The consensus among business schools worldwide is that MBA students on the lookout for jobs this year will have to widen the net of potential employers.

In turn, business schools, the best of which already build career advice into MBA courses, are launching a range of initiatives aimed at assisting their students in their search for jobs.

Mary Boss, director of career services at Paris-based Insead, where alumni have been offering short-term positions to recent graduates without full-time jobs, says: "This is one of the worst job markets we have seen."

In the US, for example, second-year MBAs returning to Tuck School at Dartmouth College this month, will, for the first time, be offered a mentor.

The mentor, a top Tuck alumnus, will oversee their job search and give advice on how to get a job. The scheme is being put in place by Tuck's careers service and will be available to students who do not yet have a job offer, says Paul Danos, dean of Tuck at Hanover, New Hampshire. "We are telling our students that they cannot rely as much on the set interview on campus. We are telling them they have to understand about how to set about getting a job," says Prof Danos.

He adds that, generally, at this time of the year, up to 80 per cent of second-year students would have had job offers from those companies with which they had served internships during the summer.

Towards the end of 2001, says Prof Danos, only about 50 per cent of students had received such offers. He was confident, however, that Tuck's 100 or so students who had not already received offers would be placed successfully this year, with the traditional recruiters taking about 60 per cent of last year's intake.

Prof Danos believes that this year will prove to be a good one for companies outside the top group of investment banks and management consultancies, which have traditionally found it difficult to recruit MBAs, to establish or re-establish themselves in the MBA market.

"Those companies are now feeling it is a good time to re-establish links with the top business schools," he says.

In the UK, Wendy Hall, head of Careers Development at Cranfield School of Management, says: "Corporate recruitment efforts have probably been reduced a bit, but the number of opportunities for MBAs are still there. There are opportunities across the board, but there are noticeably fewer in finance, management consultancy and telecoms.

Some industries have been affected more than others by the economic downturn. Pauline Weigh, Cranfield's full-time MBA director, says it is important for graduates to look more widely for employment. "Students who are groomed by schools for careers in a limited number of industries, such as consultancy and investment banking, may have more difficulty in being recruited."

Tricia Hind, director of the MBA programme at Ashridge School of Management, Hertfordshire, says that, while employers may be taking more time to recruit MBAs, students were still feeling positive about their job prospects. However, last year Ashridge introduced specialist career coaches for its MBA students.

Manchester Business School says its career management services (CMS) recognised last year that it needed to do more to help students in a tougher job-seeking climate.

CMS had been restructured and it also introduced a raft of new services that, it says, were highly appreciated by its MBA students.

Alison Edmonds, CMS manager, says: "Visibility and networking are crucial this year. We are encouraging our students to be as creative and pro-active as possible and to make a real-time commitment to their search. Our CMS team is matching this with new routes to opening doors for our MBAs."

These include:

* A new CV search site on the web: a free and user-friendly way for companies to find the right person for the job;

* CMS held its first MBA recruitment fair in autumn 2000 and has organised a follow-up fair for January 2002;

* CMS and the University of Manchester have teamed up to create "Manchester Gold MBA", a new mentoring system for MBA students that connects them with experts in their target sectors;

* A Jobs Club has also been created for MBA students to discuss contacts, job search strategies, recruiting companies, interviewing techniques, contract negotiation and how to use recruitment companies;

* Special student support activities created for students from Greece, Asia, Latin America and India (all highly represented groups on the course). These include special mailings, contact with embassies and alumni contacts.

In continental Europe, business schools such as HEC in France and Iese Business School in Spain, report a slight slowing in the number of their second-year students who already have job offers.

Iese, for example, says the usual number of employers had attended its regular careers forum in October. "They were keen to meet as many students as possible but many held back from making immediate offers," says Iese. "There was a clear retrenchment by consulting and financial employers."

However, Bernard Ramanantsoa, HEC's dean, says that some of the slack in job offers by traditional recruiters of MBA graduates appeared to be being taken up by companies that, in the past, had not recruited MBAs, such as Carrefour, the supermarket chain.

Prof Ramantsoa says that despite the economic climate the school this year was getting a high level of applicants and the quality was better than ever.