- The Perception: Tuck is the place to go if you want to get into consulting or finance.
- The Reality: Most students come to Tuck with the goal of someday running an organization—be it a Fortune 500 company or a startup organization. It's just a question of their starting point. Some start in professional services and leapfrog into a senior management role. Others, coming right out of Tuck, begin with corporate roles that include significant leadership responsibility.
- The Connection: The Pipeline Partnership Program is a pilot program designed by the Career Development Office (CDO) to give students an entry into senior management tracks at the world's most influential companies. For students, the starting salaries and career trajectories of these opportunities are as competitive as they come. For companies, the Pipeline Program provides access to Tuck's amazing source of talent.
Tuck is known for its strong relationships with recruiters from all industries—relationships that are often grounded in close alumni connections. But as Tuck goes after new recruiting relationships, particularly leadership development programs, the CDO finds itself reaching out to companies where there may be fewer alumni connections and therefore less personal knowledge of the Tuck experience. "You can't just flip on a light switch," says Richard McNulty, director of the CDO. "We need to build these relationships over time."
The Pipeline Program started with a proposal to PepsiCo during talks about Tuck students joining the company's Leadership Development Program. The CDO knew that in a strong recruiting year, great opportunities like these—when the company hires just one or two students—can easily be overshadowed by consulting and investment banking. And companies like PepsiCo don't want to invest time in a school where they don't get the attention of its students.
"Tuck is unique," says McNulty. "Our size, our focus, and our standards set us apart from other top-tier schools." Not only does the training in general management provide a solid foundation for corporate leadership, he says, but "we are able to mobilize our resources to work with individual students and employers. It's an ideal situation for achieving the right fit."
The presentation to PepsiCo was a success. Over the next year, PepsiCo returned to campus three more times to meet with students and Tuck administrators. They also put forth broader recruiting efforts, bringing a new division—SoBe Beverages, co-founded by John Bello T'74—to recruit for marketing and conducting an all-company briefing, which included international marketing and strategy in addition to the leadership program. "These efforts gave PepsiCo the visibility it needed to capture student attention—not just students who were already thinking about corporate opportunities but also those who were focused on consulting and I-banking," says Rebecca Joffrey T'97, an associate director in the CDO.
The CDO also worked to raise the profile of PepsiCo's leadership program. "Recruiters want to be assured that schools will help generate a return on their recruiting investment," says McNulty. So the CDO arranged for PepsiCo to meet with the Tuck General Management Club, wrote a profile of the company for the student newspaper The Tuck Times, and sponsored a panel on leadership development opportunities featuring PepsiCo along with panelists from the Pipeline Program's other partners (which now include Cargill, Citigroup, and MassMutual).
Over 80 students attended the panel (a terrific show of interest for this type of event, says Joffrey), and some 56 expressed interest in applying to the PepsiCo Leadership Development Program. Applicants were offered a series of company-specific workshops and, in lieu of a cover letter, were asked to write a pitch showing how their particular skills would further PepsiCo's strategic interests. In the end, seven first-year Tuck students were invited to PepsiCo's world headquarters in Purchase, N.Y., for final interviews—more than those invited from any other school. Class President Kirc Savage T'07 accepted his offer and is now working for the Quaker Oats division in Chicago. And two more students were hired into PepsiCo for strategy and marketing roles.
"From building a new recruiting relationship to working with the students through the selection process, we all worked very hard for those hires," says McNulty. Not only is that a productive outcome for those students, but it's also the right move for Tuck's future, he says. "The current job market for Tuckies is stronger than it's been in years. Looking forward, we want to have a diversified portfolio of opportunities so that our graduates can go anywhere they want—whether that is to Wall Street or Main Street, Boston or Beijing."
