Recruiters estimate that on-campus job offers, which begin this week in business schools for those with job experience and continue in February for others, will be better than in 2009, but they do not see a return yet to the giddy times of the earlier years.
They are also gearing up for a spread-out process than earlier so they would have more time with the candidates. “Last year, people were overly cautious,” said Santrupt Misra, who heads human resources (HR) for the cement-to-telecom Aditya Birla Group. He expects hiring in the placement season of 2010 to be a “more realistic reflection of the economic situation of India”.
Misra will visit six campuses—the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) at Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Kolkata and Lucknow; the Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad; and the XLRI School of Business and Human Resources, Jamshedpur—to recruit 15-20 graduates for the group, with a mix of experienced hires and those seeking work for the first time. The Aditya Birla Group’s various businesses will hire around a hundred graduates.
These hiring numbers are roughly the same as last year, said Misra. He expects hiring to increase compared with 2009, but not reach the levels of 2007 and 2008. “Going up against what? Last year was very bad,” said Misra.
Based on lessons learnt earlier, campuses and recruiters are preparing for saner hiring practices.
IIM Ahmedabad (IIM-A), for instance, said it will abolish the system of slotting recruiters into a couple of days and making candidates rush from one interview to the next. The premier school wants a more spread-out hiring season. So it will invite companies over weekends in cohorts or groups with similar job profiles on offer, beginning February.
An IIM Calcutta student, who deals with media queries, said her school is discussing with the IIMs in Ahmedabad and Bangalore not just the dates of final placements, but also changes in the process. IIMs in the three cities coordinate their hiring process to give recruiters time to travel.
“The day process led to great pressure on firms to make offers early and on students to accept offers on the spot,” IIM-A said in a press release after a meeting with recruiters in Mumbai last month. “The cohort-based system will allow more time to the recruiters per student.”
Recruiters tend to agree though they are waiting for more information on the new system and for it to be tested.
The biggest challenge the new process faces is whether the race to hire the top students will be slowed by spreading out the interviews. In the earlier system, investment banks and consultancies, invited on Day Zero, or the first day of recruitment, walked away with the so-called cream of the class.
“We are looking for not necessarily the topper,” said Abhishek Malhotra, partner at Booz and Co., an international consulting firm with plans to hire at the IIMs in Ahmedabad and Bangalore, and at ISB. “(We want candidates with) demonstrated leadership abilities over and beyond what the campus requires.”
Malhotra said he often asks candidates what they have done that cannot be reduced to a number.
Some recruiters say they are making their own rules to be less pushy.
The Mahindra Group, which includes India’s largest utility vehicles and tractor maker Mahindra and Mahindra Ltd, said it will not attach any clause to its pre-placement job offers (PPOs) for the first time. This will allow candidates who have got PPOs from the group to sit for interviews with other recruiters as well. Companies make PPOs to summer interns who have done impressive work.
“If at the end there is a company which is meeting their dream aspirations better than Mahindra, we have to let them go,” said Allen Sequeira, who heads the group’s HR and plans to hire 28 graduates from 16 campuses, including the IIMs, against 10 hired in 2009.
It is not immediately clear if the B-schools will allow such freedom.
Last year, as jobs dried up and campuses took a bad hit due to the Wall Street melt-down and conservative hiring by Indian companies, a few schools made it mandatory for graduates to accept PPOs and drop out of the placement process to make room for their peers.
IIM-A’s student placement coordinator Vivek Jain declined to share information on the PPO rules.
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CAT committee and Prometric — the body that conducts admission test for IIMs and other leading B-Schools — have outlined a seven-point guideline to determine which candidates would be eligible to appear in the second phase of CAT 2009 on January 30 and 31.
The committee felt that "equity and fairness" required it to give some candidates a second chance as they were at the receiving end of the goof ups during the first phase of CAT 2009 from November 28 to December 8 last year. Candidates who don’t meet the seven conditions will be ineligible for the retest even if they lodged complaints with Prometric, emergency helplines or IIM websites.
The first condition mentions that those students who couldn’t take the test due to planned or unplanned closure of their test lab and weren’t rescheduled will be given a second chance. However, those who didn’t turn up for the examination voluntarily will not be included. The second lot of students who will get a second chance are those who couldn’t appear for the test because they were given notices about their rescheduled dates less than 48 hours before the test.
Also getting a second go will be candidates whose test dates were rescheduled but couldn’t appear as the centre was in a different city.
The next category of candidates eligible for the second phase are those who pressed the end/quit button within the first 120 minutes during the first three days of the test but haven’t yet been given rescheduled dates. In case a candidate in this category chooses not to take the second test, then his or her first test results will be retained.
Candidates, who had completed the test in more than 140 minutes due to computer disruptions will also be allowed to reappear. However, if a candidate in this category chooses not appear for the second rescheduled test, then his or her score from the first test will be considered null and void.
A candidate who has completed his first test between 136 minutes to 140 minutes will also be allowed to appear for a rescheduled test. However, if the candidate chooses to stay away, then the marks from the first test will be retained.
