What corporates look for from B-school students?

The fast paced growth witnessed by the Indian economy in the last decade has also seen a proliferation of B-Schools across the country. While this has made management education more accessible to a large majority of students, it has its downside as well. Except for well established B-Schools, with a reputation for both academics and knowledge delivery infrastructure, a large number of B-Schools have mushroomed to cash into the boom that the education sector is witnessing. The boom is also fast ensuring that a graduate degree is no longer the de-facto entry criteria into the corporate world and a management degree is increasingly becoming essential to achieve a toehold on the career ladder.

With an increasingly large number of management graduates being released into the market each successive year, corporations are now having to graduate to more prudent and researched hiring techniques to identify and segregate talent that they propose to hire. With the replacement of ‘managerial capitalism’ with ‘shareholder capitalism’, the traits that are being looked for in management graduates is also being looked more critically and for alignment to the growing acceptance of a 1970 declaration by Milton Friedman that "the sole concern of (American) business should be the maximization of profit". The traits that are being looked into in fresh management hires can be divided into:

a. Domain Skills and Competencies
b. Social Skills
c. Human Attributes

Domain related skills/competencies form an important part of what corporations today look for. With a shift in focus from ‘labour cost’ to ‘labour quality’, the need to identify the right ‘quality’ talent is crucial, since in this age of extreme competitiveness, the cost of error rework is extremely high with the added pressures of handling consumer complaints, loss of potential revenues and cross selling opportunities, regulatory risks etc. While this is true, corporations today are also valuing people with multi-skills and with the ability to multi-task. To work across domains with the same rigour. Thus someone with super-specialisation in only one key area may be given a miss for a person who has demonstrable ability to work across domain areas.

Apart from domain related skills one of the most looked into aspect from the social/human skills perspective is ‘attitude’. By ‘attitude’, corporations typically mean the ability to identify with and ‘live’ core values of the organization such as respect for others, being customer-driven, etc. Many corporations have concluded that it is too difficult and costly to try to change the attitudes of adults. As a result, they release those unable to work and manage according to the organization's values and replace them with those who can.

Other social skills of importance, other than attitude, that is looked into includes commitment to work, the ability to work as part of a team as well as independently, ability to motivate and lead teams, and an abiding commitment to the company’s core value system. Research has also shown corporations favourably regard traits such as trustworthiness, caring, humility, and capability in their potential hires.

In the end it is all about successful image management. How well do you sell yourself? That’s the question that you must ask. But don’t be fooled. While packaging may be important, customers (read recruiters) will quickly see through the outer package and get to know if you are holding out a false promise. Successful impression management can generate a number of important benefits, including career advancement, client satisfaction, better work relationships (trust, intimacy, avoiding offence), group cohesiveness etc.

In order to create a positive professional image, impression management must effectively accomplish two tasks: build credibility and maintain authenticity. When you present yourself in a manner that is both true to self and valued and believed by others, impression management can yield a host of favourable outcomes for you and the organization/school that you represent.

Contributed By:
Supratim Kar
(Manager - New Business)
Globsyn Group