Let Students Retain Their Natural Flair

Blurb: I noticed an organisation at a campus hiring MBA students who had just finished 2nd-semester exams. The institute had agreed to waive or relax criteria for class attendance for the selected students

I was talking to three of my colleagues, Aakanksha, Mohit, and Annu from the HR team who are responsible for planning and executing our campus hiring programmes. As an organisation we end up onboarding anywhere around 150 candidates from different streams every year, a majority being engineers. Listening to these champions of my team I realised how things have changed and how all the processes involved in campus hiring programmes are going through an evolution. 

I recall pre-placement discussions at the campuses a decade back. These used to be sales pitches wherein students got into the auditorium to listen to the company representatives. However, this process has now become a formality, happening as late as the morning of the hiring day, and students are least interested in listening to the spiel. This clearly is an impact of social media and far more aware students who do their own research and analysis to know about the companies. 

I believe there is also a blurring of the sanctity of specific ‘day’ of hiring, whether it is day zero or day one. The process is to a great extent difficult to ascertain, at least in upcoming and Tier-2 and Tier-3 colleges, which are not sure of how to create a balance between process, education, and lure of getting everyone placed. Certain campuses nowadays start the process even almost a year before the final completion of the sessions. In fact, I had noticed an organisation at a campus that had come to hire MBA students who had just finished second semester exams. The institute had agreed to waive or relax class attendance rules for the selected students, as priority was to secure jobs rather than complete the curriculum in a pristine way. 

Needed, Return To Office

Newer trends driven by Covid are interesting but may not be in the best interest of education and students. We could clearly see the difference in the quality of readiness and capability of students who did half of their course online at home. While this did not impact engineering students so much due to the four-year course structure, surely management students were greatly impacted. Colleges could not manage to give campus experience that goes a long way in building character and capability. Internships have a major role in immersing students in corporate culture and doing the same online definitely affected the learning process for most of the students. 

The mindset of looking for companies that allow WFH as a proposition was worrisome and I felt that the need to have an option of looking at WFH organisation can mar initial exposure for the students. Though it can be a great option for students who want time and flexibility to prepare for higher studies, it isn’t the right career choice. I hope this trend tapers off and people see value in going through the initial grind of learning where there is no fear of asking basic questions and building lasting relationships. 

Traits Needed

At MakeMyTrip, our focus has always been on hiring individuals who are culture fit and for that, while our focus remains on academic performance and leadership abilities, we also believe that students need to be better aware of the social, economic, global, and political developments around them. They should be smart and savvy to navigate past the alleys of the workplace, build connections, learn beyond the role and know how to promote themselves and the work that they do. My personal belief is that institutions and students need to redefine personality development and finetune it to cover aspects of executive and leadership presence. 

I have seen some of the campuses doing a great job in terms of preparing students for the campus selection process but they need to balance it by allowing students to retain their natural flair. In one of the top management campuses, I realised that almost all the students conducted themselves in the interviews like clones of each other, looked as if they were trained -- they were trained to introduce themselves in a specific way, take deliberate pauses before answering the questions, ask the specific type of questions to the panelists, etc. and so on. It did give a good impression of the sincerity towards the process but after a while, it became predictable and lost its value. How to let panelists know the real personality of the students should be the work of the educational institutions.

In the recent past, the trend of keeping the academic performances during the course opaque with the recruiters cut both ways. It can encourage students to take academics lightly; at the same time, good and bright students may not be able to leverage high performance in the selection process. This whole approach, clubbed with reserved seats for different categories, makes it quite a tricky exercise for the recruiters to figure out the best of the lot.

• The author is Group CHRO, MakeMyTrip