The Great Campus Manhunt

Mike Frazier, the young personnel manager of Grey Advertising, Inc., sits in a library cul-de-sac at Harvard University. He is prospecting. His mission is to find bright Harvard men who, upon graduation, will be willing to work at Grey as account-executive trainees. He studies some sheets of paper supplied to him by the university's job-placement office; the résumé and academic history of his day's first prospect. On paper, the prospect looks ideal; he's a student of high academic standing and apparently enormous energy, a man involved in extracurricular activities and part-time work, a man with drive and ambition. A man, evidently-- ah, beautiful!--to whom might be applied all those grand hyphenated labels that the business world esteems so highly: a self-starter, a go-getter, a take-charge guy. Exactly the kind of man to be an account executive in a big New York ad agency.

The prospect appears--a rumpled-looking young fellow with a dark shirt, wild hair and devilish grin. Mike Frazier stands up and holds out his hand. "Hi, I'm Mike Frazier. Sit down and tell me about yourself."

"Well, I do OK, as you can see. What I want to know is, how good are you? Your brochure says you're a big organization but you allow room for individual expression. Do you really want individuals? I mean, individuals?"

Mike Frazier sighs. He isn't interviewing the student; it's the other way around, as usual. This student, this talented young man, can hope for half-a-dozen promising job offers before he graduates. He can pick and choose. If Grey Advertising wants him, Grey must sell itself to him.

Does Grey want him? Mike Frazier isn't quite sure. He ends the interview by inviting the student to visit the agency's offices in Manhattan--all expenses paid, of course. A few days later, the student turns up in Manhattan. He brings his guitar. He sits in Grey's modish reception room, sings and strums folk-rock.

"What are we hiring these days?" says an older executive. "I know we need new blood, but--"

Frazier doesn't know quite what to say. "We're afraid not to be interested in this guy," he tells the executive. "He's terrific. But, well, we wonder how he'll fit in. We run a freewheeling shop here, but it is an organization. You can't get 1500 people working together efficiently without some kind of organization."

* * *

The great campus head-hunt. It began in the early Fifties, when a few large companies, worried about having enough resident talent to keep them riding high in the expansive years ahead, sent experimental recruiters to a few campuses and snatched up a few hundred of the brightest, most business-oriented seniors and graduate students. The typical campus placement office in those days was hidden in a dim little basement room and administered by a dean or somebody else who spent most of his time in other offices attending to other duties. The average student never thought of finding a job through this obscure establishment, if, indeed, he even knew of its existence; and the average company was not represented there at all except, perhaps, by a faded, dusty, five-year-old recruiting brochure that nobody read. But as companies began to worry about a talent shortage, the on-campus recruiting business grew bigger. Universities hired full-time placement directors. The placement offices moved upstairs into bright new quarters with libraries and interviewing cubicles. In the 1968--1969 academic year, by a conservative estimate, some 3000 companies sent recruiters onto more than 1000 campuses, and they held several million interviews with some 300,000 students. The majority were hired before graduation.

While this scramble for campus talent was growing bigger, it was also growing more nervous. Companies found themselves competing not only against one another but also against a new set of campus attitudes. The so-called Silent Generation of the Fifties had given way to the more articulate, socially concerned and politically activist -- or at least louder -- generation of today. In this new generation were many who said that business was, as the cliché went, "irrelevant." They accused business of being motivated solely by profit, linked in sinister comradeship with the military establishment, resistant to social change, stiflingly conformist, intellectually dead, run by and for white-collared robots whose suburban lives were tormented by ulcers, failed marriages and unhappy children.

* * *

On the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, a harassed and angry man shuffles backward down a sidewalk. Two feet from his face, advancing as he retreats, is the front rank of a large, equally angry crowd of students. Everyone is gesticulating and shouting wildly. A few policemen jitter about on the periphery of the crowd, earnestly trying to look unbrutal. The man who is walking backward stops abruptly, shouts a few words in the ear of a cop and grabs the cop's bullhorn. The students are pressing hard against him, but he stands his ground.

"You've got the wrong chemical company!" he howls through the bullhorn. "I'm not from Dow, goddamn it, I'm from Celanese!"

The recruiters of Dow Chemical Company, until recently the Government's subcontractor in producing napalm, had been held prisoner in so many campus interviewing rooms that each routinely carried a ham sandwich as part of his recruiting kit. Other companies have had similar trouble, though not usually so often. Even banks. "Every company in the world seems to do something students don't like," remarks Jack Peyman, employee-relations vice-president of the Chase Manhattan Bank (which now recruits on about 125 campuses--up from 28 seven years ago). "Our man got himself picketed at Cornell last year, for instance. He couldn't imagine what the beef was. Turned out it was the bank's financial involvement in racist South Africa."

