By continuing with slot placement processes, business schools are doing more harm than good to their students’ careers and keeping them from finding ‘that one’ job, writes Allwin Agnel, CEO of PaGaLGuY.com and Wharton alumnus of 2008. (Special column written for the PaGaLGuY B-school Rankings, 2010)
At the end of every academic year, there is one game that both schools and students carefully play until neither of them remains a winner. Placements. Business schools in the need to make things efficient created the slotted process of placements and thereby have forced students to apply to companies, make career decisions based on a total face-time of 30 minutes with a company. Hiding behind the moniker of managing an efficient process, business schools have forever ignored the actual problems that have been caused by the process.
Currently, b-schools run the process using the slots wherein employers are assigned slots (decided mostly by the salaries they provide). While business schools argue that the ‘profile’ matters, the truth is that salaries usually are the key drivers in a company receiving an earlier slot. Now in order to gain access to the top talent, companies have found a way to add everything to the CTC (cost-to-company) salaries at the top schools. In certain cases, the home loans you could avail, office rent and similarly fraudulent items have been added to the CTC so that the companies can show up at the earlier slot. Business schools did not discourage this because now their placement reports started looking better. How convenient. (Read more on CTC inflation here).
The bigger casualty of the slot process is the student. At any business school there are enough people who will go blindly at the highest salary offered, but there are also a few people who care about the kind of a career they would like to build. The latter form the real casualty. In the slot process, once they have an offer they have to either move out of the placement process or have the chance to apply to one ‘dream’ company. Amidst the pressure cooker like situation during recruitment day/week, it is irrationally tough to make the right decision for your career. The school is pushing you to make a choice on rather imperfect information – all to keep the process efficient and to keep moving.
At the top business schools, recruiters complain about the slot process and also about how less time they get to spend with candidates. On a single day, students might be interviewing for half a dozen companies and are expected to provide thoughtful answers which is rare since the student has probably applied to an FMCG, a consulting firm and of course an investment bank as well. You get the picture – both the employer and the candidate know that the system is broken, but they can’t do much with it. Both grin it, bear it and move on.
Business schools are to blame. For creating this irrational hoopla and then not wanting any part of fixing it. I suggest that the placement process be scrapped at the top business schools. No more slots, no more random rules and definitely no more CTC play. This would help both the students and the companies. Students will finally have to work hard to find ‘that job’ they truly like. Most of the people who graduate out of a top school haven’t had a chance to truly work hard towards finding a job they really like. The MBA degree in India kind of makes a promise to them that they would find a job when they graduate and that they are the elite of the world. It is time to realize that this feeling causes more harm than good. Students need to take the time and effort to find the job they would like to spend significant time with. This would help the companies as well. Right now they recruit rather haphazardly on campus. They have very limited time to make a call and they tend to follow their traditional biases before taking a quick call on the students. If they knew the student wasn’t going to be placed within the next 30 minutes with someone else, the company would be more willing to give them a better chance of understanding the company. The students then possibly have the chance of finding an opportunity that will truly make their efforts worthwhile.
More than just finding that one job, students will also realize how important is to be honest with themselves, interact with people and work hard towards that one goal that makes it all worth it. Now those are skills and experiences that will last you a lifetime. These will be the next generation of thoughtful, hardworking, driven and intelligent people who make the right decisions and are willing to work hard towards what they want to achieve and not just lay back on the tag name provided by their schools. Your life post business school is the time of your life. The time you can make meaningful change at your employers and that needs doses of heart, hard work and your degree won’t hurt.
It is time to move beyond CTC, slots and the whole placement facade. For once, the topmost business schools should step and do what is right for both the students and the companies. If it means scrapping the current system, they should. ‘100% placements’ is the underlying reason behind b-schools’ flourishing. A good look into the claim very quickly exposes how hollow it is for most of the schools. If placement control is taken away from b-schools, would they survive? Top schools in the USA never hit 100% placements. Mostly they are not expected to. Students graduate, decide to start their own ventures, work in NGOs, travel the world for a few months – anything that takes their fancy. In India, are b-schools really valuable enough without their ‘placement report’ ? Hopefully the top b-schools acknowledge that they are the people who can solve this problem.
Allwin Agnel is the CEO of PaGaLGuY.com, and a Wharton alumnus from the class of 2008.