This is Cornell’s policy:
http://www.career.cornell.edu/employers/hiring_students/recruiting/upload/EmployerPolicies15-16.pdf
This is Cornell’s policies for their students:
http://www.career.cornell.edu/employers/hiring_students/recruiting/upload/StudPolicies15-16New.pdf
I’m kind of bemused by the negative views on this thread, too. In the regular working world, when you apply for jobs there’s always the chance that you can get an offer from Choice #3 before you’ve heard back from Choice #2 and even finished interviewing with Choice #1. That’s life. You have to choose whether or not you want to take the offer on the basis of the offer itself (and, I suppose, how risk-averse you are). It’s not the last job you’ll ever have in your life.
Job-hunting in senior year is college students’ first taste of real-world employment trends. Coddling them by giving them an unnatural set of experiences is not going to help them in the future. CHoosing is not easy.
I don’t think it’s that. It’s that the competition for good new employees is high, particularly in tech. Just like students are jockeying for positions at the best firms, companies are jockeying for the best students. They need the most creative and hard-working software engineers, marketers, analysts, program managers, etc., to make their companies run smoothly. If they spend 3 weeks waiting around on you, they may lose their second choice candidate who they haven’t gotten back to yet. If they wait around too long, all the top-tier candidates are snapped up. A week is plenty of time to think about the job and make a decision. I think 2-3 business days is pretty standard post-college too.
I also don’t necessarily think that offers should come after all final interviews…again, that’s placing unnatural constraints on the process. Sometimes we have to make choices without having all of the information or even all of the choices we’d like.
Also…I wouldn’t say that new graduates should expect a relocation package. There are some large companies in some industries that routinely give relocation packages to new graduates (sometimes only ones in specific roles), but I’d guess that the majority of companies do not give relocation packages to entry-level employees…or mid-level employees, either. I got a rather nice one from my current company (and it’s pretty expected in my industry) but chatting with friends made it clear that this is not the norm across industries.
I recognize that colleges have a vested interest in protecting employers by putting constraints on students’ interviewing behaviors so the employer will have only ‘good’ experiences with their students. And I suppose there is some vague hope that if a student only gets/keeps one offer, that there will be more offers available to other students at the same school. But the minute that student steps off campus, the rules change. She is a free agent. She can apply for any job at any time unless there is a contract that says otherwise. A real contract, not some vague sense of social obligation.
Back in the 80s, I was at a prestigious analyst training program. Other companies would swoop in and make generous offers to the best performers as we completed the training, to the chagrin of our employer. They modified the program to try to reduce that ‘leakage’ which helped a bit. Was the trainee unethical in accepting the better offer? Or the company that was scooping up staff whose training they didn’t need to pay for? I don’t think so. It was the original employers job to make sure that the work and compensation they were offering were competitive with what was available elsewhere. I think anyone making a job offer to a student needs to think hard about whether their offer is going to remain attractive even after the student steps off campus - otherwise that future employee is gone.
My child’s Ivy forbids the student to keep interviewing once he has accepted an offer from a company who interviewed him via the college career center. It’s actually an honor code violation with serious consequences. Also, the college can control the student’s on campus interviewing because the companies who participate agree to certain conditions. Among them is they must inform the career center if an offer was made and accepted. That way the school will refuse to schedule the student for further interviews once he has accepted an offer. I think some students who accepted early offers continued to job hunt, but did so on their own. Technically, that was still a violation but students got around it by telling the first company that their situation had somehow changed, eg. an ill parent required them to be closer to home, etc. The student could not admit he had accepted a better offer, though or it would get back to the college and he’d be charged with an integrity violation.
I was an OP about this issue back then, and recall feeling that the policy hurt the lower income kids the most, like S, who felt he had to take any offer since he had to start paying back his student loans. The more affluent students could risk more.
N’s mom- the situation you describe (analysts getting hired by other banks) is not the same as the situation the OP describes. Students get an actual service when they use career services for a job hunt and in return, career services sets out a very minimal set of expectations. Anyone who wishes to launch a job search on their own is absolutely free to do so. Your kid wants to work at Credit Suisse or Exxon or GE or Pfizer? The email addresses are on their website. Good luck and god speed.
The on campus hiring system would be chaos (and companies would opt out) if a particular college didn’t set out a set of “rules of engagement”. I have periodically dropped colleges from our recruiting schedule even though we like the kids we see- have hired lots of them- and are happy with their performance.
Why? It’s a circus and a free for all. We can’t hit our global hiring targets if kids view an accepted offer as an invitation to keep on interviewing. We can’t ensure the right number of people in the right functions for the particular geographies if certain colleges just move resumes around without any order or process. I can’t have a team of interviewers show up on a campus thinking they’ve got a full day of interviews only to discover that half the kids are no-shows. Waste of time and money. A well run career services team maintains a back up list of kids so if someone accepts an offer- and therefore is no longer interested in my company, a kid on the wait list gets to interview.
What if it were YOUR kid who didn’t get his first choice interview because a classmate hogged the slot and then was a no-show???
Your kid doesn’t like it? Use Vault or Monster and skip campus recruiting entirely. Problem solved.
“So the flat-broke college graduate may need to borrow money from the Bank of Mom and Dad to cover the first/last month’s rent, minimal furniture, deposit on a car, etc., and then pay back the loan after the company issues the bonus or reimbursement.”
Well, duh. Isn’t that what parents are for?
School career center wants to give employers equal opportunity to interview all applicants before those applicants commit. Due to scheduling and limited space on campus, it is not fair to some employers that can’t be on campus earlier.That is why some schools have restrictions on when students can go off campus for a super day or when they need to make decisions on offers.
At my kid’s school, they use the career center portal to submit their applications and book appointments. If they should violate the code then they would no longer to have access to the portal. It also means once an offer is accepted then the student would no longer be able to use the portal for job search.
I think the protection goes both ways.
You and I may think this is obvious, @Pizzagirl, but I’ve noticed that some people here think that a young person should be completely independent IMMEDIATELY after graduation. I wanted to point out that this may not be realistic.
Also, some families may not be able to provide this kind of financial assistance, in which case the student may need to plan around that issue. That might mean doing a greater amount of paid work while in school or during the summers to build up some savings, for example, or it might mean taking a first job in their hometown and living with their parents for a while to build up savings before venturing out on their own.