CorpComms Magazine

Business school students may claim to care about a company's corporate and social responsibility strategy but, when it comes down to actually finding a job, they assign little weight to such reputational factors, a new report claims.

Indeed, just one in ten will consider 'high ethical standards' when making a decision on joining a company.

Academics from the Melbourne Business School and Sydney's University of Technology asked 303 MBA students to rank 28 attributes of a hypothetical job offer.

These attributes included salary, bonus structure, potential for overseas assignments, opportunities for travel and a company's corporate reputation.

The students were asked to list the top five companies that they would like to work for after graduation, and highlight the five attributes that made them so appealing.

The academics found that MBA graduates were most concerned about salary and opportunities for promotion. Indeed, those students who initially told researchers that they wanted to make a social contribution to change the world were unwilling to take a lower salary.

Corporate reputation and workplace reputation appeared to matter only marginally to students, and then only when they had to make comparisons between companies with the best and worst reputations.

The findings are at odds with the MBA Oath, dreamed up by a group of 30 students at Harvard Business School in the wake of the banking crisis, who pledged: 'I will safeguard the interests of my shareholders, co-workers, customers and the society in which we operate.'

The MBA Oath was devised as a voluntary pledge that echoed the medical profession's Hippocratic Oath in an effort to create a code of conduct for the business community.

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