-- A Wall Street Journal News Roundup

Chris Bristow, director of the career management center at London Business School, has a simple warning for fresh graduates: It's going to be tough to find a job, and you'd better not be too choosy.

Barring an upturn in the economy, he expects that the number of job offers to new graduates will fall sharply from recent years. What's more, many companies over-recruited last year, and despite today's increasing layoffs, find themselves overstaffed. In the London Business School's class of 2000, 98% of graduates found jobs. For the class of 2001, Mr. Bristow says, that number will plunge to the low 80s.

And for 2002? "Don't ask," he says. Right now he's telling students to look at jobs "they might not have considered before."

Variations on this theme are occurring across Europe and the U.S. Many major corporations that wined and dined M.B.A. candidates last fall intend to curb their campus-recruitment efforts this school year. Consulting giants such as Booz Allen & Hamilton Inc. and A.T. Kearney have already announced such cutbacks. Instead, the firms plan to hire a handful of 2002 M.B.A. graduates from their current pool of summer associates. With the notable exception of the energy industry, which is plowing ahead with hiring plans and in some cases increasing them, the gloomy recruitment outlook is spreading.

Now, several business schools report a downturn in hiring by finance, high-tech and manufacturing. Securities firm Schroder Salomon Smith Barney asked new hires to voluntarily defer their starting dates by one year. "Bearing in mind the economic situation, we are adjusting to the market," says a spokeswoman in London.

Making matters worse, business students finishing school next spring must compete with recent graduates who have yet to find work or became jobless following the Internet-sector downturn. In addition, many companies "wish that they had not made as many offers as they had made to the 2001 class," says Bruce G. Willison, dean of U.C.L.A.'s Anderson Graduate School of Management.

At the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business, Glenn Sykes, director of M.B.A. career services, expects the number of recruiting companies, job interviews and offers to drop 20% to 25% this fall.

Amanda Hughes, a London Business School student who has completed her first year, is already feeling the pinch. She had two firm offers for summer internships, but both companies -- one in consumer-goods and the other in the construction industry -- backed out before she even started. They retracted their summer offers, blaming the economy and the subsequent cancellation of planned projects.

Instead, Ms. Hughes, 29, worked on organizing a women-in-business conference. "It wasn't how I had planned to spend my summer," she says. With a year to go to finish her degree, Ms. Hughes is "quite concerned" about her prospects.

Job hunters who find work feel fortunate they did. Take Jenny Nikodem. After completing eight semesters at the European Business School on the banks of the Rhine River last summer, she took a nine-month trip through Australia, New Zealand, Nepal and Guatemala.

She returned last March and noticed the change. "I was lucky I didn't travel more and that I started looking for a job when I did," says the 25-year-old German. Her friends at big consulting firms told her she need not apply. So in June, Ms. Nikodem accepted a job in corporate development at Bertelsmann AG.

Lionel Lafarge, a French electrical engineer, will soon graduate from the management school of the University of Paris La Sorbonne. He spent much of the summer looking for a job in Germany. After talking to Schlumberger about a job in Germany, he says, "I felt confident that I would at least get an offer or another job interview." One week later, Mr. Lafarge was told Schlumberger had initiated a hiring freeze.

Fortunately, his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering was in great demand and the 23-year-old quickly got a job as a software developer.

Among the manufacturing companies that plan to lighten their campus interview schedules for business students is Ford Motor Co. The big car maker, which this month announced plans to cut as many as 5,000 jobs, says its on-campus recruiting of prospective M.B.A.s will be "significantly reduced" this fall. "There's not an awful lot of sense to sending a cross-functional team out to a school to bring back one individual," says Rose Mary Farenden, Ford's director of global salaried recruiting.

High-tech companies that recently pruned their staffs also aren't keen to hire as many M.B.A.s. Cisco Systems Inc. believes it is inappropriate to make "large additions to head count given the current economic environment," says a spokeswoman for the San Jose, California, maker of Internet-switching equipment.

Companies that keep hiring can choose from more applicants. Klaus Behrenbeck, partner in charge of German recruitment with consultants McKinsey & Co. in Cologne, is sticking to plans of taking on the same number of new consultants this year as last year's 250 to 300.

"We need to build a firm like ours long-term," Mr. Behrenbeck says. "It's dangerous to react to an economic slowdown with a change in recruiting policy."

The main change for McKinsey is that the pool of candidates is increasing, making hiring easier. McKinsey in Germany expects 11,000 to 12,000 applications this year, up from around 10,000 last year. "In the times of the New Economy, we got top people but of course sometimes it took a bit of a longer discussion to get them. Today, it seems to be sometimes a bit less complicated to convince them to join us," Mr. Behrenbeck says.

"For an M.B.A., it's pretty scary out there right now. A lot of my friends are under pressure, and even the ones that just landed jobs have the feeling it could go at any time," says Anindya Ghosh, 29, who just finished his M.B.A at Barcelona's IESE Business School.

This spring, Mr. Ghosh founded Kubi Wireless, a communications company for business travelers. He's finding he can be more selective with job prospects. "The slower job market and the dot-com layoffs mean there are plenty of people out there -- hiring becomes easier. Other than the trouble getting financing for a new venture, this is a good time to start a business," he says.

Mr. Ghosh estimates that 10% to 20% of his classmates have had to forget their first choice of jobs, such as investment banking and consulting, and accept offers in other fields, such as energy.

Indeed, buoyed by high petroleum prices, international oil companies are the exception. Royal Dutch/Shell Group hasn't slackened its search for "high quality graduates," a spokeswoman says. Rival BP PLC is boosting its hiring of M.B.A.s. A spokeswoman says the company's trans-Atlantic programs, which recruit U.S. M.B.A.s to Europe, would result in 22 new hires this year, more than double the 10 hired last year.

Meredith Olson, a University of Chicago business student, believes classmates with summer experience at energy companies "don't feel they'll have difficulty getting" full-time offers. She hopes that her present internship at Dynegy Inc., a Houston energy concern, will lead to a permanent position. Company officials confirm they expect to make her an offer soon.

Dynegy plans to hire between 12 and 15 M.B.A.s graduating next spring, an increase from this year, says Randy Wilson, its director of university relations. He has noticed a significant increase lately in applications from M.B.A. candidates. "I'm not so naive to think that everybody wants to work for Dynegy because we're the greatest company," he says. "I do understand that there's been a change in the economy."