SuperWeek, an annual recruiting event, drew a record of 11 investment banks to Yale School of Management earlier this month.

The recruiting opportunity, which took place between Jan. 2 and 11, allows banks to interview summer interns from SOM’s first-year MBA class. Major banks such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley returned to SOM for this year’s SuperWeek, and two banks — Perella Weinberg Partners and Peter J. Solomon Company — came to SOM for the first year. The record-high number of recruiters this year follows the March 2012 appointment of Career Development Office, or CDO, Director Julia Zupko, who restructured the operations of the department, SOM Dean Edward Snyder said.

“Recruiters understand that our students can work across sectors, which coincides with their needs., Snyder said. “In some cases, that message is just taking hold and replacing some of the older views about the school, and it’s sort of fun for me to see not just recruiters, but faculty, staff and young alumni as well converge on a more modern and up-to-date image of the school.”

Lloyd Baskin, CDO senior associate director, said companies are looking to recruit students who think creatively and holistically as opposed to “just people who run numbers.”

SOM succeeded in bringing a record number of companies to campus this academic year — both during SuperWeek and throughout the year — due to “a team effort,” Baskin said, adding that SOM administrators, staff, faculty, students and alumni have all contributed to building and maintaining relationships with recruiters. Zupko said Snyder has helped “institutionalize” the collective approach to the recruiting process.

Snyder said Zupko, who moved to SOM from the University of Chicago, has made organizational changes within the office that have strengthened the school’s recruitment efforts. Prior to Zupko’s arrival, Snyder said CDO administrators responsible for different areas, such as marketing or operations strategy, often reached out to companies independently. Now, Snyder said, each CDO administrator focuses on a separate industry, which maximizes the number of companies the CDO contacts while avoiding overlaps.

Since SOM is smaller than most top MBA schools, Zupko said the CDO needs to “balance student interest with employer capacity.”

“We have to do the best job possible to make sure the employers are happy, as they want people to accept the offers,” Baskin said. “We want to hit that maximum — enough banks for students and enough students that accept the offers.”

Snyder said SOM students like to explore different career options and often decide what path they want to pursue later than MBA students at other schools, adding that the SOM is challenged to bring in recruiters from companies that reflect the student body’s interests. The total number of internship offers made to students this year surpassed last year’s numbers, Baskin said, but he added that the CDO cannot yet release specific numbers as the recruiting season is still ongoing.

Many banks’ summer associate pool is a primary source for future permanent full-time hires, and the percentage of alumni employed three months after graduation is a key factor in many major business school rankings, said John Byrne, a former executive editor of BusinessWeek who designed the publication’s ranking system. He added that having a large number of graduates employed at banking and consulting firms can also help a business school’s ranking by increasing the average alumni salary, another important factor in rankings calculations.

All SOM administrators interviewed said they are mindful of the fact that the school’s recruitment efforts affect its position in business school rankings.

Einar Ingvarsson SOM ’14 said he thinks the CDO did a good job scheduling interviews during SuperWeek. The scheduling is important, he said, because students can experience high levels of stress when they have multiple interviews per day.

Twenty-one percent of graduates of SOM’s class of 2012 accepted jobs in investment banking.