The Hindu Business Line : <I>B-school hiring goes deeper </I>

The country's second layer of B-schools, nearly 800 of them, are slowly coming into their own. Branded as catering more to the marriage market than the job market, these B-schools had to fight to get companies to visit them for campus hiring. And whatever hiring happened were thanks to personal contacts and networking of the professors or the placement officer. Thanks to the boom in the job market, the hiring season is more vibrant in the Tier II and Tier III colleges now.

Hiring from these B-schools, which was till now an ad hoc exercise, is gradually gaining a structured approach. Fuelled mainly by the growth of the retail and the BFSI sectors, about 80-100 B-schools in the country are likely to get drawn into the formal campus recruitment programmes in the next two years.

Bangalore-based assessment company MeritTrac Services has just concluded a massive assessment project for a financial services company involving 3,000 students from 120 B-schools across 17 cities. Though this was a specific mandate for sales and operations positions for a large BFSI client, this will soon be a trend, says Mr Madan Padaki, Co-founder and Director, MeritTrac Services. Retail, BFSI, BPO and KPO will be the key sectors for B-school recruitment in the coming years. Chennai-based HR consultancy and search firm Ma Foi has put in place an integrated programme for students to orient them to corporate careers. The GEM programme (Group learning, E-learning and Mentorship) has attracted both graduate school and B-school students, says Mr Pandia Rajan, Managing Director, Ma Foi.

Mr Padaki says that B-school hiring today is akin to what engineering campus hiring was a decade ago when only the IITs and the RECs had a structured approach to campus hiring. As demand picked up, companies started visiting Tier II colleges and now almost 200 engineering colleges in the country have a formal recruitment programme.

The country currently has over 1,000 B-schools and hardly 20 of them have companies visiting them directly for recruitment. "Though most of them have placement cells and placement officers, most of the hiring happens through personal contacts and networking," says Mr Padaki. This is likely to change in the next couple of years, he adds.

In fact, MeritTrac has already put in a battery of tests for assessing B-school students. These tests are designed to assess students for both generic and specific skills. The generic tests would be in the areas of communication ability, logical and reasoning ability and psychometric testing in behavioural areas while there would be specific tests to assess domain knowledge like finance or marketing.

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