How big firms bring in top students with trips to Dubai, Lapland or Lisbon
To enthuse top students and get ahead of the competition, companies have been offering so-called business courses to destinations abroad for years. No expense is spared. “I was amazed at how much money was spent on us.’
Together with a big office abroad for a weekend or longer? “A nice gesture towards students,” thinks Leslie van der Werf. The UvA tax economics student recently signed up for such a trip by the Dutch branch of consultancy firm EY - called in jargon a business, master or talent course. Destination: London. “Such a multi-day trip gives you a much better idea of what people at the firm are really like,” Van der Werf thinks. “In that sense, I think it is more representative than, say, an office visit in the Netherlands.”
Large companies organise such a business course, hoping to enthuse top students to come and do an internship with them. Accommodation and flights are usually covered by the company itself and there is plenty of choice for students who like to travel. Consultancy firm Deloitte goes to Paris and consultancy firm Tax Pereira advertises their business course to Lapland with cute huskies on its website. Large (tax) law firms are also making a splash. This year, for instance, De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek went to Rome, DLA Piper to Dubai and Simmons and Simmons to Lisbon. And every year the destinations can change; the latter firm went to Iceland last year, for example, and Tallinn the year before.
Why do big firms organise such trips anyway? In other words, what do they gain from taking students on a few days’ trip to destinations like Dubai and Lapland?
“We want to give students the opportunity to get to know our office in an approachable way,” says Elisabeth Visser. She graduated as an employment lawyer at the UvA two years ago, but now works as a campus recruiter at law firm Loyens and Loeff, where she organises a tax business course to Zurich.
Approachable, she calls it, because, unlike a full-time two-month internship, a business course only takes a weekend. “Such an internship is quite a commitment for students. They often do a thesis alongside it, for instance.” Then a business course is a fine, first step for students, to see in a shorter time frame (often a weekend, although DLA Piper, for example, goes to Dubai for five days) whether the company suits them.
During the business course, there is room for free time, but the programme also includes activities related to the work of the company, which is often also based in the destination country. For example, students going to Zurich with Loyens and Loeff have to solve a tax case, “the case fondue”. “That name is the reason we have been going to Zurich for years,” laughs Visser. If a student stands out in a positive sense, they are offered an internship. This happens relatively often, she states. All 20 students who went with Loyens and Loeff to Zurich last year were allowed an internship.
Lots of competition
Legal, finance and accountancy firms are keen to recruit talented students, says UvA professor of corporate law Harm-Jan de Kluiver. He himself was a lawyer at De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek for many years. “There is a lot of competition,” he observes. Such a trip might just persuade a talented student to apply to that firm, De Kluiver thinks.
This is also seen by career coach Marie-Elise van den Hoek Ostende, who works at the UvA Student Careers Centre, where she coaches students with their step into the job market. What she notices is that students who are interested in working at one large organisation are, in practice, often also interested in working at another large organisation. So these kinds of companies are all fishing in the same pond, she says.
But in the past, companies hardly ever took talented students abroad, according to De Kluiver. “At some point, that kind of crept in. Due to economic prosperity of the companies on the one hand, but also because students started to find it increasingly normal not to go to the Veluwe, but to Mallorca or Bali, for example. That ease with which students fly all over the world leads to a certain inflation of locations. So to come up with something special as a company these days, you have to be of good stock.”
Sustainability
So then you end up at a destination like Dubai - a location where accountancy and consultancy organisation KPMG also organised a recruitment event a few years ago. Or San Francisco, where law firm Allen & Overy’s business course went every year until recently (this year Paris). “From a sustainability perspective, I just wouldn’t do such an intercontinental trip anymore,” says De Kluiver, who has published many academic articles on sustainability. “There are plenty of nice destinations where you can go by train.”
More and more companies seem to be taking that message to heart, observes UvA alumni and lawyer Sophie Kuijpers. In 2018, she herself went on a business course to Shanghai, China. As a student, that’s fun, she says. “I met very nice people in a short time then and I do remember that I was really surprised then by how much money was spent on us. There was definitely no cutting costs.”
She therefore thinks that the responsibility for this kind of travel should not be placed on the individual student, but on the company itself. “Surely students are more likely to think: gosh what a nice initiative.” While many companies actually claim to endorse ESG objectives, aimed at promoting more sustainable and social policies within organisations.
That is why I find it most distressing, says Kuijpers, that a company like DLA Piper says it values diversity and inclusion as well as sustainability, but then chooses to fly students to a country where homosexuality is banned. “Then you are just being implausible and devaluing ESG commitments of the whole industry.”
Appearance to customers
More will have played a role in such destination choices than sustainability considerations, thinks Van den Hoek Ostende, who himself once organised a business course to London at a previous employer, which was later converted into a trip to Paris - by train, that is. For companies, the image towards customers is also important. They want to show them: we recruit the best students, and we have something to show for it. Just look.”
Hence, companies also have a strict selection process for the business course. Only the best students are allowed to participate. So does UvA student Van der Werf not manage to get through that at EY? Then he simply signs up for another business course, he says without hesitation. “The trip itself is also something you go for, of course.”
Law firm DLA Piper could not be reached for comment on their business course to Dubai despite several attemp