There is a lot of anti-business talk in the air. Time Inc. and the Marketing Science Institute once held a seminar on "The Crisis in Marketing Manpower" and invited a group of students to come and say why they didn't want marketing careers. "Business is largely ignored at Swarthmore College," one student told the assembled executives. "There are a lot of problems that seem more relevant to the students -- in civil rights and the social field, VISTA, the Peace Corps, environmental pollution." A student from the University of Michigan grumbled, "I don't think it's accidental that every person in this room is white." He went on to tell of his experiences as a musician with the Lansing Symphony: "All the Oldsmobile executives would come to the concerts and they all wore dinner jackets." Something about the dinner jackets troubled him. He couldn't quite articulate it: something businessish or upper-middle suburban, something about conformity. "My impression was that these people weren't interested in the music, didn't know anything about it and didn't really care."

* * *

On the campus of the State University of New York at Buffalo, a big manufacturing company's recruiter scans the file of one Michael Aldrich. The recruiter reads it with mixed feelings. Mike Aldrich, the dossier says, is a teaching fellow and a straight-A student, heading for a Ph.D. in English, with a strong secondary interest in science. A rare catch for any big company: potentially a high-level salesman, perhaps, or public-relations executive. But the file also says Aldrich isn't quite sure where he wants his life to go. He is evidently talking to corporate recruiters mainly to get information. The recruiter is worried. Some of the very brightest students, he is aware, are stridently anti-business.

Mike Aldrich enters the interviewing room and the recruiter's face brightens. Unlike many students on this often-turbulent campus, Aldrich has had a haircut recently, wears no beard, is dressed neatly in jacket and tie. He looks--well, businesslike.

When they start to talk, the recruiter's smile sags a little. "My karma is self-determination," Mike Aldrich explains. "It may sound petulant, but the only job I'm interested in is one where I'd be driven by my own demands, not the demands of the company. I've got to set my own course."

The recruiter mumbles: "Well, uh, I'm sure, when you've worked your way up the ladder--"

"I'm not interested in ladders and all that," says Aldrich. "I've got to be independent, whatever I'm doing. It's got to be my job, you see? Something I'm totally immersed in. Not just a place in some hierarchy, where you get ulcers waiting for the next promotion."

The recruiter flounders toward firmer ground. He brings up the subject of money. Aldrich shakes his head. "Money doesn't interest me," he says. "Matter of fact, right now I live in a commune. I can get along on a thousand dollars a year."

The recruiter is out of his depth. He says: "Well, then, let's talk about your specific interests. What kinds of activities are you in?"

"Most of my time these days is taken up by an organization I founded, called Lemar. That's short for Legalize Marijuana. It's nationwide now, growing fast. It keeps me pretty busy."

After a while, the recruiter shambles to his feet. "Well, um, it's been nice talking to you."

* * *

"Sometimes they just don't understand each other's language," says John Fox, the long-haired young director of Harvard's Office of Graduate and Career Plans. "Even when they both want to get together, it can be hard. They've been living in different worlds. Their goals can be different. Neither can quite grasp what the other wants."

"Yes, times have changed," says Jack Shingleton, placement director at Michigan State University. (Shingleton runs one of the biggest placement offices in the country: some 2600 recruiters and recruitment teams visited his campus in (continued on page 222)Campus Manhunt(continued from page 162) the 1968--1969 academic year and held more than 30,000 interviews.) "College people aren't interested just in salary and security anymore. They're more critical and skeptical than they used to be. They ask more questions, sharper questions, new questions. They can afford to; they know they're in demand. A company must be on the ball if it hopes to do any hiring."

• • •

Mike Frazier, the recruiter from Grey Advertising, is at Morehouse College in Georgia. A black student walks into the interviewing room.

"Hi," says Mike. "I'm Mike Fr--"

"I suppose you're here to hire your token nigger, right?"

