Cracking the changed MBA campus recruitment

Placement season is an intense experience. For management students, it is days of anxieties culminating in a circumstantial conspiracy: choose one employer and forget the rest, all in a matter of minutes make a wrong choice, and your destiny will be different. For companies, the season presents the same hard choice. Months of debates, exchange of documents and revision of options can go at discount, if the right, possibly the best, candidates slip out of their hands, and a wrong candidate lands up in their cabins.

Both students and companies have to make snap decisions on the campus. Students constantly battle over whether to 'accept the offer on hand' or 'hold out for the dream job.' Moreover, "Campus recruitment is a zero-sum game," where one student's gain is another student's loss, says Tushar Walwadikar, second-year student and secretary of the placement cell at Xaviers Labour Relations Institute, Jamshedpur.

Similar is the case with companies. If an FMCG major has short-listed 40 students to be interviewed at one IIM, and wants to make offers to eight, it would soon realise that unless it makes a spot offer, the 'good candidate' may go its competitor, which is also to interview him/her. That makes a mockery of its short list and the grand ambition of choosing the best.

The pressure increases for students and recruiters when between 50 and 90 companies descend to a campus. Is there a way to make the choices less uncertain and more familiar?

For companies, 'the secret' to cracking the campus code is to not neglect their summer interns from the management institutes, who act as ambassadors for the company. And whether the interns go back to their institutes as 'good' messengers for the company or not will be determined by the job content of the internship, the exposure they got, the way they were treated, and experience of their interactions with institute alumni who work with the same company. Moreover, if organisations make smart 'summer intern' hiring decisions, they may very well translate into 'final placements' and thereby, reduce the competitive stress during the placement season. Since most institutes give the students five offers to choose from, a company that gave them a sound intern experience would already have its candidates' 'one foot in the door.'

But in hey days of a hot job market, companies had been succumbing to competitive pressure. Many had resorted to rapid-fire hiring. Even on the best of MBA campuses, companies realised they were not hiring all star performers or personality types. For instance, a consultancy may realise that their new MBA hire may need a little hand holding before he or she is able to settle into a smooth and functioning client relationship.

A star candidate for a management consultancy, for instance, would be a candidate who is in the top ten of the batch, preferably with a strong analytical bent of mind, a president or member of a debating society or the placement cell or students union or such, with demonstrated inter-personal skills. These apart, the candidate has to give convincing reason for choosing consulting as a career than nursing a desiring for "variety in work" and whom the firm can put in front of the client without worrying about any faux pas. But in a competitive environment, the right candidate remained elusive, with competition picking up him/her for a less suited job at a fancy salary. The consultancy, in this instance, would have to settle for whoever is available.

New realities

This was the case until last year. This year, there is a whole new 'organisation-candidate equation.' Walwadikar speaks about the experience of his batch, "When we joined XLRI in 2008 summer, we were on top of the world because the economy was booming and the future prospects for us seemed great. Halfway through, my classmates and me, got a rude shock and have had to temper our expectations. Students now see unstructured internships as a challenge to prove that they can stay positive under pressure." Students who joined B-school in summer 2009 in the throes of recession will probably be more adaptable. For those who joined business school in 2007, final placements in March/ April have been a dampener. Even IIM Bangalore, which in 2006 had 133 out of 256 students placed on Day Zero, had less than half that number, 64 out of 249, placed on Day Zero in 2009. At Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, average offer made to students in 2008 was Rs 19 lakh, which dropped to Rs 15 lakh in 2009. Average salary at XLRI too dropped from Rs 14 lakh in 2008 to Rs 12 lakh in 2009.

A top management consultancy that had hired 40 MBA grads in 2007 this year hired five students. Some companies did such 'token hiring' merely to keep the 'relationship going' with the institutes. International placements, a big lure for students on MBA campuses, too have reduced significantly.

But the public sector undertakings enjoying a field day on premier MBA campuses were a pointer to changing student aspirations. Obviously, students were looking for stability and depth than fancy salaries in PSUs. At IIM Bangalore, first time public sector recruiters in 2009 included BPCL (BPCL.NS : 581.65 +10.35), GAIL (GAIL.NS : 412.9 +3.7), IOC (IOC.NS : 292 +0.9) and SBI (SBIN.NS : 2242.9 -11.75) Capital.

This is the first of a 3-series on campus recruitment. Next: engineering campus recruitment.

malvika.chandan@expressindia.com