The Professor Is A Headhunter

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As companies compete fiercely for top talent on campus, they're forging closer relationships with influential faculty members—and they're not shy about spreading around the cash

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Around the country, B-school and undergraduate professors with ties to big companies routinely recommend their best students as potential hires. Of course, recruiters continue to avail themselves of campus job fairs and more traditional means of scouring for talent. But more often than most students realize, money is part of the recruiting process. Sometimes the school benefits, as happens at the University of Houston. In other situations, professors themselves receive the corporate largess.

Direct payments to professors who offer recruiting tips are rare, according to company and campus officials. Instead, professors who receive corporate consulting fees or research grants sometimes pass along promising names as part of their relationship with companies hungry for talent. In one unusual case, Valero Energy Corp. (VLO ) recently provided gas cards to graduate teaching assistants at four Texas universities in exchange for the names of undergraduates deemed suitable for a company internship program. "There's a tremendous amount of money changing hands," says Maury Hanigan, who runs a New York-based firm that scouts MBAs for corporate clients. "It's all dressed up to pass the sniff test."

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In many cases, companies don't pay schools or professors explicitly for recruiting help but establish more subtle financial relationships. The accounting firm Ernst & Young maintains a list of about 2,800 top accounting professors. E&Y financially supports academics in a number of ways, including paying for what Ellen J. Glazerman, the firm's head of faculty relations, calls "buyout time," when a professor takes a semester off to develop a new course. Glazerman says some professors routinely identify top performers for E&Y—sometimes even intervening on behalf of job candidates who perform poorly in initial interviews.

http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine...28/b4042055.htm