Running the Recruiting Gauntlet

You might have seen me walking around campus in a suit last week. Then again, I was probably difficult to pick out. There were a lot of graduating seniors walking around in suits last week, hair freshly gelled and portfolios in hand, marching off to Hilles Library or the Charles Hotel. Come spring vacation, many of these suited students will have nice recruiting jobs lined up for next year. I, on the other hand, will not. Over the course of a week, I pretended to sell everything from cars to computers to denture cleansers. The one thing I couldn't sell my interviewers, however, was myself. Nobody wanted to hire me. I didn't land a job through the recruiting process--but, though you might not expect it, I did manage to win some peace of mind.

When Dec. 10 rolled around, I joined the large majority of my class in dropping off a batch of resumes at the Office of Career Services. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I knew I wanted to go to graduate school in the next few years but certainly not right away. I have led a fairly academic existence over the past three years (I'm a philosophy concentrator), and surely the fresh air of the "real world" would do my burnt-out mind some good. As I had heard through the grapevine, consulting companies have a secret hankering for kinds with problem-solving ability but no real business knowledge. My parents made a point of showing me newspaper profiles about Wall Street executives who had majored in such esoteric fields as classics or Sanskrit. For all I knew, the financial world might be crawling with closeted philosophy types, sneaking in a few illicit hours with Kierkegaard before taking the subway to work.

By intersession, a few invitations for interviews had trickled in. I bought my first suit and got a haircut. I did a few case questions on the Web, got them horribly wrong but remained guardedly optimistic. Hey, if I could pass my metaphysics classes, surely I could fake my way through some cost analyses!

How wrong I was. The real challenge wasn't the case questions but trying to look eager and enthusiastic about the job I was interviewing for. The harder I tried to come off as someone they would like, the more embarrassingly I failed. Even my desperate attempts at humor were rebuffed. During one case question about the denture industry, my interviewer asked me how we could make sure customers stick to our product. "But aren't they already quite literally stuck to it?" I replied. She smiled. "Next question."

But my recruiting gaffs didn't end just there. My subconscious always seemed to well up to the surface, turning every first-round resume interview into a therapy session. An interviewer would ask me about my extracurriculars, we would get to talking about competitiveness at Harvard, and I would finally add, "Yeah, a lot of people here seem to do things because they feel it's expected of them." "Hmm," my interviewer would smile, "I hear it gets particularly bad around this time of the year." Sooner or later, my interviewers got a whiff of my real interests, the way police dogs sniff out two kilos of hash in a carry-on bag.

My list of unprofessionalisms go on. I could mention the time I said out loud, to a friend on the penthouse floor of Hilles, "I guess I'm wasting my time and theirs as well." Moments later, a pantsuited woman standing 10 feet from me perked up, walked over and introduced herself as the representative from the firm I was interviewing with. I cringe to think how much of our conversation she overheard. As you can probably guess, I didn't get a second round interview.

Over the course of the past two weeks, the absurdity of my recruiting experience has rivaled that of experimental French theater. If you ever want to have a surreal encounter, try explaining to someone why your knowledge of Wittgenstein's philosophy of language has made you a better marketer. Or why a career in business is the natural extension of your love of literature. Or why a fledgling academic needs management skills. My interviewers weren't buying it, and more importantly, neither was I.

I don't mean to cast any aspersions on recruiting or the business world. From my brief taste of the recruiting process, business seems to be an exciting and challenging career; I've met a lot of people, both interviewers and interviewees, who are extremely talented and interesting people. But it's not for everyone. It may look like two commitment-free years of job experience, but it's also two years of solving business problems for large industrial corporations. If that has no bearing whatsoever on your future career, maybe those two years are better spent somewhere else.

Future entrepreneurs would probably gain important problem-solving skills by getting a two-year master's degree in philosophy. But why should they, if they have no desire to be philosophers? Likewise, why should future writers of lawyers or professors consult? If you want real world experience, surely there are other means of getting it.

It's now well into February, and I still haven't figured out what I want to do after graduation. The days are getting warmer; the clock's hands are ticking louder in my ear. But at least I've figured out one thing I don't want to do. That little bit of progress, however slight, was worth a lot of rejection.

Joshua Derman '99 is a Philosophy concentrator living in Quincy House.