• • •

And yet, to the surprise of many, business is holding its own--in fact, is managing to hire more college graduates than ever before. "We haven't found it true that college students are, quote, turned off by business, unquote," says Harold E. Roush. college-relations director of RCA. "Some are Most aren't. We're hiring all we want. It isn't true that they all plan to drop out of our technological society. What is true is that we can't just open a door anymore and expect them to pour in, begging for jobs. We've got to go out and convince them--with ever higher salaries and other, less tangible rewards." (RCA sent 283 convincers to campuses last year and signed some 1000 recruits.) Even Dow Chemical reports in somewhat amazed tones that the number of students signing up to talk to its men (they hunt on some 300 campuses) has increased each year through the Sixties. College placement chiefs make similar reports. Dr. F. Thomas Sheeder of the University of Miami says 25 percent more job interviews took place on his campus in the 1968--1969 academic year than the year before. "The philosophical value of money varies inversely with the number of years to graduation and self-support," remarked a cynical Princeton senior last spring, observing a group of sophomores who were demonstrating against the university's investments in South Africa.

"If business is for the birds," says Newell Brown, Princeton's career-services director, "then this campus is something of an aviary." He admits he is puzzled, but so is nearly everyone else in the campus head-hunting business. How can the two phenomena be reconciled: the widespread notion that college students scorn business and the statistical fact that--in the end--they don't? Everyone has his own explanation. Some grumble that reporters have exaggerated a minor phenomenon to manufacture a hot story. "There has been too much press coverage of student radicals, a small but very vocal minority," says Dr. Thomas Clark, university-relations manager of Celanese Corporation (whose recruiters spend some 650 mandays on 150 campuses each year). Others think business itself is guilty of exaggeration. "We've worried too loudly about the students' increasingly critical attitude," says Eugene Boyd, vice-president and corporate personnel director of the Coca-Cola Company. "We've blown it up out of proportion. Sure, we're having a sharp debate with the students. But we've made the debate sound like a war." Yet to dismiss campus criticism of business as exaggerated--to say the criticism is unreal, a statistical mistake--is itself an exaggeration. "The criticism is real," says Herb Michener, college-relations manager of Scott Paper Company. "Damned real."

Then why is business hiring so many students? How could Scott, for instance, snatch some 125 "sharp minds" off campuses this year, twice as many as in a typical year at the beginning of the Sixties? "Ah," says Michener, happy to be asked the question. "What's happening is revolution. Business is changing--adapting, redesigning itself into forms that the students like better. The students have forced this to happen. The old image of business--stiff-collared, pragmatic, uninterested in aesthetics or humanitarianism or social citizenship--is dying. Companies in which that old image is not dying are not going to live."

• • •

On the Hempstead, New York, campus of Hofstra University, a worried knot of students sits in the waiting room of the university's placement office. They all look uncomfortable in dark suits and white shirts. They await IBM, which is due on campus with a task force of three recruiters. Among college seniors, giant IBM has a reputation for paying top dollar and offering wide-open opportunities but requiring decorous behavior and shirts of pure establishment white.

"I bought this white shirt specially for today," one of the students says. "Do I look IBM?"

"Don't worry about it," says the university's placement director with an easy grin. "IBM is probably as anxious to get you as you are to get IBM."

The three youngish IBM hunters turn up. They talk in a breezy, informal way that sometimes borders on the hip and certainly doesn't sound like stiff IBM. ("What's your bag?" one of them asks a student, and the student looks startled and says, "You mean--what job am I looking for?") They introduce them selves as Pete, Ev and John. Their shirts are, respectively, white, tan and blue--blowing that myth to the winds.

• • •

The recruiting literature that festoons college placement offices today takes a determinedly unbusinesslike (and sometimes self-conscious) attitude. Aetna Life & Casualty titles its job booklet "Your Own Thing," explains that "helping people is our kind of thing" and promises recruits the double reward of "making good and doing good," Honeywell illustrates its booklet with a picture of a love-beaded hippie and vows that the company is hunting for "mavericks." Corning Glass Works claims to be looking for "iconoclasts." Norton Company shyly asks, "Can you trust a company that's over 83?" And the corporate recruiters are living reprints of the literature. Most are, or at least look and act, just under 30 years of age. Some are full-time recruiters who haunt campuses all year; others are simply bright young men who are pulled off other jobs and assigned to temporary campus duty during the peak (January-March) hunting season. They are carefully picked for their degree of rapport with what business leaders envision as the "younger generation."

• • •

In an apartment on the East Side of Manhattan, a party is in progress. It's a loud party of young adults that seems likely to become rather indecorous. Two young men arrive about 9:30 P.M. One is a high-ranking senior from the Oshkosh campus of Wisconsin State University. His name is Larry. He is tall and thin and looks bewildered. His companion, George, is a recruiter from a large Wall Street bank that is prepared to spend a good deal of money and effort to hook Larry. George and the bank are both aware that some college students imagine banks to be ponderously stuffy places, and he is a recruiter largely because of what he calls his "unstuffitude." He has advanced sideburns, talks a lot about the girls he's balled; and the word establishment, sneeringly intoned, crops up often in his conversation. A real swinger, this George.

