Recruit This, McKinsey

Times are tough right now. But you New York management consultants and Wall Street investment bankers know that, and you’ve been busy cutting costs wherever possible at your firms. Problem is, you think it will actually help your firms if you cut down on the number of Harvard students you recruit this fall, and if you slash the logo-imprinted giveaways, lavish dinners and other such perks you used to use to lure us into your companies, back in the good old days of ’99.

You couldn’t be more wrong. As the McKinsey people especially would say, strong firms weather tough times by focusing on their core competencies, those specific tasks and skills that a particular firm does better than anyone else. So let’s take a look at you guys and see what your core competencies are. Most people would suggest that consulting firms like McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group and Bain excel at offering critical, unbiased strategy advice to Fortune 500 companies. Similarly, the conventional wisdom holds that Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan sell shares of companies to the public, facilitate mergers and acquisitions, and help wealthy individuals stay wealthy.

Again, the conventional wisdom is wrong. As I see it, the core competency of a consulting firm or an investment bank isn’t any of these low value, commodity services that your average junior loan officer at Fleet Bank could do in his sleep. The real value these companies bring to the world and to their shareholders is their unmatched skill at recruiting fresh-faced young students from the Ivy League. Those lavish dinners with the managing directors, those Morgan Stanley-emblazoned squeeze balls and those endless series of first round, second round, supplemental, on-site, off-site, group, case, informational and informal interviews are what you guys do best. No one else in the world can do what you guys do when it comes to convincing the best minds of my generation to follow your madness, becoming well-fed and Hermés-clad, dragging themselves through midtown streets at dawn, looking for the car service home after a rough night with a pitchbook.

If you accept that the core competency of all the traditional firms that recruit Harvard students is in fact recruiting Harvard students, then there are some pretty interesting implications for how these companies should get themselves through this recession. First off, they should outsource all their secondary and tertiary activities—you know, like consulting and investment banking—so that they can focus all of their efforts on recruiting. The consulting firms can accomplish this by purchasing the answer keys to Harvard Business School case studies and simply changing the names above the graphs for their PowerPoint presentations. Similarly, the investment banks can outsource the I-banking departments—which again is just replacing “Company X” with “Company Y” on the front page of pitchbooks that no one reads anyways—to a Third World country with strong English and typing skills, like Cambodia or India. Trading desks can be replaced by networks of day traders working from home. Ideally, once these firms have restructured, they will retain nothing but a HR department and an outgoing, charismatic, racially diverse skeleton staff to recruit us outgoing, charismatic and racially diverse students.

Secondly, by outsourcing your distractions from recruiting, your firms will be able to focus on gaining a greater market share, which of course is far more important than your share price or your profit margins. As long as Fortune or Institutional Investor ranks your firm Number 1 in mergers and acquisitions, then who cares if you’re not making money? By outsourcing such work to vast pools of labor that will work for pennies, and then by recruiting more and more Harvard students to fill in the gaps, you’ll have a potentially unlimited workforce, guaranteeing that on all deals your firms do (outsourced, of course!), your name will be on the coveted left side of the WSJ tombstone ad.

Above all, remember that companies that do nothing of value must obscure that fact by hiring the best people to appear dynamic and innovative while doing such meaningless work. As such, you ignore recruiting Harvard students at your peril. Recruiting Harvard students is a long-standing tradition at your firms (dating back at least to the mid ’80s), it is the only thing you do well (see above), and it is the only thing that will keep your firms from capsizing in this stormy economic climate. So, if you want me, you’re going to have to work for it. I expect from you an elegant dinner next week at the Capital Grille. Don’t think about showing up in anything less than a $2,000 Zegna suit—I expect only the best from a potential employer. And bring toys, lots of toys!

Alex Rubalcava ’02 is a government concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.