The Amazing Adventures Of Supergrad

"This is a very positive period for college recruiting," says Edwin Koc, director of strategic and foundation research at the National Association of Colleges and Employers, which gathers data on the hiring of college graduates. Last year, the association estimates, 1.4 million seniors graduated from college. Of those who were actively looking for a job, the average senior received 2 1/2 job offers. This was true of all college students, not only those at elite institutions, and the jobs were in all sectors: financial services, consulting, manufacturing and especially government, which, with its relatively early retirement system, has already started feeling the void created by boomer departures.

Earlier this year, campus career services officers were predicting that 2008 would be the best hiring year ever. With the economic downturn, it has slowed, but not by much. By April, the association's latest survey of 19,000 college students showed, more than half of seniors had already received at least one job offer. The association predicts an 8 percent increase in the number of college graduates being hired this year, which is less than expected, but still, basically, great. "That's off of a year -- last year -- where the increase was 20 percent," Koc points out.

Recession or no recession, companies are hiring to train a new group of managers to replace those who are going to be gone in two, three or five years. This is the reason, Koc says, why college students are "the only employment sector that's doing well."

"We're talking a real seller's market," says Koc. "It's a great time to be graduating."

AND AN ENTERTAINING ONE. Just as, for this generation, a birthday party could never be just a birthday party -- there always had to be a moon bounce, a magician, a reptile handler -- a recruiting event can no longer be just a recruiting event. Instead, it must be a competition or some other adrenaline-laced smackdown -- an extravaganza where students showcase their smarts and competitive instincts, and companies try to sell themselves, presenting their missions as unique, their workdays as exciting. Their techniques combine the pleasures of reality television, game shows, spa treatments and cocktail parties.

Last year, L'Oreal brought a group of MBA students from about 20 schools, including Duke University and the University of Florida, to New York for dinners and wine-tasting. The event culminated in an "Iron Chef" competition, where the students were required to cook together using an apple -- the Big Apple, get it? -- as one ingredient. Harrah's Entertainment, along with Jim Beam, Nationwide, Dell, Microsoft and other companies, invites business students from schools such as Northwestern and Ohio State universities to Las Vegas to play poker. The multiday schmoozefest shows off their ability to invest, bluff, lose, win and stay awake all night. This spring, Google invited UC Berkeley and Stanford students to the "Google Games," a day of puzzle-solving, Lego-building, sports and a trivia competition. It's all designed, according to Google spokesman Calum Docherty, to "familiarize students with Google and our corporate culture of collaboration and relishing challenges."

Just don't call it work!

Government agencies are also getting in on the game. Recently, the FBI went to Wilberforce University, a historically black college in Ohio, where the school's director of career services, Hardy Brown, had arranged for promising candidates to gather, along with agents and some administrators, for a coat-and-tie dinner. During the meal, the school's head of financial aid drank a glass of water and fell on the floor. Firecrackers, placed in a wastebasket in the hall, were set off, and in the confusion the cry went up that the aid officer had been killed.

"Everybody was in tears; the room is going crazy," Brown recalls. Then it was announced that what was really happening was a "mystery theater dinner," where students had to work in teams to solve the fictitious murder.

No one has dropped a group of recruits on a desert island yet, but that can't be far away.

The goal of all this is recruitment-related image enhancement. Employers, like consumer product purveyors, are using branding to distinguish themselves from one another. Some companies tutor high school students, especially girls and minorities -- groups that are underrepresented in sectors such as technology, engineering and accounting and thus particularly coveted -- to get their brand name out early and often. Others are teaming up with college career services offices, offering events where undergrads are taught how to network while holding a plate in one hand and a drink in the other. And rare is the employer who does not offer internships. For ambitious college and high school students, the white-collar office job has replaced ice cream scooping and camp counseling as the summer rite of passage.

And for those interns who are selected, employers do everything possible to make the summer special. "In previous generations, you could sort of take a summer intern for granted," says Tom Wilson, managing director and head of recruiting for Merrill Lynch. "They're the summer kid. Send them to get coffee; rough them up a little bit. Today we demand a lot of them, but we work very hard to make sure they have a very good experience, because if we don't give them a good experience, they will not come back."