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Prior to doing my MBA at the Sauder School of Business, the longest I had been unemployed was a month, a month and a half. Over the proceeding ten years I had to apply for and interview for a lot of positions, due to my co-op undergrad program through which I did six work terms. After completing my B Sc. I only changed jobs once and if it wasn’t for a downturn in the IT industry I might not have become so frustrated and disenfranchised. So to say I expected such difficulties securing a full time job after completing my MBA, would be untrue.

Although there were some mitigating circumstances and unexpected difficulties, it still took me over a year to find a full time position. That is right, after completing my MBA, I was unable to find full time employment despite decent qualifications and putting considerable time and effort into my job search and into particular job interviews and courting companies and contacts.

While applying to grad school, in either “Which MBA?” or one of the GMAT preparation guide books I read was the following quotation where a graduate described his MBA thusly:

A two year job search with optional MBA attached.

The time to start looking for your post MBA job, might not be the moment you get into the program, but starting the moment after you secure your internship position would not be unwise. I know I started looking well before the program ended. Statistics can be deceiving, and the Sauder School of Business does not want tales of a one year job search to be widely disseminated, but then I don’t think the truth is a valued commodity at Sauder. I went so far as to ask on one of our many evaluation forms/surveys “Is the future of management thinking lying and cheating?” or something equally flippant, but that is another story. To say I have some bitterness would be true, but I have even more sadness and unanswered questions.

Concerning statistics, most MBA programs are forced to report a lot of information concerning employment in order to be considered for the various rankings. They usually state them as percentage of students who found full time jobs X months after graduation. Sauder is not a two year program, rather a little over 15 months, but graduation isn’t officially until the summer, so there is room for ambiguity. That said I may be among the least successful graduates of the Sauder MBA program in recent history, at least in terms of securing a full time job, which is one of the main impetuses behind doing an MBA degree. My passage through the program was a difficult and unsatisfying one.

I also went on exchange, the first person from Sauder to go on exchange to Tsinghua, which was one of the reasons I did it. While at Tsinghua I was officially denied access to career services. This isn’t suppose to happen, and the exchange agreement was amended so no future Sauder MBAs would be specifically excluded from access to career services, but it wouldn’t have mattered. At Tsinghua career services are currently geared towards native speaking Chinese nationals, even if you go to recruiting events which are frequently in English, the recruiters don’t particularly want to talk with you, they are only interested in hiring Chinese nationals and will likely just refer you to the corporate website, to apply for positions outside of China. None of the foreign nationals I went on exchange with in China seems to have had much success finding a full time job in China. Several of us put considerable effort into it.

Going on exchange to China isn’t why I had difficulties finding a full time job. It might have been a factor and I definitely missed out on a lot of recruiting opportunities, but I did become an alumni of the Tsinghua School of Economics and Management so maybe years from now that will be of greater value. After my time in China came to an end, I moved back in with my mother temporarily. All my stuff was stored there and I figured free rent, but my mom lives in a little hamlet that doesn’t even have its own gas station. I don’t think living in Deep Bay was good for my job search as I was forced to rely almost exclusively on the Internet and participated in a lot of phone interviews. I could and did travel to Vancouver for job interviews, receptions, conferences, etc.. Living in Deep Bay however, was not the biggest obstacle I had to overcome.

Doubt, fear, and confusion can and were all obstacles I had to face, and still face.

I did manage to get interviews for good positions and at excellent firms. I made a list of companies I admired while a student and managed to get interviewed by some of them. I had multiple interviews for multiple positions at some firms. I had companies contact me after finding my resume online. Here is a partial list of companies I interviewed with:

• Amazon.com
• Electronic Arts Canada
• Pangaea Ventures
• Updata Partners
• Opera
• TD Securities
• BMO Capital Markets
• MDA

There are a lot of reasons you don’t get a job. Sometimes there just isn’t a good fit between you and the company or you and the position. Sometimes you answer a question incorrectly, or incompletely, or too slowly. Sometimes you do really well in one round of interviews but less well in the second round when more decision makers are present. Sometimes you under prepare, sometimes you over prepare, sometimes the position never gets filled, management changes their mind about a program or project, there is a temporary hiring freeze etc. I’ve got more insight into the hiring and job application process than I’ll ever need unless I go into recruiting or HR.

What about networking? I definitely lost enthusiasm for that, but I still have hundreds of business cards, I attended conferences (MMEC 2005, Web Directions North), I volunteered at conferences (Techvibes Massive), I joined industry organizations (New Media BC), I invited people to ‘Link In’. I actually went out of my way to help a lot of people while an MBA student: classmates, professors, staff, undergrads, TAs, husbands of TAs, assistants of TAs. To say some of my classmates or staff at the Sauder School of Business or the University of British Columbia could have helped me more, would not be unreasonable.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the Sauder School of Business is one of geography, it is North of the 49th Parallel and West of Ontario. Vancouver is a great city to live, it was where I was born, I only applied to Vancouver schools, which may have been my first mistake. Vancouver however, is not a major stop on corporate recruiting tours. Some banks, consulting firms, etc. do come and there is a very strong Asian influence at UBC so recruiters recruit for positions in China as well as points East and South in North America, but I missed out on most of that as I was actually in China.

