Selections Interview with Randy Williams, Director of MBA Career Services, University of California, Irvine

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Selections: How closely do you work with admissions staff in deciding what kind of candidates will fit your school best?
Williams: For the last five or six years, we have worked very, very closely with the admissions staff. In addition to admissions, there is a group of what we call our department-level directors. We meet on a regular basis. We meet with the admission director and the assistant dean of MBA programs, who oversees admissions, career services, and student affairs. We meet on a formal basis every other week and talk about a number of issues from a global perspective. Our departments are all really related. Everything we do starts with the admissions piece and ends with career services before [students] become alums.

We are housed relatively close together. Admissions and career services are located right next to each other. We are the “yin” and the “yang,” if you will. They work to get the students in, and we work to move their careers along.

There has always been the understanding of how admissions and career services are tied together. What the admissions folks do, in terms of bringing in people, will impact our ability to work with students on the back end. Our success will then drive how successful admissions is in its job. It’s a circle. Like most schools, we have realized that the two are intertwined. So we work very closely. We have improved our communication. We now do many, many joint ventures.

Selections: What role does career services play in the admissions process?
Williams: There are four things that we do to provide assistance during the admissions process. One, we provide constant feedback on the characteristics and attributes that are sought by the corporate community, because we are out there with the corporate community. We hear what the corporate community says about our candidates and what they are looking for in a candidate. So we can feed back to them on an ongoing basis the types of characteristics and attributes that the employment community is looking for in candidates. Then they will try to keep that in mind when they are looking at candidates to select for admission. With certain populations, we actually also assist with some of the interviews, specifically with the international student population, because with that group of students, there are certain things that employers are looking for. Also, the international students often have special needs. So we will work with them to ascertain whether an international student might fit into our program. We have one of our assistant directors in career services and really, half of her job is to focus on international student issues as they relate to student services. She is doing a lot of programming and works very intensely with the international students. She [often] does the interviewing with the international students.

The third thing we do is assist in evaluating the prior work experience. So what she does for that population is, she will do the interviewing to help ascertain the level of work experience that the international student has.

The fourth thing we do is, once someone has been admitted to the program, many of those candidates want information on what we do. So we become almost an extension of the recruitment process to get them in. We are part of the sales piece. “We really like you. We want you to come here, so let us tell you why you should come here.”

Selections: From the career services standpoint and from the employment communities standpoint, who is the ideal applicant? What qualities and characteristics does your school look for? How does the school gauge them?
Williams: I think we are probably very similar to most schools. We are looking for candidates who have good communication skills, in both an oral and a written format. We’re looking for candidates who display leadership attributes and really understand that they control their career. We want them to take personal responsibility and be self-motivated. Everyone in career services knows there are a couple of types of candidates. One is the type who says, “Have you got my job yet? I have my MBA, so where is my job?” We look for those types of candidates who understand from the beginning that this is a partnership, and that we are really about education. We want those who will take advantage of everything we do and offer but who also contribute as a partner. That is something that all of us on the admissions side and the career services side look for. We look for people who are confident and say, “Hey, I’ll take all of the assistance you can give me, but this is my career, and I take responsibility for that.” In a general sense, that is the ideal candidate that we are looking for.

Selections: Are there specific skills that seem to be in demand right now?
Williams: We are more interested in just quality people. The admissions side does a real good job of screening through the GMAT, in terms of assessing somebody’s academic capabilities. Based upon that screening process, we know that people coming in, for the most part, can do the job. They are going to get through the classes. So what it really comes down to are things that are really just a little bit more nebulous. But they are skills, like the capability to work as part of a team or the ability to have good communication skills. Presentation skills, which are part of communications skills, are very important. Analytical skills are important.

Then, of course, in this environment, if you do not have the capability of feeling comfortable using technology—not as a computer programmer or coder, but just from the standpoint of whatever career you plan to go into—you’re going to need to have a good handle on the software and processes out there that everybody uses now. We are looking for people who feel very comfortable in that environment.

Selections: How are such things as leadership ability, communication skills, teamwork skills, and potential value to an employer measured?
Williams: What we have done just in the last year—and this was really a result of that feedback from recruiters that I talked about before—we have really realized that recruiters are using the behavioral interview as a tool on the back end. So they are really using that to screen those individuals for a lot of these skills that we just talked about. Analytical skills. The ability to do problem solving on the spot and to be able to think on their feet. So one of the things we have incorporated on the front end is that same tool. So we are basically, in addition to the scores you get through standardized testing, we basically use behavioral interviewing on everyone who has applied to the program and has made it to a certain point. So what we are trying to do there is screen for those same types of skills that employers screen for on the back end, using the same type of instrument, the behavioral interview.

Selections: What is a behavioral interview?
Williams: You are setting up a situation. Instead of asking, “Can you tell me what you’ve done?” which encourages people to chronologically go through where they have worked, you’re setting up a situation where the student basically has to respond to a situation. For instance, “Can you explain to me a time when you disagreed with your boss and you knew that your solution to the problem was the right solution but your boss did not. What did you do and how did you resolve that?” You’re making them think back on their own personal experiences and come up with an answer as to why they thought their solution was the correct solution. Or you may give them the question, “Can you tell me about a time at your job or with some other organization where you had a difficult situation with a coworker and it needed to be resolved. What was the situation and how did you resolve it?”

We’re trying to see how people think on their feet. And we’re trying to see how they responded to situations that they will encounter in the work world. We have different questions. Some are really geared toward giving the person an opportunity to explain instances where they displayed leadership capability. We are looking for leadership potential, self-motivation, and strategic thinking. The questions are designed to bring out examples of times when people have shown those capabilities.

The other two things we use are personal recommendations. And we also review their résumés and essays to look for those same types of experiences. We have found that the best tool is really to talk to somebody and make them articulate what it is they have done around these skills we are looking for.

The admissions office does have a rating when they put people through these behavioral interviews and when they look at people’s résumés. They rate the different skills and answers that the candidate gave. That [rating] is used in conjunction with the GMAT scores and GPA.

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