The Essence of Any Matching: Made for Each Other!

Recruiting at Management Institutes has always been a not-so-satisfactory experience for me. You are required by the ‘process’ to select a person in a fifteen minute interview. Although a group discussion is held earlier, the selection process just does not allow you time enough to interact adequately with the student-candidates. As an interviewer you are required to decide nevertheless, and offer a job that fetches a salary in excess of Rs. 1.2 Mn a year to some!

The recruiters and candidates both realise that they are part of a funny process, but go along the game. Recruiters often look for the required numbers and student-candidates look for highest salary possible. It is not as if recruiters never look for the right match or students never look for an organisation of their choice, but they accept the limitations set by the placement process.

The right match between an organisation and an MBA is a matter of accident in many cases, not a conscious decision.

When the economy was booming, many of the IIM students picked up jobs abroad, and sometimes 35% of the batch was placed in such jobs. A friend once said that IIM did not stand for Indian Institute of Management but International Institute of Management. The press covers highest salaries offered at each campus to promote the high salary hysteria further.

As a student of botany I have understood the importance of the natural habitat. A plant grows in its natural habitat, it is not as if it will die elsewhere, but it will not give the best yield, it will not blossom in a figurative sense. I have felt that a person must think whether [s]he will grow and ‘blossom’ in the organisation where [s]he works. And of course try to find one such. They do not necessarily exist abroad or are big corporations offering fat pay.

Who knows? Perhaps the IIM student who found a job in a Rs 30 Mn [See Economic Times which says: Even a firm with a Rs 3-crore turnover managed to grab an IIM-A graduate in 2009] organisation may discover that it was not a bad deal at all.

It all depends on whether you value the ‘intangibles’.

Vivek