Students considering Cornell University's graduate school of business will soon be able to apply with a single click via LinkedIn.
According to USA Today, Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University announced the new feature July 8. The newer, quicker method will allow applicants to easily add information regarding their employment, educational, demographic and contact information ahead of time.
"The LinkedIn feature gives an applicant the option to describe their experience and background as they would to someone they just met," Ann Richards, Johnson at Cornell interim executive director of admissions and financial aid, said in a press release. "This modern platform gives our applicants the chance to provide a personal tagline and meaningful summary, point out skills, explain experience, differentiate from the crowd, and show how they build a network."
Potential students who wish to just use the standard method of applying to the school will not have to provide Cornell with their LinkedIn profiles. Richards said the school would search applicants' names on the Internet in the past and try to find their LinkedIn profiles that way.
"There will be less duplication of information," Richards told USA Today. "This will make it a lot easier and a lot less cumbersome for students to apply and still give ... students the opportunity to present a very well rounded and robust picture of themselves.
"The problem with Googling and just searching LinkedIn for someone with the same name is that you are not really sure you are getting the information on the applicant. By the applicant connecting their LinkedIn application to us, we are confident that the information we are seeing there is for our candidate."
Christine Sneva, Cornell Tech's director of enrollment management and student services, had the idea to streamline the application process with the use of LinkedIn.
"Using LinkedIn seemed right," she told USA Today. "(Cornell Tech's M.B.A. program) was an extremely creative and technology-driven type of program. So (using LinkedIn) made sense and really spoke to the core competencies of what the program was and also the kind of people we were looking for."
