P is for Placement

One question I love asking my new MBA students is what they want from the program. The first answers are usually about gaining knowledge, understanding the principles of management and adding to their professional qualifications. Then a few bold souls will candidly talk about getting the right job, starting their career with a dream company and cracking placement.

Every Marketing textbook explains the 4Ps. For a young MBA though, there is a 5th and equally important P.

P for Placement.

In a recent lecture with my second-year students, I asked how many months were left for placement season. Someone softly said “It starts in November”. My reply was “And we’re here at the end of August”.

What I didn’t ask was how many felt they were ready and what they had been doing to prepare. For any student of any MBA program, here are a few things I would suggest.

Firstly, you need to be clear about the industries, product categories and companies that you are interested in. Once you have your wish list ready, confirm that it matches with the companies who usually come to your campus. If the lists don’t really match or your list is longer than the campus list, then you need to revise your expectations. Don’t frown at me, please. This is reality, so deal with it.

Once you have this clarity, start reading up everything that’s out there on the industry and the companies you are keen on. Apart from sales turnover, growth rates, brands, competition and profitability, you need to have perspective on the high-level business issues and challenges. The more detailed and specific you can get, the higher the quality of conversation you will drive in that twenty-minute interview. Companies are impressed by and interested in those who take time to understand them and their business. It’s a bit like going on a date. If you’ve taken the trouble to find out your date’s likes in food, drink and entertainment at minimum, you will get brownie points for your interest. When 500 students on a campus are applying for the same job as you, every brownie point counts.

While preparing a resume, please visualize the screening process. A few harried HR executives and some juniors drawn from the representative departments will be skimming through literally hundreds of resumes, all in a short span of a few days. Mostly, there are pre-set criteria like work experience vs. fresher, engineer vs. all others, age, etc. Assuming that you don’t end up on the floor for these reasons, your “standouts” will determine which pile you are assigned to. So, make sure your resume is filled with good stuff, like results you delivered in your summer internship, important competitions you won, big awards you took home and promotions you got in your past jobs. And be sure to write it in a way that is easy to notice. All resumes, like all ads on TV, are basically good. Yet, how many ads do you really remember of the hundreds you watch every week. Net, make yourself an unputdownable CV. Too impressive to be ignored.

Assuming you make it to the interview, the rest is really up to you. What would you say in 90 seconds when they ask you to “tell us a little about yourself?" Your answer should be well thought out and well-rehearsed. If you’re trying to think of an answer while being glared at by three or four over-worked and generally stressed-out corporate executives, then you will inevitably say something less than optimal. Also, if you haven’t rehearsed your answer out loud, then it will feel weird when you yourself hear it for the first time while in the spotlight. So, write down your answers, revise them relentlessly till they’re perfect and practice saying them till you feel comfortable with the sound of your own words. If you don’t like the way it sounds, then chances are that Corporate India won’t like it either. Start again.

This opening introduction will set the tone for the rest of the interview. Questions will range from your achievements in academics and past jobs, current affairs, what you know about the company, why you want to work for them and your career plans.

Whatever I have said till now is what happens in more than 9 out of 10 placement processes. So, it must be really easy to crack if its so predictable. Right?

Wrong. At least very often.

The simple fact is that many students don’t go through a disciplined process of preparation and leave it all till the very end. I’ve known students who were at best average in their impact during face-to-face discussions but who cracked jobs on day zero or day one. Not by luck, but by grinding hard work, preparing like athletes, reading about their companies of interest till late in the night and waking up early every morning to rehearse their answers before the rest of the hostel came to life.

Whether you’re a second year MBA student with less than 90 days to D-Day or you are in the first term of the first year, start your preparation right after reading this piece. The hardest work is actually doing the hard work. Steve Jobs is admired for being a maverick genius. But he was an adopted child, who spent many months diligently learning calligraphy, a skill that eventually found its way into the beautiful fonts of the Mac. We all think of him as a genius and he definitely was. But a very hard-working genius, was he.

Your time starts now.