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

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Selections: What kind of people do you find easiest to place?
Hori: It is a real broad range. When I think about the people I have been working with over the last year, their backgrounds are everything from nontraditional backgrounds, people who have worked in education or at a nonprofit—to people with traditional business backgrounds or engineering backgrounds. So I think a lot boils down to personality. The vast majority of people here are just delightful to be with, and again, that gets back to the admission process, because every candidate is screened through an interview beforehand, and that does make it easier.

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?
Hori: I haven’t seen any shift. This is as hard as it has ever been because of the shifts in the job market. Those companies that are hiring are finding that the pool they have to pull from is richer than ever before, and there are two reasons for that. One is there aren’t as many different types of opportunities and the other is that the quality here increases each year because admissions is doing such a good job. It’s been challenging, but it makes it interesting.

Selections: Has the economic downturn affected the kinds of questions you get from applicants or students? In what ways has it affected the admissions process?
Hori: Questions are certainly focused more on what we think the market will look in two years. I have a “Magic 8 Ball” in my office, and I shake it up and try to give them an answer. That is really what the vast majority of questions focus around. They are asking us to predict something that nobody can predict. Kellogg, like all of the other business schools, has seen a very dramatic increase in the number of applications and in inquiries about admission to business school.

We are not increasing our class size at all. We are still at a little over 600.

Selections: How does the economy affect the relationship between the admissions and career services departments at your school? Do you feel there is a symbiotic relationship between admissions and career services that grows stronger/closer in a weak economy?
Hori: I feel like our relationship has always been good, at least since Michele [Rogers] and I have been here. We have the same views. We are in this together. Dean [Donald] Jacobs used to call us the bookends: She is in charge of input, and I am in charge of output, and we are sort of dead without each other. So I feel like, even in the best of times, we had a really strong dialogue going and that is what has built the foundation and strength of the relationship between our two departments. It does strengthen when the economy is softer, but I don’t feel like one of us is putting more effort into it. The groundwork was laid many years ago.

It is easier for us to reach out to each other on things. Like right now, they are short an admissions interviewer because someone is out on jury duty, so they came up and let us know that and if someone in this office has extra time, we will fill in. Everybody in our area has been trained in the admissions interview process. There is that back and forth. They help us during the summer months—when it is slower for them—with mock interviews for the students in the four-quarter program. There is a fair amount of back and forth, so we need to understand each other’s world. We can’t stay in our own little ivory towers. And they can do the job mock interviews. This strengthens the bond, but it has always been strong.

I’m very lucky to be working someplace where all areas work together in partnership. This is a very integrated place. //

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