02 December 2007

Recruitment and existentialist angst

Wake up! You have to get a job!
Since early September we have focused almost exclusively on academics: prepping for class, mastering the case method, fiddling with excel models, that sort of thing. Okay, so that's not entirely true. We have been turbo-socialising too - in my case this involved regressing to undergrad habits and antics but with less sleep. But by and large our professional energies were directed towards learning.

Soon, however, I was rudely reminded that I have to get a job post-HBS and that I should start thinking about it now. The first wakeup call was having to rewrite my CV for the HBS resume book. How did I want to pitch myself? As a general manager? A financial wizard (impossible in my case!)? How can I demonstrate my entrepreneurial spirit? Which bits of my experience are more "impressive" than others? Befuddled, I drafted something respectable and clicked submit.

But I had little time to draw breath. On 5 December, the recruiters were unleashed. My inbox started filling up with dinner invitations, coffee chats, and ads for company information sessions. I complained to Careers Service that I has getting recruitment spam; they told they would investigate (in other words, grow up and get used to it!). Hordes of suited and booted HBSers trekked over the Larz Anderson bridge to the Charles Hotel to munch on mushroom puffs and swig chardonnay.

The Best, Big, Bold, Bad-boy Firm, looking for...
Curious about the hype, I went to one of the bulge bracket investment bank's presentation. The room was full of pin-stripe suits, canapes, and bubbly wine. The ubiquitous Harvard Business School hoodie was out, and slick shirt-tie combos were in. We were given the manadtory 20-minute "hurrah" pitch from the Senior Vice President for Corporate Greatness, and offered a thick book full of nuggets of advice on how to get through the grueling interviews.

Then potential recruits began an elaborate dance with recruiters, asking questions ("describe your company's culture? What would I be doing as a summer intern?") and receiving disturbingly saccharine answers. I soon figured out that the aim of these little 1-2-1s was to get your hands on the recruiter's business card so that you could send a follow up note the next day ("Hi Jim, it was great to meet you last night at the Charles. I was really fascinated by ...."). This was shameless networking at it's best.

Anyone for Satre or Camus?
As the tempo of the recruitment drive reached a frenzy - 15+ presentations a day, numerous coffee chat emails, dinner invites from Wall Street's finest, war stories of how a classmate had secured a great lead into a top PE shop - I discovered an interesting corollary: HBS was offering group therapy sessions.

Until now we've spent most of our leadership class learning about organisational behaviour, thinking about how to manage upwards/downwards/sideways, and pondering what makes a great leader/manager.

Last week we transitioned into the "personal" segment of the course. I was asked to solicit feedback from colleagues, peers, friends, and family to find my "reflected best-self". I was given a selection HBSers' memoirs coming to their 10 and 20 year reunions, and challenged to write my own fictional memoir 10 years out of business school. What would I have accomplished by 2019? How do I define success? What trade-offs would I have made? And what would the consequences be?

It is easy to see how this exercise combined with the relentless stream of recruitment activities can quickly lead to a severe bout of existentialist angst: what is life all about? what is my passion? do I want to make money or enjoy myself? can I do both? how am I going to change the world?

I applaud HBS for forcing us to think about these issues, but in actuality some questions just don't have simple, pat answers. And what might be the right answer now, won't necessarily be so in five years time. So instead of lying awake night worrying about whether I'm really a leader "who will make a difference in the world", I'm going to fall back on a simple way of making decisions: (1) stick to my passions and don't do anything which I know won't enjoy day in, day out, (2) think of my life in 2-year bite-size chunks - know where you are going, but don't plan 10 years out because life will get in the way, (3) if I would shudder to see it in my biography or on my epitaph, then I won't do it. And I'm going to remember that success, like leadership, can be defined in many many different ways.