He introduces Larry to some attractive airline stewardesses and bank secretaries and makes sure Larry's glass stays full. The party hasn't been organized exclusively for Larry's benefit, but most of the liquor has been supplied by George. He will put the cost on his expense account. The bank won't question the amount. George's expense budget, like many recruiters', is virtually unlimited. George likes this life. He works hard at recruiting; he wants to keep the job until, like an athlete, he grows too old.

Larry looks uncomfortable. People keep coming up to him and asking how he likes swingin' New York. He has a pale, haunted face that reminds one of the girls, she says, of a "misunderstood artist." ("Actually, I'm a business-administration major," he mumbles.) The girls cluster around him in a vaguely predatory way.

Larry leaves about 11:30, looking overwhelmed, with the explanation that he must be up early the next morning to catch a plane home. The prospect of returning to the vast silent spaces of Wisconsin seems to fill him with relief.

George sits morosely on a chair after Larry leaves. "Oh, hell," he says. "I think I overdid it."

He is correct, A few days later, Larry phones recruiter Tom Lewis of Kimberly-Clark, whose main executive offices are in the quiet little town of Neenah, Wisconsin.

"Is that offer still open?" asks Larry.

"Indeed it is."

"Great. I'll see you in swingin' Neenah."

• • •

Tom Lewis is a full-time campus head-hunter, and a highly successful one. He is 32. His manner is one of quiet good cheer; he wears no long sideburns and he speaks dictionary English. "It's silly to generalize about the so-called younger generation," he says. "Trying to figure out what they want or how you should act toward them is a losing proposition, because there is no 'they' in that sense. You're dealing with individuals. Some are swingers, some are social-reform types, some are born suburbanites. All you can do is be yourself. Try to put on some kind of act and you've had it."

Lewis' company, the manufacturer of Kleenex and other paper products, must add some 300 college-educated people to its payroll each year to replace those leaving and to maintain an ambitious expansion program. About 100 are expected to come directly from college campuses. Lewis and two other men, aided in peak periods by temporary recruiters pulled off other jobs, have the assignment of hunting down those 100. To do this, in the 1968--1969 academic year, they made about 160 trips to 110 colleges all over the country. They interviewed some 3200 students. Of these, 800 were felt to be worthy of further consideration. About 525 were offered company-paid trips to various Kimberly-Clark plants and offices, and 400 accepted. Half of them pleased the executives who were their prospective bosses, and these 200 were formally offered jobs. Half, or 100, signed on.

"In other words," says Lewis, "to hire one good man, we interview 32. It isn't easy."

On a typical hunting day, Tom Lewis drives onto Wisconsin State's Oshkosh campus about 8:30 on a cold March morning. This vast, flat campus houses some 11,000 students. It looks serene in the bright morning sunshine. Back in November of 1968, a group of student radicals tore the president's office apart, but the hard-line university administration promptly expelled most of them and the campus has been relatively quiet ever since.

In a large room lined with file cabinets, Tom Lewis is greeted by Dick Turzenski, a former elementary school administrator who is now the university's placement chief. As is customary, Turzenski has coffee brewing for his recruiter guests. Among them are a man from a Milwaukee bank and two from Bendix Corporation. The Bendix men look tired. They have been traveling for a month and face another long trip that night. The night before, seeking diversion, they hit a few bars in Oshkosh. "I should know better," one of them grumbles as he sips his coffee. "I'm going to spend April in bed."

Turzenski, a quiet, wryly humorous man, also looks tired. By the time the 1968--1969 hunting season is over, he will have scheduled some 8000 interviews for 250 companies. "That's about a 30 percent increase since last year," he says. "You say students are turned off by business? Sometimes I wish it were a little bit truer."

He hands Tom Lewis a bundle of 12 student files. A few weeks earlier, Kimberly-Clark had sent Turzenski a list of the job categories for which the company would be recruiting and students who were interested signed up to see the hunter. Turzenski then scheduled them into half-hour slots. Tom Lewis has a full schedule today: six students in the morning, six in the afternoon. "I could handle more," he says, "but it wouldn't be fair to the last few. After 12 interviews, I'm emotionally wrung."

It's nearly nine A.M. Lewis goes into the interviewing cubicle Turzenski has assigned him--a miniature office containing a desk and three chairs. From his attaché case, he pulls a bundle of papers and an alarm clock. He winds the clock and sets it on the desk, where it ticks loudly. He must stay on schedule throughout the day.

