‘Campus placement not best indicator of B-school status, job retention is’

T Muralidharan, author of the best-selling book, Your Right First Job , says that campus placements are not the best indicator of how well a B-school is doing.

Muralidharan, Chairman of recruitment firm, the Hyderabad-based TMI Group, says what is a better indicator is how many recruits stay behind in a job beyond six months.

“You’ll be shocked, because if you look at the data, one out of three students recruited from campus, come back into the job market within three to six months. How many people retained the job should be an indicator rather than how many people were placed on campus. Because if they are not retained, perhaps an employer may not want to come back to recruit from the campus the next year,” he says in an interview to BLoC.

Another aspect from his book which he expands on is that the placement office and students should jointly take responsibility for a student’s placement in a job. There is tremendous pressure on placement officers to get companies to visit and recruit from campuses but Muralidharan, whose firm has recruited thousands of candidates for various companies over the years, says this pressure should be co-shared and students have to be involved in the placement process as well.

“Students should be told how to get a job, how to use the web, use consultants. It expands the placement horizon for students; that’s critical for them. Right now, even in the top B-schools, students are only involved in scheduling but need to be involved in which employer to invite, from which industry segment, how to engage with them. It changes their perspective,” he says.

One more aspect which Muralidharan, an IIT Madras and IIM-A graduate, deals with is on learning on the first job. “The first job is an extension of education, you don’t go by compensation. You have to see what kind of peer group you have, the learning opportunities. In companies like HUL, Citibank, competition is intense, but rather than high salaries, that’s a learning and recruits have to take their training seriously,” he explains. ( Click here to view a video of Muralidharan talking about his book, Your Right First Job )