David Vivero

I had a dinner conversation tonight with one of my best friends from business school and he alerted me to the fact that a number of firms are recruiting on campus, which requires them to adhere to certain rules around offers, but are exploding their offers if they aren’t accepted by some artificial date. Since he was late into the interview process with other firms, they encouraged him not to worry about the offer he accepted: he could change his mind, of course, if he preferred to go with the firm he didn’t already accept.

Some might say it’s dishonest to accept an offer at one firm, and then later decline if something better comes along. In most cases, I would agree: I think when you make a commitment to someone else, you are absolutely obligated to stick to it. Especially in environments like recruiting, where it costs a lot of money to recruit and these firms are making commitments several months in advance, you owe it to the firm to be honest.

However, I think it’s unfortunate that these firms, who count on the honesty and commitment of their applicants, are creating deadlines and blatantly disregarding the policies of the recruiting office that makes it possible for them to come on campus. In that context, I don’t necessarily feel too bad for them if students are forced to make commitments they do not truly feel comfortable with, and instead have to renegotiate to get to the company they like most.

This doesn’t just happen in recruiting, by the way: when environments are created in which commitments are forced or made too early, the probably of closing drops precipitously. There are specific venture firms, and entire industries/countries, where term sheets don’t necessarily mean you’re funded. Likewise, people are having trouble closing on their real estate transactions these days, when decisions get made before the financing is assured. It makes no sense to pressure the other side when the only thing keeping the deal together is a half-hearted commitment and some company letterhead.

Most of all, I think it’s symptomatic of an inefficient and distorted way of handling job recruiting in the academic world (it’s nothing new at colleges, either). Luckily, I haven’t participated in recruiting since my sophomore year of college, but I’ve observed it from the outside. Firms compete with each other furiously, providing incomplete and sometimes inaccurate information to students, hoping they make commitments as quickly as possible. They hold lavish dinners, or invite students to spend weekends in new cities, and they sometimes try to court new employees with fancy pickup lines rather than real substance. I think the spending and distortion are largely a function of:

• The simultaneity of all these firms’ efforts, on campus at once; and
• The willingness of students to interview with and entertain offers from companies they’re truly not interested in.

With a process like this, it’s no wonder that the firms are jostling aggressively for applicants to sign their offers dispassionately and the average tenure of a business school student in their job following school is about 18 months on average.