He scans the papers on the first student. Then he stands, walks to the door and looks out into a waiting room where several students sit, talking, flipping through recruiting brochures or staring speculatively into the middle distance. He calls out a name. One of the students rises and the day's parade has begun.

Once every half hour, a student will stride, shamble or shuffle into the little room. Within 20 minutes of meeting each one, Lewis must decide whether the man seems worth a $7,000--$12,000 starting salary, whether he should be invited to visit a plant or simply forgotten. As the day wears on, Lewis slumps lower in his chair, and his fingers, drumming on the desk, betray a gradual inner tightening.

He says to a student, "I don't see much extracurricular activity on your records here. Why is that?"

The student says, "I don't know. I'm not antisocial. But--well, I don't go for clubs and cliques and all that. I don't like the pettiness of it, the hypocrisy." The student speaks in a soft voice and does not look Lewis in the eye. ("I hate to see a guy who's been beaten down by the system," Lewis remarks after the student has left. "That poor guy may be an outsider all his life." On a sheet of paper on his desk, he writes, "Not suitable. Poor grades. Apparent trouble getting along with people.")

He asks an accounting major, "Why do you want to work for Kimberly-Clark?"

"Well, for one thing, it says in your literature that you give a man responsibility right away. No apprenticeship or anything like that."

"You read the literature, did you? Unusual. Anyway, you're right: We know apprenticeship and training are bad words these days. If a man has what it takes, he gets real work on his first day."

"I like that. And I also like the company's work on river-pollution control. I like the social conscience of it."

"You haven't asked about salary."

"Hell, that's minor. I assume you're competitive. Seven to eight hundred a month, right?"

"Right. Listen, we'll be getting in touch with you."

("I liked that guy," Lewis says. "He'll be hard to get. Probably has several other offers already.")

The clock ticks on.

A chemistry major asks: "Will I have to shave off my beard?"

"Hell, no."

"But I've heard--"

"You've heard myths."

("The misconceptions they have," says Lewis. "When is the celluloid-collar image going to die?")

Another student begins to sense, toward the end of his half hour, that he isn't making the grade. He asks: "Will I hear from you one way or the other?"

"Yes. You'll get a letter within two weeks."

The student fidgets uncomfortably. "Will you tell me the reasons for the decision, whatever it is?"

"Well, we--"

"I mean, I think a man ought to get reasons. Otherwise, he thinks maybe there's something wrong with him after a lot of these vague turndowns, you know?"

("Sad," says Lewis. "He's probably had 20 interviews without an offer. Usually, we have to do the selling; but in his case, it's the other way around.")

At the end of the day, the weary hunters gather around their host's coffee urn. Some placement directors hold formal post-interview sessions, but Turzenski thinks it's more useful just to stand around and chat.

"How'd you make out?" the hunters ask one another.

The Milwaukee bank man is gloomy. "Didn't score all day," he says. "There was one man who seemed great, but I don't think he likes banks."

"I had a kid who wanted to know our position on Vietnam, free sex and pot," one of the Bendix men says.

"What did you tell him?" somebody asks.

"I told him our main position is on money. We like it."

Somebody else is reading a copy of Business Today, a magazine published by a group of Princeton students who want business and universities to communicate better. "Listen to some of these letters to the editor," the reader chuckles. "Kid from Yale says, 'When you're ready to stop licking business' derrière, I'll be ready to listen.' Kid from Texas says, 'Don't send me another copy, I wouldn't want anyone to think I'd read that--' Well, it ends with a blank. I guess he said 'shit.' Some of these kids don't like us much."

The hunters laugh good-humoredly and start telling stories of encounters with campus radicals. Somebody tells of a demonstration in California. "I never saw so many beards in my life. Christ, I was in a thicket."

Tom Lewis recalls that he once formed a flying wedge with other hunters to escort a Dow recruiter through an angry mob. "Curly Hendershot, his name was. Little guy. I hate to see people bully a little guy."

"Yeah, I remember Curly," says one of the Bendix men. "We hit Columbia together couple of years ago. They picketed the hell out of him. Didn't bother him at all."

It doesn't seem to bother any of the hunters, in fact. "I don't mind a demonstration once in a while," says the bank man. "It sparks things up. Keeps you on your toes."

The only man present who seems worried about the future is Dick Turzenski. His worry is that the number of jobseeking students and campus-roving hunters will continue to grow faster than his budget and staff. He stands slumped in his doorway, sips coffee and watches the hunters depart down the corridor. "Maybe I'll be lucky," he says. "Maybe the business boom will slow down next year."