Winning the 'war for talent'

When participants in on-campus recruiting are presented with exploding offers and bonuses — employment offers that are retracted if not accepted within a short amount of time — Career Services wants them to know that they have recourse.

“There’s a war for talent,” Director of Career Services Patricia Rose said. “Our students have a lot of opportunities, and they don’t realize that they have some control and some power and we can help them exercise that.”

In response to an Oct. 7 article in The Daily Pennsylvanian in which students testified that they had been pressured, sometimes in “underhanded” ways, to respond quickly to employment offers obtained through OCR, Rose said that her department has mechanisms in place to help students push back.

Rose explained that an offer letter asking for a response before Oct. 28, the date set by Career Services as the earliest an employer can demand a commitment, is permissible if the offer will not be rescinded prematurely. She did still call that practice “unfair” to students and noted that if the employer is aware that the student has until Oct. 28 to respond but calls the student frequently, then the student needs to resist.

Career Services will help students respond to pressure from firms by helping them with the language they should use in conversation with recruiters, as well as by contacting firms directly. She noted that Career Services call firms every week to remind them of OCR policies.

“If students don’t make contact with us we can’t do anything,” she added. “If we don’t know that [exploding offers] are happening, we can’t monitor them. The most important thing is for students to make us aware.” Career Services will only call firms that are reported to them if they have permission from the student to call about a particular case.

If firms refuse to give students more time after being contacted by Career Services, the firm’s opportunities to recruit on campus become restricted. Career Services generally pushes information sessions and interview times for insubordinate firms until later in the OCR process. “And believe me,” Rose said, “Employers do not want to have their access to Penn students restricted.”

Although companies have been banned because they have not followed Career Services’ policies, Rose is “reluctant” to ban them from recruiting at Penn because she does not want to take opportunities away from students.

“I feel that the better approach ... is to say we’re going to make [companies] come later in the process when it’s closer to our deadlines so [they’re] not taking advantage of our students. That usually does the trick,” she said.

For their part, firms are pretty quiet on the topic of exploding offers. The recruiting web pages of several major players in OCR, including Bain & Company, The Boston Consulting Group and Ernst & Young, do not mention expiring offers at all. McKinsey & Company tells students seeking a position at McKinsey that they can contact their McKinsey recruiter should they receive an expiring offer from a different firm.

Students sometimes take advantage of policies like McKinsey’s, Rose said. Students tell firms that a competitor is pressuring them with an exploding offer just to claim an earlier interview. Students should be discouraged from using that tactic, she added.

“If we don’t provide an even playing field for employers they might not come back next year and that will hurt future Penn students. We want the employers to feel like ... everyone is playing by the same rules,” Rose said.

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