Help Still Wanted

By John Greenwald Reported By Carole Buia/New Brunswick, Michelle Mccalope/Houston, Jeanne Mcdowell/Los Angeles And Leslie Whitaker/Chicago

In the white-hot job market that held sway last October, PricewaterhouseCoopers launched a spirited talent hunt. It extended lucrative offers to a score of business and economics majors at Rutgers University in New Jersey who were eager to embark this summer on careers with the big accounting and consulting firm. Some of them will be heading for the beach instead. The company has postponed their corporate debuts until next January. Says a senior: "We were gearing up to start our jobs, and then this letter came. But at least they're not laying us off."

Not yet, anyway. The delay reflects the downshifted reality of recent months, putting the class of 2001 face to face with the worst U.S. economy in a decade. The result has been a crazy- quilt pattern of campus recruiting, with some companies retracting their offers while others are still thrusting bonuses into students' hands. "This year was going gangbusters," says C. Randall Powell, director of the placement office for Indiana University's Kelley Business School, which serves some 1,350 undergraduate seniors. "But this spring we quickly noticed a significant drop-off."

Yet the hiring momentum has been so great that most seniors continue to find work. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, employers intend to hire 18.8% more new grads this year than they did in 2000, down from the 23.4% increase they had projected earlier this year. "Graduates are still getting good offers, and salaries are holding," says Richard Equinoa, director of career services at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. "But let's talk in six months."

Slumping consumer confidence and declining retail sales have already taken a job toll. At Southern University, a traditionally black school in Baton Rouge, La., retailers J.C. Penney and Mervyn's have cut their interviews by two-thirds. "The options for students are becoming more limited," says Kris Tiefenthaler, the director for college relations at Sears Roebuck. But retailers have high churn rates, so Sears--which recently announced store closings and layoffs--is sticking to plans to hire 200 new grads this year.

For now, declines in offers from staggering New Economy companies such as Cisco Systems and Lucent Technologies have been offset by bids from Old Economy geezers such as General Motors and Johnson & Johnson, which have been avidly hunting for accountants, programmers and engineers.

In the public-service sector, the demand for teachers to instruct the young and for nurses to treat the old remains just as hot. At the University of Delaware, a recent job fair lured recruiters from 150 school districts across the U.S., who raced through 3,000 interviews in a single day. Small wonder that some 95% of Delaware's approximately 500 graduating teachers have landed jobs. The rest are merely avoiding them.

As for nurses, schools can't train them fast enough to match the rate at which baby boomers are turning gray. "The shortage we have now is the worst we've seen," says Pamela Beeman, a dean of the College of Health and Nursing Sciences at Delaware. That's balm to graduating seniors like Celine Klapinsky, who will join the Christiana Care Health System hospital in July at a starting wage of $19.02 an hour, or about $780 for a 40-hour week. Says she: "They offered to pay my entire senior tuition, plus my books and other fees."

Meanwhile, someone forgot to tell Microsoft that recruiting by tech companies was down. Microsoft has always competed ferociously--no surprise there--for the brightest young minds. That has meant fat offers for students like Neel Murarka, a Cal Poly computer-science major who accepted a $70,000 starting salary--plus a signing bonus and stock options--to join a Microsoft team that will develop new software from the ground up. Antitrust troubles or not, Microsoft is still a cool company, and it wooed Murarka and other hotshot prospects with an all-expenses-paid visit to Hollywood, capped off by tickets to the Grammy Awards. "We had a blast," says Murarka. "Everyone who went to the show ended up joining Microsoft."

Few class of 2001 grads have been in greater demand than civil engineers. Their bridge, road and building-construction talent is coveted by companies and public-works crews alike. "We can't produce enough of them," says Al Barron, the director of career services at Southern. "Folks will come 2,000 miles to talk to one person." One like Montrell Harris, a graduating senior who is juggling six offers that range from $39,000 to $49,000. "The only hectic thing," Harris says, "is deciding which one I want."

For business and finance students, the outlook has grown decidedly mixed. More than half a dozen investment banks and consulting firms wooed Indiana senior Dick Pines, bringing him to New York City for expense-paid weekends that included one memorable stay in a $500-a-night hotel. Pines finally signed with Credit Suisse First Boston for $55,000, plus a $10,000 bonus-cum-relocation grant. But classmate Jori Issette is still sending out resumes. "I'm a little discouraged," she says, "but you have to keep your head up."

The seniors signed up by Cisco last fall have a new appreciation of Internet time: they were recruited, hired and fired in the space of six months without ever doing a day's work. They even collected three months' severance plus the run of Cisco's outplacement services. Some jilted seniors were happy to bid adieu to this loser. "In the fall Cisco was healthy and growing," a student says. "Now it's slowing down, and I don't want to work for a company with problems."

Ironically, the slumping job market could help rekindle employee loyalty, which had seemed as old-fashioned as a time clock when workers could bounce around with impunity. Accounting major Katherine Stiveson plans to start a $41,000-a-year job with Deloitte & Touche this summer after she graduates from California State University at Northridge. And Stiveson vows to work extra hard. "I'm going to make sure I'm doing my job well and stay an aggressive employee," she says. "I don't want to be laid off."

Sears recruiter Tiefenthaler spots a similar trend. "There used to be a job-hopping environment, but now I think the pendulum is swinging back, and people may want to stay with one company longer," she says. That shift has Sears "feeling pretty good." At the outset of the decade, it would be ironic indeed if one of the first legacies of the New Economy '90s turned out to be a docile class of '01.

--Reported by Carole Buia/New Brunswick, Michelle McCalope/Houston, Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles and Leslie Whitaker/Chicago