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One thing's very clear in this data, and that is firms appreciate two things.
Number one, they appreciate people who have high ability, shall we say.
People who get high grades, good test scores, other measures of ability.
The other thing they appreciate is that you've had some experience in
their industry.
Either because you learned something or the thing we're focusing on is that you've
reduced the uncertainty as to whether or not you'd be a good fit in their industry.
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If you've never worked in the industry that I'm hiring you to work in before,
we don't know how well you're gonna fit there.
So when I got hired into academia, they already knew I would fit that pretty
well because I'd been a grad student and I'd been in school a long time.
But they didn't know it for sure and so over a period of time you figure out, hey,
this person can do research and can teach and things like that.
It's that type of thing, and the more we see that you've had experience doing that,
the better sense we have that you will fit in our industry.
[MUSIC]
Let's consider two applicants for a job.
They're both second year MBAs applying for full-time jobs at the same company.
Holding everything else equal,
if one of those candidates has worked in that industry before.
Their odds of getting that job are more than double
that of the person who's never worked in that industry.
In fact, they're about 2.4 times as high.
So just taking, you know, as a, as a baseline.
Suppose there's a company which accepts 10% of its
applicants that have never worked in the industry before.
That same company would accept, would make offers to about
24% of the people who have worked in that industry before.
So you can see that it's quite a dramatic difference,
it's more than twice as likely to get the job.
[MUSIC]
There's a very natural rent to own, if you will,
arrangement for MBA's, which is called the summer internship.
And it's extremely useful for testing the waters.
So an MBA who says, I'd really like to work in
investment banking, but they've never really worked in banking.
They can, by going to work in banking over the summer, they solve two problems.
One, they find out whether or not they like working in banking.
And the other is,
a bank might be very reluctant to hire somebody who's never worked in investment
banking if they're gonna have to go through a lot of effort to fire them.
They fire them naturally at the end of a summer internship.
There's a nice, natural breaking point in the employment relationship.
Now, a lot of those people get offers to come back, and
that's very helpful in terms of making the market work smoothly.
But if it didn't work out for some reason, the firm isn't stuck with
a person it doesn't want, which can be very disruptive and expensive.
[MUSIC]
You see that same thing where certainty, with,
where knowing that the person has experience is valuable to that employer.
But it's not quite as valuable because they're more willing to take a chance on
the outsider, because at the end of the summer they can get rid of them for free.
So in that, in, in the example there, if we have two applicants to
a similar firm for summer internships, the, the person with
experience in that industry is about 1.8 times as likely to get the job offer.
Whereas if it were a full time job, it's well over two times, closer to 2.4 times.
[MUSIC]
We see a lot of people who get summer internships get an offer to go back and
work there, in our data it's about half.
Now a lot of the people who don't get offers to come back that's for
budgetary reasons.
They go to a small company that turns out to not have
the ability to hire the person back or something like that.
But a lot of it, if you look at companies that have large numbers of summer interns,
they're making offers to maybe most of them, but far from all of them.
So firms and students are able to take advantage of what they learned
about each other over the summer to get the better matches.
The summer is very useful, both for learning about firms,
learning about industries, learning about each other and so forth.
We see a lot of firms make offers to the people that work there over the summer.
We see a lot of students go back to those firms, but a lot choose not to.
So both sides of the market are learning something, both about
the match they have with that firm and how that compares to their outside options.
That they then can go compare that they then can go look at over the next
recruiting season.
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The time to take a chance is in the summer.
People will take a chance on you in your summer internships much
more than they will in full time jobs.
And you see more and more, at least Stanford students,
I don't know about other business schools as much, taking,
trying to split their time between two internships over the summer.
And especially if you want to try something new,
that's a great idea, as long as each of those internships is long enough for
you to learn whether or not this is the right place for you.
So if, if a five week internship is just enough time to, you know,
learn where your desk is, and you don't really get a great feel for the industry,
then that's not gonna solve the problem.
But if five weeks or six weeks, or however long a split internship is,
is long enough to really learn about that industry, and that business,
then splitting your summer up gives, gives you so many more options going forward.
And so much more information going forward.
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