Selections Interview with Roxanne Hori, Assistant Dean and Director of Career Services, Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University

Page 1 | 2

Selections: How closely do you work with admissions staff in deciding what kind of candidates will fit your school best?
Hori: We work very closely with admissions, but it is part of a broader scope. There is not a lot of advising that we do, except on the side of trying to help them understand trends in the employment market—if there are changes that might impact background or criteria that they would use. As an example, when the high tech boom was going on, which seems like a lifetime ago, it was just making them aware as they went out to promote the school to prospective students. We wanted them to know what we were doing in the high-tech arena so that prospective students understood what the school was doing, how much outreach we were doing, and in what markets. Now, does that impact the profile of the student we attract? It probably does to some degree, but our main purpose was more to inform admissions so that if they were out beating the drum for the school, they were representing the correct career services picture.

Selections: From a career services perspective and from the perspective of the employment community, who is the ideal applicant? What qualities and characteristics does your school look for? How does the school gauge them?
Hori: My sense in talking with companies through different roundtables we have done with employers from across the country [is that] the profile they are looking for in general is great interpersonal skills, very bright, strong leadership ability, and a team player. And then within a company, there will be other characteristics that each firm may look for based on the culture of the organization.

Selections: Right now, are you finding that there are specific hard skills or characteristics that seem most in demand?
Hori: We haven’t seen a change. They are still looking for really good analytical skills. They are looking for people who are comfortable in working with numbers. This is very common for an MBA program, regardless of what the job is, even if you are going into a job as a journalist or doing organization design; they are still going to look for people who can analyze the data.

Selections: How are such things as leadership ability and potential value to an employer measured?
Hori: I’m not sure how they measure them. They look at the student résumés. Once they are through the door, what I look at are things people have been involved in, even through extracurricular activities or through leadership roles they may have had at their employers or at their undergraduate institutions.

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?
Hori: For me personally and for our office, I would say it is not a concern. That is partly because of the physical set up and because of the culture here at Kellogg. There is a lot of interaction and communication that goes on. We don’t pretend to be selection experts by any stretch of the imagination. We do try to partner with admissions as they do with us in terms of just keeping each other abreast of shifts going on and any challenges that may be there.

As an example, once in a while, an admissions counselor will come down to our offices and catch me or one of the other career services counselors and talk with us about a candidate if they are on the fence about a candidate, if they are not sure about something in his background, or if we had mentioned that certain students had been a challenge and their background may be similar. It is not unusual for them to come down and let us know or ask our opinion. Likewise, if we are really challenged and if a student is having a tough time and they are challenging us. . . any time we find out that a student is having a tough time—and that can be socially, academically—we will go down to admissions and let them know of that. Because if that counselor knows who made the final decision on admissions, at least then that person is given a flag in terms of maybe they were on the fence and made an exception. Any number of things could have entered into the final decision. That doesn’t mean we wouldn’t admit someone with the very same profile again. There may just be something going on in [the student’s] personal life that we don’t know about. The other party that tends to get involved to some degree is student affairs. If Fran or Dean Wilson is working with a troubled student, and it may have been something that potentially could have been caught in the admissions process, then they will offer that feedback.

Next page -->

Page 1 | 2