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Interview Season

If the freezing cold Chicago winter hasn’t got you down, the recruiting season probably has.  Like the winters are long and dark in Chicago, recruiting season is also long and hard.  You network with employers, you impatiently wait for interview invitations, you prepare for the case interview process, and you prepare answer to behavioral questions for hours upon hours so you can nail that coveted interview you’ve been waiting for. It really is a process full of ups and downs.

Unfortunately, despite the intense preparation, just about everyone here at Kellogg also has too face rejection. And a lot of it. In pursuit of the job you’ll have this summer, you have to compete against far too many people for a single spot, sometimes an employer doesn’t always take someone from a given school, often times you don’t know exactly what an employer is looking for from candidates, and quite often the process is pretty subjective. As a result, the recruiting season can be a hard process.

In general this year, the month of January has been very busy. There’s a lot more nervous energy in Jacobs, a lot fewer people at the Keg, a lot more people surfing the CMC webpage these days, and a lot more people requesting “acceptance” to the Kellogg LinkedIn group to update their profiles just in case employers are checking online – I know that because am the LinkedIn group owner.  Likewise, people all over the school are checking their phones incessantly, awaiting calls and voicemails from recruiters for that coveted offer for summer employment.

Some schools call this process “hell week” although at Kellogg, there’s no such name as hell week, though perhaps there should be.  And unfortunately, the hell isn’t just confined to one week in January.  Instead it takes place for a few weeks for some students, and it goes on much longer for students that may not have jobs yet.

The good news is now that it’s February, some of the worse of it has past, whether you have a job or not.  The grueling processes of as consulting, banking, and brand management are just about over, which comes as a relief to a lot of people.  To those who got the offers they wanted, things are definitely looking good for the rest of the year.  For those who did not, they have to figure out what the next steps are and what their contingency plans might be.

But no matter which camp you fall in to, most people on campus are exhausted. Congratulations to everyone for making it this far. And hopefully those who are finished will help their classmates reach the same status.