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The Art of Admissions
by Carlotta Mast
Selections Interview with Roxanne Hori, Assistant Dean and Director of Career Services, Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University
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.
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. //
© Selections: Spring 2002