Many management students tend to approach professionals individually to request for a suitable job. These could be out-of-the-blue emails to professionals from someone totally unknown, or students they met during a visit to the institute. Although such requests show initiative, they also reflect a very poor understanding of the companies’ hiring, especially of fresh management graduates.
Most companies, especially the large and reputed ones have a very structured approach to hiring from management institutes. I am not debating the right or wrong of such an approach in this column as that is a different topic. Suffice to say that such an approach and the related processes are followed, and quite strictly in many organisations.
Methodology
The three main reasons for this structured approach are -
~ Organisations rate/rank institutes based on various parameters, including their past experiences with the students from that institute. This rating is fundamental to even consider hiring from an institute.
~ Hiring costs money for any organisation in terms of managerial time, bandwidth, as also actual costs such as travel, and the like. As such, they would prefer to consolidate their hiring efforts in such a manner that the maximum number of suitable students can be selected with minimal effort and cost.
~ Organisations try to ensure a smooth entry for the management graduates into the corporate world and that they are facilitated during this period. The concept of management trainees and the relevant induction, management training, etc., are all planned to ensure that these new recruits have a positive experience when they start their association with the organisation.
In the context of the above, most organisations do not entertain applications directly from students. I know of organisations where individual application requests, even through senior management professionals, are not entertained.
Placements
As such, students should focus all their efforts on getting a job offer through the placement process of the institute instead of attempting to apply for jobs directly. However, there are situations where the placement is not up to the mark in an institute or preferred jobs are not being offered. In such situations, the students can do all the back-end research for suitable roles and organisations as well as find out the contact details of the concerned persons.
However, the approach and interaction pertaining to any such application should always be through the placement cell and done in a formal manner. This would also give a higher level of credibility to such applications and, needless to say, might be considered more seriously than if an individual sends an application.