Tapping into graduates’ minds

Here's what Claudia Tattanelli, a red-high-heeled corporate executive, knows about today's college graduates:

They want to work for Google - or the Peace Corps.

They don't think government jobs are stodgy.

They don't want to work like dogs, the way their parents do. Instead, they want a better work-life balance.

They value diversity - and for them, diversity is not a code word meaning jobs for African Americans and Latinos. It's about a richness of experience for everyone, including the white majority.

"They need to feel comfortable. They are not willing to give themselves up as individuals and wear a mask when they come to work," said Tattanelli, 34, sitting in her cheerful office just off Rittenhouse Square.

The reason Tattanelli knows all this is that she is the U.S. president of Universum Communications Inc., a 20-year-old global market research firm based in Sweden, with U.S. headquarters in Philadelphia. Universum focuses on employment trends among the latest crop of college graduates, including those with advanced degrees.

Each year, Universum surveys more than 200,000 undergrads in 29 countries, including more than 64,000 in the United States. The rankings become fodder for dozens of graduation-pegged articles in publications such as BusinessWeek and Fortune magazine. Tattanelli ends up being quoted on the results.

But what readers see in print is only a sliver of Universum's business, which the company predicts will come close to $10 million in the United States this year, Tattanelli said.

Universum makes most of its money selling sliced-and-diced results of its research to companies wanting to improve their ability to hire millenials - young people born between 1981 and 2002.

Students fill out a 23-page, 57-question survey, which is distributed through college recruiting offices. They select their five favorite employers, and give their impressions of the companies' benefits, ethical standards, advancement opportunities and recruiting strategies, among many questions.

They also answer questions about themselves and their job expectations - including salary goals, preferred cities, best benefits, most effective recruiting strategies, and most valued corporate attributes, describing, in general, what attracts them to a company.

Companies can even get results for the individual colleges where they plan to recruit.

"It's important for us to identify and connect with this generation," said Amy Van Kirk, head of U.S. campus recruiting for PricewaterhouseCoopers L.L.P., a Universum client. The accounting and consulting firm hires 4,000 recent graduates each year.

Van Kirk said Universum's data, plus the firm's own research and focus groups, "help us to shape where we want to go in terms of our message."

When last year's research showed that graduates valued socially responsible companies, Pricewaterhouse responded by creating "Project New Orleans" to augment its in-house employee community service programs.

Next month, one student from each of 86 colleges will travel to New Orleans for a volunteer project, working with Pricewaterhouse staffers. "Now these students are in our pipeline," Van Kirk said. "It gives us a chance to know them, and they get to know about us in a non-businesslike setting."

Public accounting firms are some of Universum's best clients, Tattanelli said. "They don't own their own product," she said. "Their assets are their people, so if they don't get the top talent, they won't get the business."

Universum's business began in 1988, when Lars-Henrik Friis Molin, then an economics graduate at the University of Stockholm, realized that all the recruiting advertisements he was seeing were mind-numbingly alike, Tattanelli said.

Using publicly available lists of Swedish students, he decided to distribute his own magazine and help advertisers create the kinds of messages that would appeal to him and his friends.

Three years into it, on a whim, he began to include a little questionnaire in the magazine, asking students which ads they liked and which companies attracted them. The companies got as interested in the survey results as in the advertising, and pushed him into more research.

In 1992, they urged him to expand his research into Europe, and he did, surveying students through universities. In 1994, Universum expanded into the United States, setting up shop in the Manhattan neighborhood of Soho in 1997.

Meanwhile, Tattanelli was a young political science major with a part-time job nearby in Sotheby's auction house. Global herself, Tattanelli grew up in Italy and summered in the Hamptons, the child of a mother from Long Island and a father from Italy.

By coincidence, she met Universum executives at Sotheby's. When she returned to Italy, she helped with the Italian Universum survey. Then, in Spain, she met a Swedish man, married him, moved to Stockholm, and started working full time at Universum's headquarters.

In 2000, Tattanelli was named head of the U.S. operation. The Soho offices were fine, but her lifestyle was not. "We were looking for apartments in New York, and they were way below the standards of what we had in Sweden," she said. "The apartments were ugly, and we had to beg for them."

Tattanelli's husband was so miserable that she told him to pick anyplace to live and she'd commute to New York. He chose Philadelphia because he was going to open a U.S. office for his company, Jacobi Carbons Inc., and Philadelphia has a strong reputation in the chemistry industry.

"As Europeans, we felt at home here," she said. "We came for a long weekend, walked around, and had coffee on the square."

For a while, she commuted to New York, but on Sept. 1, 2001, she moved the company and 30 employees to Philadelphia. "We had lower rents, nice space. We can have a great office in the downtown," convenient to the airport and an easy train ride to New York and Washington.

Now she, her husband, and their two young children live a few blocks away.

Tattanelli said the office, pleasantly painted in yellow and blue, had to be downtown to attract Universum's young workforce.

Globally, Universum employs 350 to 400. In the United States, there are about 60 in offices in New York, San Francisco and Philadelphia, with about 25 working here. There are also freelance writers, editors, designers and market researchers. Statistical analysis of the survey is done in Sweden, Tattanelli said.

Five years ago, after years of focusing on the survey, Universum decided to go back to its media roots, mainly through partnerships and acquisition. "We started magazines," she said. In 2006, Universum acquired the Jungle Media Group in New York, a publisher of career magazines. Jungle Media also creates recruitment events.

In December, Universum acquired Webfeet Inc., a recruitment software and market research company with a Web focus. And in 2005, Universum expanded into Asia, starting with China. Tattanelli also heads Asian operations.

Over the years, Tattanelli has found it fascinating to watch graduates change.

The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, she said, influenced young people to become more patriotic and to try to make a difference in society - perhaps by working through the government. Given the 2001 recession, it wasn't surprising that the graduates also saw government work as financially secure.

"In a lot of television shows, government agencies, FBI, CIA, CSI - the government was portrayed as not a stagnant place," she said.

Young people are turning toward organizations such as the Peace Corps or Teach for America, and some companies, including Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc., will hire students and then defer their starting day so they can serve with these nonprofits. " 'We'll be waiting on the other end,' they say," Tattanelli said.

The recession also influenced the Millenials to seek a better work-life balance than their parents had. "They've seen their parents sacrifice for nothing," she said. "They know you can lose your job at any moment."

Universum's survey of more than 200,000 college students in 29 countries highlights global trends in recruiting:

Asia has become a hot spot for recruiting college graduates, especially in China and India.

Last year, Tata Group, an Indian conglomerate, wanted to hire 17,000 students. This year, it is recruiting 37,000. By contrast, Lockheed Martin Corp., a major employer of college graduates, hired fewer than 10,000 in the United States.

Students from top Indian schools want to be recruited to work here. That gives them the cachet to negotiate higher salaries when they return to India.

Diversity is important to graduates here, but not in Asia.

In Brazil and Japan, graduates see an openness to people with disabilities as an important attribute of an top-notch employer.

Mexican students like a diverse work environment that includes Caucasians, but equality between the sexes is not as important.

In caste-conscious India, the ability to reach a managerial level quickly is highly valued, right behind a competitive base salary.

French students want to travel. The opportunity to work internationally is important for all Europeans.

Chinese students who earn their M.B.A.s here want to work in the United States for two to three years so they "can go back to China as a hero."

Global companies want to recruit Chinese students with U.S. business training for work in China.

SOURCE: Claudia Tattanelli, president of Universum USA, based on survey information. EndText

For online links to Universum, and more, see http://go.philly.com/UniversumEndText