The Indian Institute of Management, Shillong (IIM-S) has come to be known as the ‘Recruiter’s Rock in the Abode of Clouds’ and is a fairly young institute offering top-quality management students, giving the established institutes a tough fight.
The flagship Post Graduate Programme in Management is a two year course with students expected to take an internship during the first year summer break and a permanent offer in the final year, before graduation. The institute has a track record of securing 100 per cent placements for all its students since inception in 2008.
A couple of months into the programme and the institute is already bustling with recruitment activity. It has been a month-long process into getting ready for this time and it is indeed crucial, especially for those who have not had a corporate exposure before. In the run up to the internship recruitment drive, the Placement Committee had engaged students into setting up their resumes and verifying every written detail. We had to submit proof for every word written on it to ensure authenticity of data as recruiters were to make offers on the basis of the academic track record, work experience and achievements mentioned therein.
Once we had our resumes ready, now the onus was on us to prepare for the respective profile of our interest. We were provided with readings on various domains such as finance, marketing, HR, IT, consulting and the like with basic reading for those who had not had prior exposure or learning before. For example, those who had an engineering experience but had their interests in marketing found the prep material really helpful in getting ready for the selection process. In addition to having the reading material, our writing club called Symphony had organised practice group discussion sessions and mock interviews that helped us gain immediate and accurate feedback on our performance.
On the ‘D’-day
We were all set, and soon enough, recruiters began to come in and the process was in action. We had a variety of recruiters from various domains offering positions in banking, marketing, operations, sales, infrastructure development, e-commerce, consulting, CSR and all the way up to the niche general management profile. Recruiters were not just limited to private enterprises, but also included leading government institutions.
Each company had their own unique style of recruitment which included not just the traditional group discussion and interview process but also included case studies, live projects, presentations and conducting opinion surveys on a new product. Students were put through a variety of challenges which brought out their mettle and portrayed the best of the talents to the recruiters.
The recruitment process
While the first-year students were busy with the internship recruitment process, the final year students are busy in a much more gruelling final recruitment drive. Some students secure a pre-placement offer (PPO), a full-time job offer from their internship employers based on strong performance during their summer internships. Some others are successful in securing a pre-placement interview (PPI), a direct interview for the full-time job.
Having a growing rate of success over the years, recruiters are indeed battling it out to secure the best of students from the institute.