Nov. 15, 2018

Doug Hanslip, director of MBA career services

What is your educational/professional background?
I received my undergraduate degree in communications studies and economics from Northwestern University. I earned my MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern with academic concentrations in finance, marketing and management policy.

I realized primary product marketing experience working in consumer packaged goods at General Food/Kraft/Altria early in my career, followed by a transition into investment banking and capital markets after receiving my MBA. I departed Wall Street after 15 years for executive search, where I co-headed practices and recruiting platforms for the world’s largest search and staffing firms such as Korn Ferry and Allegis Group, respectively, where I was instrumental in the growth and development of my business unit’s brand, positioning and global market development, with a particular expertise across the financial services sectors.

I bring expansive knowledge of career services, a successful track record advising and placing individuals across all ages and numerous industries and functional roles, and a demonstrated ease and alacrity developing employer relations with a deep network of current and relevant hiring managers and talent acquisition professionals. The hiring and recruiting landscape is changing rapidly, and I’m hoping that the culmination of my skills, experiences and relationships will help me add value to the Moore School’s Office of Career Management (OCM) by preparing our MBA students for how one secures a great job in today’s evolving recruiting arena and where one looks to find the job that they best align with and aspire to, as well as help hone our practices in my new role within OCM.

Why does what you do matter?
What we do on the OCM team within the Moore School matters because of the guidance we individually provide to our MBA students. Whether it be working with them individually on their respective resumes and cover letters, teaching them focal interviewing techniques and interpersonal skills, or bringing companies to campus while connecting graduates to specific employers, the OCM team works hand-in-glove with the MBA office to get our students and graduates the best internships and employment opportunities available. 

Why are those programs important?
Similar to most MBA programs, we have core finance and marketing concentrations, but we also have a top-ranked operations and supply chain area of focus and concentration as well, which is a functional area realizing enormous growth and impact across global industries and roles today.

Our graduates also gain a deep core understanding of how to utilize data and business analytics and the tools one regularly uses in business to leverage this knowledge and expertise with ease and alacrity across industries and roles.

What are the most valuable skills that students could gain from a Moore School MBA program?
The core skills we push our students to achieve during their time here are a mastery of software and applications tied to managing data and analytics, a stronger sense of the global perspective within an international business landscape and a critical eye and intellectual curiosity from a global vantage regarding cause and effect and, ultimately, solution. Lastly, our graduates have a deep and relevant in-country international immersion program with a dynamic company or business unit within their chosen field of interest.

What do you think makes the Moore School stand out among other business schools?
The depth of our students’ and graduates’ primary experience and true international immersion and language study programs, combined with second-to-none understanding and real-life application of current business analytics tools like R, is what allows our business school students to differentiate in a field of what can be commoditized MBA programs.

Accounting is accounting, for example, and coursework among most major universities is not too dissimilar down to likely using the same textbooks. But when one realizes the global dimension and international economic influences that the Moore School provides, it truly makes a difference.

Is there anything else you’d like to mention?
The Moore School has several value-added research partnerships and centers of excellence that our MBA students can leverage as resources within their fields of study — applied business analytics, marketing solutions, operations and supply chain, and entrepreneurship to simply name a few. We believe that a degree from the Moore School prepares today’s MBA graduates for tomorrow’s jobs. With the business world changing so fast every year, MBA graduates today need to be armed with the tools and knowledge that companies are gearing their future business strategy and their finance, marketing and operations all toward, and the Darla Moore School of Business prepares our graduates for these roles better than most.