During my extended job search I tried to keep busy. I played guitar, I painted, I did home improvement, I read and endeavored to improve my resume, to learn from my mistakes, to get a job. I read 1000s of pages on Microsoft Excel, trying to become something of a guru. I made several models for valuing and examining new ventures, I even got tasked with helping an associate of a classmate with one of his consulting projects. I continued to add to, revise, and fine tune my resume, even making it into an hResume after seeing a presentation on that Microformat.

I filled out so many online forms, subscribed to RSS feeds, created agents and during all this I came across some things that neither the UVIC Computer Science Co-op department nor the Sauder School of Business Career Center warned me of. I’m speaking of the surprise online quiz. I don’t know how important the answers you give are, but I don’t think I was ever interviewed for a position where during the online application process, after filling out my personal details and clicking submit I was greeted with a impromptu questionnaire. I don’t know if they were actually timed and the questions weren’t unreasonable some were psychological, some were specific to the job, some were more general, it is the unexpectedness of them. After carefully researching a position, crafting a cover letter, battling with often less than intuitive career sites, the last thing you want to do is take a test.

Sometimes your get sent a quiz via email. I came across this while trying to get a job as a software developer so I’m familiar with this screening technique. Obviously giving the correct answer is important, but it is also a time and effort thing, just showing a willingness to put in the extra effort may elevate you above other candidates. As applicants could potentially research the answers extensively companies can use online applications which time the quiz or ask for an estimate and making one of the questions “How accurate was your estimate and why did it take less or more time than you anticipated?”

The longest interview I’ve ever participated in was a whole day affair while I was working as a co-op student at Shell Canada. They asked me to go through an elaborate recruiting process, I had no reason to say no, I think I was even paid, because I was already an employee. ;-) They didn’t offer me a full time job upon graduation and I wasn’t disappointed with the outcome but my boss and supervisor both were. I think I do better in more informal less adversarial interviews and people who have actually seen my work usually have complimentary things to say. Lack of references shouldn’t have been an issue I faced, but as I learned from applying for an MBA, just because someone agrees to write a letter of reference, doesn’t mean they’ll do so in a timely manner. My acceptance at UBC and SFU was held up by people who despite having months to do so, waited a long time to write my reference letter and even tried to weasel out after I’d already listed them on the application.

This has turned into a longer post than is perhaps optimal. What can I say, long job search, long blog posting. I actually started keeping notes on some of the things I went through before I secured a full time job. I had a lot on my mind that kept me from doing my best in job interviews or in the MBA itself. I still did well. TD Securities seemed to think my transcript was particularly strong, before talking to them I never really mentioned my grades in cover letters. I believed some companies are interested in grades and transcripts some aren’t, if they request them you have no choice but to provide a transcript, end of story. After TD complimented me on my grades during the interview, I said something to the effect they could have been better. “How so?” the recruiter asked and I replied flippantly, “I could have gotten straight A’s.” For the record I managed an A- average, but only a percent and half or so below an A average, perhaps if I was more of a whiner and complainer, I know I got 1% below an A a couple times at Sauder… My goal was merely to get above 80% which seems to be an unofficial barrier, class averages usually were at 80 or a percent or two below. At Tsinghua which perhaps is a bit too generous in their grading I did even better, even managing as my classmate Anders informed me to get the top mark in an entire class. This was a particular surprise to me, as my term paper had difficulties travelling from my computer to the TAs…

Imagine if I hadn’t been one of the top people in the program eh Anne? Nothing happened that would negatively impact my grades or job prospects, certainly not my mental or physical health, nothing I was threatened over, nothing I was forced into doing…

Update February 2012

I am once again unemployed, in fact my current period of unemployment is even longer than the year I spent unemployed after finishing my MBA degree at the Sauder School of Business. No one claims any longer that I wasn’t negatively affected, of course my MBA classmates and the administration at the Sauder School of Business generally pretend I don’t exist. I’ve tried my best to stay away from everyone and everything Sauder, but I still haven’t recovered from the events of March 17th 2005 or the words and actions of certain individuals before and after that date.

I’m not blameless. I tried too hard in some ways. Lack of effort isn’t usually an issue but when you’ve faced as much rejection and as many setbacks as I have it is hard not to be bitter at least a little. I continue to look for a job, for someplace where I’m wanted. I continue to read expert advice such as the lengthy guide written by Eric Shannon on how to find a job at a good company. He had some trouble finding a job after he finished school and years later that was partial motivation to write a guide to help job seekers. I’ve written far too much about my personal problems and my difficulties finding permanent employment. Maybe it has helped someone, I’m far from convinced that blogging or graduate school helped my career. It definitely negatively affected my health.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 2nd, 2007 at 4:55 pm filed under: BC, Depression, Excel, MBA, Sauder, Tsinghua, Vancouver and tagged: Amazon.com, applicants, BMO Capital Markets, Deep Bay, Electronic Arts, Eric Shannon, GMAT, job search, job seeker, jobseeker, MDA, networking, Opera, Pangaea Ventures, RSS, TD Securities, UBC, unemployed, Updata Partners, UVIC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.