Wanted: Almost Any Warm Body

An annual salary of $8,100 ought to sound reasonably attractive to a young fellow fresh out of college. But not to University of California Senior Al Hartman, 22, who graduates in June with a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering and has already been offered an $8,100 job by General Electric, which also promised to pay his tuition toward a master's degree. Hartman in tends to turn G.E. down, figuring that he can get as much as $9,000 from some other company -- hopefully, one doing defense work that can promise a "critical capabilities" draft deferment.

Just as bullish about his prospects is Rod D. Grimm, 25, a Berkeley graduate student in marketing who has al ready served two years in Viet Nam with the Green Berets. Grimm, who receives his master of business administration degree this summer, has been interviewed by 15 companies. He has gotten eight "seconds"--invitations to inspect company facilities and talk seriously about work and salary--and expects several more before he is finally forced to make a choice.

Interviewees Down. Last week, from Berkeley to Boston, that annual rite of spring called campus recruiting was well under way. And if students like Hartman and Grimm made it sound like a buyer's market--well, it was. "Almost any warm body can get a job," comments M.I.T.'s Placement Director Thomas W. Harrington. This year even more firms are sending out personnel experts to round up bodies for even more jobs than they did in a heavy campaign last year. At the University of Chicago Business School, for instance, 230 companies are recruiting v. 190 last year; so many recruiters are on campus that latecomers have to do their inter viewing in off-campus hotel rooms.

While the number of interviewers in creases, however, the number of interviewees is proportionately dwindling. Many students, especially engineers and science majors, intend to move on to graduate school, either in hopes of avoiding the draft or to prepare themselves for the extra $100-a-month starting salary that degree-happy head hunters will, on the average, pay for a master's certificate. Also, more students than in previous years will go directly into the armed forces. At Georgia Tech, where 15 out of 1,000 seniors entered military service last June, 150 members of a similar-sized class will go this year.

V. the CIA & FBI. Not surprisingly, the decrease in available bodies has sent salaries up; average wages are about 5% higher this year for students with master's or bachelor's degrees. Electrical engineers, still the most sought-after group, are being offered average starting salaries of $661 a month, $20 more than last year. Chemical engineers, moving from seventh place to third on the roster of most-wanted skills, are being offered $673, higher than any other graduates. Solid salaries are being waved at every kind of diplomate: $561 a month for accountants, $662 for metallurgists, $634 for physicists, even a higher-than-ever $524 a month for the humanities as Government agencies recruit social scientists to help build the Great Society.

Competing with one another and with Government groups such as the CIA and the FBI, corporations are trimming requirements. G.E. once took 81% of its college hirelings from the upper quarter of their classes, now gets only 47% at that level. Companies formerly thumbed down draft-subject students but will now hire a 1-A for as little as three months in hopes of generating a corporate loyalty that will last until he gets out.

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