Broaden The Job Search

Harvard’s Office of Career Services is an excellent asset for students. Whether a student is looking for a summer internship, exploring career opportunities, or finding post-graduation employment, OCS has a wealth of readily accessible resources, including brochures, contacts, career counselors, and programs aimed at providing information about a broad range of career opportunities. However, many students will not use any of these resources. This is because one program, the On-Campus Recruiting Program, overshadows all the rest. OCR has detrimentally and unnecessarily influenced undergraduates’ conceptions of employment opportunities, and OCS needs to do more to not only present other options but also to make them as easily accessible.

Out of the 1,571 seniors in the Class of 2008, 688 students used OCR, or about 45 percent of the entire class. These students submitted 15,816 applications in total. Almost half of the students who applied to jobs using the e-recruiting program accepted job offers, meaning that just over 20 percent of the entire graduating class ended up accepting job offers through OCR. OCR is unquestionably ubiquitous. It provides a large number of jobs to undergraduates and attracts many more applicants than there are positions available.

However, the portal through which students access OCR, Crimson~Experience! (commonly called e-recruiting), can be a source of non-OCR opportunities. E-recruiting has become synonymous with on-campus interviews, but there are listings for jobs that do not offer on-campus interviews. Yet this aspect of the e-recruiting process receives little attention because OCR is so widespread.

The problem with OCR is that the scope of available positions is incredibly limited. While OCS excitedly announces on its website that over 25 different industries were represented in last year’s OCR, it acknowledges that the companies represented are heavily weighted to the consulting and, at least until this year, financial sectors. This is an obvious fact to anyone who has ever used the program.

There is nothing wrong with applying for jobs in consulting or finance. These areas often promise highly paid, intellectually stimulating positions and can be good options for individuals who do not yet have a clear direction of where they want to go in their careers. However, OCR makes these options much more salient and gives them much more weight than it ought to; it is comparably much easier to find and apply for these jobs than for jobs that are not listed through OCR or on the e-recruiting website.

As a friend of mine once noted that, if 1,000 (or even only 688) people run by your window screaming, you are going to go outside and see what all of the commotion is about. In this way, OCR similarly distracts students from looking at other job opportunities; “everyone” is looking at jobs through OCR, so it is very easy to think that you should be doing so as well.

OCS has done some work, especially this year, to make other opportunities more readily accessible, but more needs to be done. E-recruiting contains jobs that do not necessarily conduct on-campus interviews, and a first step OCS should take would include advertising these positions and making it clearer that, through the same process and website that OCR uses, students can find an even broader range of jobs. As a second effort, OCS should make a point of adding more companies to the e-recruiting website even if they do not hold on-campus interviews. The key is making as broad a range of opportunities as possible accessible from one easy-to-use location. Finally, while there are several career fair events throughout the year, none receives as much publicity or focus as the major career fair in the fall, roughly corresponding to the time when OCR deadlines in consulting and finance are occurring. OCS should to more to highlight additional career fairs throughout the year so that other opportunities are as easy to find and as easy to apply for as those through OCR.

This is undoubtedly one of the hardest years for job seekers in recent memory, and, while there are fewer opportunities to be found through OCR, this affords the perfect chance to reexamine the way that students are looking for and finding employment. By explicitly broadening its focus, by making students aware of other opportunities, and by making it even easier to apply for these opportunities, OCS will further its goal of helping students find the right job.


Shai D. Bronshtein ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Lowell House.