing themselves as professionals and who can apply their book learning and best attributes from previous work experience toward the next step in their career. These people tend to be the easiest. . . not only the easiest but the most productive people we work with. These are people who are willing to help themselves to the resources that are available to them. They can take ideas and suggestions and turn them into their own action plan. They are not waiting for us to do it for them. They are quite willing and capable to do it themselves. Once they become aware of what is available to them and how to use the resources, they take responsibility for their careers.

Selections: What are recruiters looking for in an intern and a new hire? Have you observed any recent changes in what they are looking for?
Case: In a word, yes. As far as interns are concerned, recruiters are increasingly expecting that intern candidates will be able to differentiate themselves and to sell their ability to learn as well as produce. They expect candidates to be able to sell a passion for the work and for doing the work within the particular organization for which they are interviewing at that moment. So it is much more of a matching process. For permanent hires, the same criteria apply—with the added ability to sell their sense of professional direction, responsibility, and commitment to learning and leading.

This is a management school. This is a management education process. These people are learning to be managers. Quote, “leaders.” So recruiters want to see evidence of that capability. Recruiters are being more selective and looking well beyond skill set. This is a buyers’ market. They want the people who fit the jobs they have. And of course, within that, there is a certain degree of flexibility around an individual’s prior work experience or personality or work ethic, etc.

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