What advice do you have for incoming students about recruiting?
- Lean on the alumni network
- Cast a wide net!
- Know yourself, your story, and do your research
- Students should feel confident that they are employable – and they shouldn’t give up on finding jobs they’re passionate about. The SOM community is super supportive and will help them!
- Follow the club curriculum, and tune the mindset to start from zero and work as a team with other classmates.
- Recruiting is like the market. There will be many highs and many lows. Stay positive during the experience and you will realize how much you have grown by the end of everything.
- It can be an unstructured process that requires one to be organized and be comfortable with networking. Once you start, your muscle builds and the outcome will be favorable.
- I recruited for tech. Tech recruitment takes its time and is very random. You need to have a lot of patience for it.
- For sustainability, I would encourage networking via Yale and CBEY’s many alumni resources and emphasize the importance of staying up to date on the “hot” issues and trends in the industry because they change very quickly. Know whether you’re more interested in working on a certain sustainability topic (e.g. waste/circularity) vs. any sustainability topic in a certain specific industry.
- Tech recruiting is a lot more unstructured than consulting or banking – and those passionate about getting a job in tech should be okay with that. I advise folks to seek specific interest lanes they want to explore, whether it’s function or domain (i.e. trust & safety). Then, they should find people to have coffee chats with to see what the day in the life is like in these fields.
- Stay organized. Recruiting in any non-traditional industry will be much more independently driven, so be sure to keep track of when jobs are posted, because they might not be all on the same timeline. Keeping an Excel spreadsheet of companies, jobs, and alumni in the space really helped me to make sure I was staying on task and was completing an expansive search of my options.
- For social impact: Join a student-led conference team like the Economic Development Symposium or Philanthropy Conference, clubs like Nonprofit Board Fellows or Social Impact Consulting, or a practicum like Global Social Entrepreneurship. You can meet and work with like-minded students and organizations that you care about.
- Stay confident and talk to everyone across the industry. Tech isn’t very network focused but talking to folks can ensure that you save time in terms of finding what exact niche you want to dedicate your career in.
- Focus on casing and make sure your skills are top notch.
- Patience! Nonprofit/social impact roles are posted late and often amorphous.