The last lot of candidates eligible are those who faced disruptions such as frozen computer screens or monitors that didn’t display the elements properly. These candidates were identified through site reports recorded at the test labs and haven’t been given rescheduled test dates yet.
The results of CAT will be declared by the third week of February.
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The first MBA entrance exam of the year, XAT 2010, held on Sunday, 3 January 2010, was by far the toughest MBA entrance exam. “XAT2010 was easily the toughest paper of the management exam season so far this year. This was a very difficult paper with all the ingredients of a Bollywood potboiler; lengthy questions, difficult questions, tricky questions and yes, easy questions too. Students would have come out of the exam hall not knowing how well they fared,” said an official from leading prep institute T.I.M.E.
XAT 2010 maintained the difficulty level of XAT 2009. The number of questions was 101 and each question had 1 mark. The negative marking scheme is progressive. There was 0.20 negative marking for the first five incorrect answers in each section and 0.25 marks for each incorrect answer thereafter.
Like last year, the number of sections was three. They were Data Interpretation & Quantitative Ability, Analytical Reasoning & Decision Making and Verbal & Logical Ability. Each questions had five choices. The essay topic to be written within 20 minutes was ‘Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need but not every man’s greed’.
“The key to approaching this paper was to keep cool and follow the tested ‘TIME-allocation’ strategy. Those who left the difficult questions and did not target a ‘pre-fixed’ number of questions would have been able to find the easy questions and have a good, balanced performance in all three sections – which is the key to get the coveted call from XLRI,” mentioned T.I.M.E. in its analysis.
Now let us focus on the sections of XAT 2010.
Data Interpretation & Quantitative Ability
This section had 40 questions. According to T.I.M.E., this was the most difficult section in the entire paper. “The DI sets were almost ‘undoable’ and should not have been attempted,” mentioned T.I.M.E. The Quantitative Ability questions were from a variety of areas. Though most of them were difficult and tricky, some of them were simple. “Locating such easy questions and solving them would be the key to scoring well in this section,” said T.I.M.E.
Verbal & Logical Ability
This section had 31 questions. According to IMS Learning, this section was much tougher than what it was in XAT 2009. “While the focus was once again on inferential logic and critical reasoning, a lot of questions contained long paragraphs, which were difficult to interpret in themselves, apart from the fact that the options were very close,” mentioned IMS Learning. This section consisted of four Reading Comprehension passages which were pretty tough to interpret. “Additionally, there were two Jumbled Paragraph questions, and an FIJ one, both of which were taxing to attempt,” added IMS Learning.
Analytical Reasoning & Decision Making
This section had 30 questions. In the Analytical Reasoning section, there were questions on Data Arrangement and Business Judgement. According to PT Education, the Data Arrangement area had 19 questions with five sets. They were of Moderate to Tough difficulty level. The area of Business Judgement had 11 questions and four sets. This topic was of Moderate difficulty level. “The Decision Making sets though ‘easy’ to read always had two close options which made the process of selecting the right answer a very tedious and time consuming one,” T.I.M.E. stated.
“The key to approaching this paper was to keep cool and follow the tested ‘TIME-allocation’ strategy. Those who left the difficult questions and did not target a ‘pre-fixed’ number of questions would have been able to find the easy questions and have a good, balanced performance in all three sections – which is the key to get the coveted call from XLRI,” mentioned T.I.M.E. in its analysis.
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With the increase in demand, colleges are approaching Panjab University to grant them permission to start more add-on courses. With regular courses out, the trend in colleges has shifted towards add-on courses. Almost all colleges in the city have started these courses, as most students prefer these to their regular graduation courses.
Talking to Newsline, Dr Puneet Bedi, Principal, MCM Dav College for Girls, said, “We have four add-on courses and all of them have their seats full. Students no longer want to pursue regular courses. These courses help them get placed right after graduation.” The college runs add-on courses in multimedia and animation, interior designing, video-reporting and cosmetology. All the courses are being taught by professionals.
As more students show an inclination towards the add-on courses, colleges have been approaching Panjab University authorities to grant them affiliation and permission to start more such courses. Sources at PU said many applications seeking permission to start new add-on courses were lying pending with the V-C office.
At S D College, studying an add-on course is mandatory. College Principal, Dr A C Vaid said, “It has been quite some years since we started add-on courses and the response is getting better every year. We have never received a complaint against the complusory enrollment for add-on courses. This shows the interest among students and how they want something more besides the regular graduation courses.”
Meanwhile, because of these add-on courses, colleges have also been able to get many of their students placed right after graduation.
Another college that offers a number of add-on courses is the DAV College and its students get placed on basis of these courses.
Government colleges, too, have followed the trend and started various add-on courses. The most common among these courses include diploma courses in animation, radio jockeying and interior designing. However, the only problem being faced by the government colleges is lack of faculty. To overcome this problem, the UT Education department has now planned to revamp the entire system of add-on courses being offered by different government colleges.
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in Career Forum by Jacko, 06-03