Reading Boss' Mind

First the predictable ones: leadership qualities, the ability to share glory with others, fire in the belly, quick thinking, ambition, enthusiasm...you have heard them before. Of course, most of the people we spoke to added that they would like to recruit the toppers.

Scratch the surface and the urge to look for specialised traits is immediately visible. One top recruiter wants assertiveness in a candidate, but it must fall short of aggression. Bharti Enterprises, operating in the fast-changing telecom space, gives top billing to the ability to adapt and qualities that make a good customer-service professional. Its head of HR, Jagdeep Khandpur, even landed up in a little known B-school in Mumbai this year because he had heard the institute placed special emphasis on customer-service skills. But, by the time he reached Mumbai, the top graduates had already been picked up by others. He plans to try his luck next year.

Consulting firms look for exposure to global management practices as well as competencies in niche functional areas, points out A. Sandeep, dean (Centre For Advanced Consulting and Research), Indian Institute for Planning and Management. Banks and FMCG companies put a premium on industry interface and practical experience. For Tata Consultancy Services, the country’s largest software company, the overall presentation and communication skills and the psychographic profile of a candidate, in addition to the academic record and grasp of the subjects specialised in, are the vital statistics.

GlaxoSmithkline has gone a step further and devised its own method of testing the routine innovation and entrepreneurship abilities as well as the highly abstract integrity, passion, and cultural fit. "We look beyond academic brilliance," says P. Dwarkanath, director (HR), GlaxoSmithkline (Consumer). Cadbury’s India, on the other hand, looks for "game changers", that is, people with "the big picture ability". Thus, it’s no longer uncommon to find psychologists holding individual sessions with candidates to judge their emotional stability.

Irreverence and counter-questioning are also sought-after traits. A company’s pre-placement pitch this year was: ‘Thank God It’s Monday’ and, coincidentally, it was conducting placement interviews in one of the institutes on a Monday! That led a candidate to open the interview with: "Do you really mean it? Are you really such an exciting place to be in?" To be sure, this cheeky candidate got the job.

If the recruiters want to judge a student’s interpersonal skills, s/he is likely to be questioned about a personal conflict with a friend and how it was resolved. "The competencies required for each job are well defined and we try and find out whether the candidate possesses them or not," says S. Vardharajan, vice president (talent engagement and development), Wipro Spectramind. Little surprise then to hear B-School graduate Swati Vashisht observe: "You are hardly asked any management questions. They want to see how much beyond the book you can go."

An emerging trend these days is that companies also look favourably at candidates who did summer training with them. The argument in favour of this is that a certain comfort level develops during the two months and the unpredictability is that much lower since the candidate becomes, to an extent, a known quantity. "Last year, about a third of our campus hires belonged to the summer trainee batch. We believe this is the right direction to head in, as this provides us a better view of a trainee in action," says Adil Malia, vice president (human resources), Coca-Cola India.

Abhishek Industries, the Trident Group flagship, highly visible in the appointments columns, lays a lot of emphasis on the location of the institute. It prefers the north-based ones since their students are less likely to have problems about working in Ludhiana, its head office, or Barnala, where its plant is located. "Attitude and character matter more in today’s competitive world than the brand of the institute," says managing director Rajinder Gupta. Not so for Bharti—for them "the most important thing is the quality of the faculty".

So, there. It seems easier to advise the candidates on what not to do. The first of these is: never ever be late for an interview even if you are in a back-to-back situation. Secondly, don’t come under the halo effect. Simply focus on the job on offer without being overawed by the interviewers. And bargain by all means, but never too hard. It is a big put-off for the recruiter to find a candidate who is more interested in the money than the job. It would however be erroneous to think of the placement game as one in which the recruiter is the player as well as the referee. Even in these not-so-happy times, graduates of top-notch schools are spoilt for choice. At these institutes, placement hardly spills into the third day and there is invariably a scramble among recruiters for a Day One slot.

Even outside the venerable IIMs, life isn’t too bad. While Bharti doesn’t recruit a candidate from an institute it hasn’t visited for campus selection, TCS, which recruited 52 candidates from the Category A institutes and 80 from the Category B in 2002-03, is open to them. "In these cases, we first determine if there is an appropriate role fitment for the applicant. The applicant must also meet the broad selection criteria," says TCS’ executive VP Phiroz Vandrevala. And Coke, while generally not recruiting from B-schools that it does not visit for the campus interview process, does consider candidates from other institutes for its summer training programme. Says Malia: "We are looking to pick the best talent in the country and so we head for the best B-schools. However, this should not imply that good talent is not available outside of these schools."

Before the placement season, most of the recruiters go through a trying process to identify the institutes they wish to target. Bharti, for instance, which goes to about 10-12 institutes, carries out an assessment of no less than 40. TCS does an internal rating of the schools based on 12 parameters. Coke, to an extent, goes by the track record of the previous batches from a particular B-School and its distinct culture. Even a niche player like srei International Finance, which is into infrastructure equipment and project finance, carries out a rigorous assessment on the basis of half a dozen criteria including "multi-dimensional approach in overall development of individual skills and knowledge".

Students can be demanding too. For instance, consultancy firms suddenly find themselves somewhat out of the reckoning. McKinsey & Co, which topped the wishlist of most B-School graduates not too long ago, fell sharply in the sweepstakes last year. Accenture, Lehman Brothers and BCG—top 10 recruiters in 2001—were not seen at all in 2002. The tech bust impacted recruitment by i2 Technologies, another top 10 ranker in 2001. On the other hand, the rising fortunes of telecom firms and a few software companies have translated into a major presence for TCS, Bharti, Polaris, etc.

And there is a caveat for HR professionals going for selections too: "Don’t get overawed by the candidates just because they happen to be from some top notch B-School." Nervousness during placement time, it seems, is mutual.

by Suveen K. Sinha and Gauri Bhatia