Its pretty much a demand-supply issue. Companies need good managerial talent and the avenues to identify and recruit that good managerial talent are limited in India. Between November and March, when most Indian B-schools open up their batches for recruitment, it is top priority for companies to be the first ones to reach the best campuses and grab their share of the talent.
In a particular company, finding the person who takes the decision to go to campus is very important. The first person you call in a company doesn’t necessarily take that decision. It takes the Placement Committee one to one and a half month to reach that person in a company who takes the decision, explains Rajiv Sarin, a GIM Placement Representative.
Say, a company has an intake of 10 MBAs in mind for a certain B-school. If another B-school gets to know about it and intrudes, that might make the company change their numbers for our school, says Gagan Vohra, another GIM Placement Representative.
Apart from this, duplication of process is a major factor that keeps B-schools from keeping everything about placements confidential until the day 100 percent of the batch is placed.
We believe that the process we follow during placements ensures that everyone has a fair chance to get into their dream company. We do not want other B-schools to know about and replicate this process, explains Vohra.
A month before placements, a bunch of GIM alumni visits the campus to help the second year students choose the sector to seek a job in. The students also grab this opportunity to hone their interview and group discussion skills.
Day Zero, Day 1, Day 2
Most B-schools follow one of the two types of placement processes. In a rolling process, placements are spread over a few months, with companies visiting campus at leisure, even as the school goes around with its normal business of classes, projects and the works.
In the other kind of process, which is followed at GIM, all Indian Institutes of Management, SP Jain, XLRI and others, all activity is brought to a halt and companies are invited to conduct recruitment over 2-3 days.
At GIM, based on the aspirations of students in the batch, quality of profiles offered and salary figures, the GIM Placement Committee gives each company a time slot when the Human Resource Department Managers of the companies can come to the campus, talk about the company and profiles offered in a Pre-Placement Talk, invite resumes and select talent using interviews, group discussions, games or psychometric tests.
The best companies get the slots on the first day, popularly known across campuses as Day Zero. The next best companies are given the Day 1 slot and the rest are slotted on Day 2. At GIM, the placements begin fro Day 1.
Good care is taken to ensure that no two companies from the same sector are slotted simultaneously, or else students would miss out on applying to a company.
This is where the fun begins. Given that the best opportunity to recruit the best talent of the school is more in the earliest slots than the latter ones, companies bargain hard to get a Day Zero slot and hold on to the best candidates.
How companies do it are amusing exploits in their own right, and each B-school has a story to tell. Here are some stories:
- Just to be in the Day Zero slot, a company would increase the salary offered by a couple of lakhs at times. If the company does not have that luxury, it could even flatly refuse to visit the campus. Of course, its all a negotiation game and the Placement Committee and the company end up finding a common ground. But there are times when the B-school has to let a company go.
- The hiring team of a company slotted for the evening lands in the city in the morning and shows up uninvited at the B-school directly from the airport, demanding that their slot be preponed or else. These are hard situations to handle for Placement Committees and they often end up bitter.
- If a company finds a bright candidate during the interviews, it might unnecessarily elongate the interview by asking frivolous questions, at times to as much as 3 hours, just to keep that candidate from attending interviews of other companies.
- A company slotted later might threaten that if the entire batch did not sit for their selection process even though 70 percent of the batch is already placed they would leave campus and never come again to that B-school.
Once companies start coming to campus, students have the choice to apply to the company they are looking at and sit for their selection process. Some B-schools make it mandatory for students to accept a job once it is offered, while others like GIM have a mechanism that allows them to sit for several companies even while ensuring that they do not hamper the chances of those who do not have any offer yet. While some Pre Placement Talks are a treat to watch, others can be a painful experience due to the lack of a single relevant slide.
The sprawling patio that opens up into a large courtyard inside the 200-year-old heritage structure GIM is housed in is the melting pot of high drama during placements. There are wild cheers and hugs as soon as a student gets a plum job offer, while those who are yet to convert a single company grow tenser as the day passes. These are 119 students who have lived with each other for two years and have a strong bonding among themselves. Celebrations are often muted so as to keep up the spirits of those who are still trying but failing. The day doesnt end for those who have a job offer.
It doesnt matter if you have a job if your closest friends are still trying. Until they get one, we do whatever we can to support them in terms of research, emotional support, ensure that they are eating well and remain motivated, muses GIM student Vikram MR, placed with IBM.
It is only symbolic of the closeness of the batch and collaborative nature of the placement activity that nobody changes into casual clothes until the last person is placed.
Even as this drama unfolds, the first year GIM students silently and steadily operate the unseen machinery behind the placements. A scheduling committee plans and executes the slots, ensuring along with the rooms committee that each company gets a room or a hall to conduct their process in, a mess committee ensures that the grub keeps coming in, the transport committee seamlessly manages cabs to transport companies recruiters from airport to hotel and hotel to campus, while the hotel committee does not let the supply of rooms run out. People hardly sleep 2-3 hours a day during the placement rush.
Late evening of Day 2, the last remaining student gets an offer and the entire MBA class of 2007 of GIM is placed. A loud cheer declares the news and the moment of truth is celebrated with grandeur at Genes, the riverside bar just across the street from GIM. Only physically present in the picturesque Goa country until now, the second year batch of GIM returns mentally to Goa as well.
To be continued… In part 3 of this feature, learn how to read a placement report and make sense of the figures.
This article is neither a sponsored feature by nor an opinion on the Goa Institute of Management placement process. Readers are called upon to conduct their own research before making a judgement on the institiute.