Clerical recruitment criteria relaxed for now

Non-graduate candidates for bank jobs (clerical posts) will get a significant breather. Banks had recently stipulated that graduation was the minimum criteria for clerical posts, following a recommendation by the Khandelwal Committee on HR issues.

This had upset a number of candidates who were non-graduates and had passed the common exam held for these posts.

Roughly 15 per cent of the 5.31 lakh successful candidates were non-graduates. Their disappointment has been taken note of and is now being addressed, Mr M. Balachandran, Director, Institute of Banking Personnel Selection (IBPS), the agency which conducts the common exam, said.

At a meeting between the HR heads of various banks, the IBPS, and Indian Banks Association (IBA) last week, it was decided to recommend postponement of the stipulation of higher eligibility criteria for the current exam cycle.

Instead, banks have been requested to stipulate the same eligibility criteria they specified when they gave their mandate to the IBPS. Or adopt a uniform minimum criterion, as stipulated by the IBPS.

tighter screening

In deference to the demands from candidates, the application fee to be charged by various banks is likely to be reduced from Rs 200 to 100 and from Rs 50 to 20.

Also, the pass percentage is being tightened, with higher standardised scores, to align with the likely minimum score to be fixed by banks. This will be done to moderate the number of qualified candidates /eligible applicants to 3-4 times the number of vacancies.

The IBPS and banks had also discussed the phenomenon of a few candidates getting multiple offers while a disproportionately large number of lower-ranked candidates did not get any call at all.

This had led to a few candidates being able to shop around with banks and do ‘bank-hopping', while denying other candidates their chance.

Although this cannot be stopped totally, the IBPS and banks have decided to introduce some measures to discourage such behaviour.

One move being contemplated is to restrict the joining time given to candidates to around three weeks.

If the selected candidates don't respond or join on the due date, the offer will straightaway be given to the next eligible candidate on the waiting list.

Banks also have been told to keep a waitlist of candidates equal to the number of vacancies. Banks will conduct fresh interviews from amongst those who applied to them to fill up left over vacancies, if any.

Fine-tuning applications

It has also been decided that IBPS will provide the details of the varying eligibility criteria with regard to qualification, age, etc., prescribed by different banks while calling for applications for future common written exams.

This, along with information provided on the frequency of scores in different brackets State-wise, would enable candidates to take informed decisions about participating in the common written exam at all and /or to apply to (specific) individual banks.

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