Recruitment / Placement : IIM / ISB vs. International Schools

update:Turns out this post needed more follow-ups, here is an update post covering salary ranges, base salaries and other such matters

I receive a fair amount of e-mail from my blog readers. Many pertain to application evaluation/essay evaluation. And some pertain to recruitment and similar career related questions - and several of these are from potential Indian applicants.

This post is to summarize some principal possible differences between recruitment in the top Indian business schools like IIM/ISB vs. top International schools (typical FT top 10 or M7 + LBS/INSEAD). Keep in mind the following

1. I can write about IIM / ISB experiences based on what I've heard and read. I haven't studied in one of them previously (yes, many IIM grads do study MBA again in international schools) but I do know many who have, including a sibling.
   
2. I haven't started the recruitment season at INSEAD yet - it starts next April for me. But I've seen quite a bit so far. So if this post needs an update later, I will do so.

So, compared to the Indian Institutes, what are probably the principal differences?

1. Recruitment is a long cycle - The process of finding a job can takes months, sometimes 4-6 months. The process involves substantial amount of career coaching, CV polishing, schmoozing, meeting with recruiters, follow-ups, attending cocktails and networking sessions, and then finally rounds of interviews. Jobs are not a "given", the idea is you learn all the skills needed to "earn" one.
   
2. There is no "placement week" with "zero day placements" and everyone getting jobs in 2 days - There is a recruitment season which lasts 2-4 months, but nothing stops someone from looking for jobs much earlier.
3. A lot of graduates get jobs outside career services / campus placements - A pretty high percentage - often as high as 30% (could be more depending on the year, school etc.) get jobs outside placements. They do so for variety of reasons - but the most important one is that search for the right job in a company of interest. Getting jobs like this is again a long process that involves lot of research, networking and persistence.
   
4. Astronomical salaries are usually outliers - Yes, someone from Columbia this year got half a million. Many from INSEAD do get high salaries. But keep in mind that these are statistical "outliers." They do not represent typical salaries. When I read many reports on IIM/ISB I read about many "1 crore" salaries which translates to over 250,000$ base salary for associate or 3rd year analyst positions. I might be wrong, but such salaries from banks may be specially given to IIM / ISB students because I don't think any of the international schools get such salaries on a regular basis. I don't know. But the typical average in most of the top schools is around 110,000 USD.
   
5. You are often pitted against those from other top schools - There are many interesting jobs and positions often open only to a select set of schools. What that means is you are not competing for it with just your class mates, but also with those from the other top schools - you compete on a whole new level. Without mentioning names of companies, I can tell you there are specific roles that companies open only to the typical FT top 10. The flip side is you are competing with all of them. Most of the companies recruiting are high profile and have access to the best talent around the world, so they're not standing in a queue to recruit you.
   
6. Job placement is a whole lot about specific roles and fit - A lot of placement is for specific roles and positions. This makes fit very important. There is very little of "we'll come in a bus, pick a bunch of grads, and then put them anywhere in the organization." I can say that this is a critical difference between lot of international blue chips that come on campus vs. Indian company style recruitment (of which I can speak of with considerable experience).
7. Placement is truly global - jobs are offered around the world, and often in very interesting management rotations that take you to multiple countries.
   

Does it mean that it's a hopeless case to get a job? Uh..no. Most of them get great jobs in interesting companies and with pretty good salaries. But you need to work really hard to get them. In the process, you become a whole lot polished as a person. And this is a reason why some schools don't really worry you with grades (INSEAD doesn't) so you can focus on all the other critical skills you should be polishing as an MBA, and it's not all about theory and books.
updated note: needless to mention, these skills should come to aid later in life when you are job searching on your own as well.

At some point later I might post some interesting jobs that get offered. If you have a correction suggestion to make, please send in a comment and I will make necessary changes. I hope I answered a few questions and cleared some doubts about how recruitment typically works. This is not just for INSEAD, as I said, it holds for many other international schools as well.

update:Turns out this post needed more follow-ups, here is an update post covering salary ranges, base salaries and other such matters

update: Here is a post on Consulting recruitment at INSEAD and for those who think about GMAT Relevance in interviews, here is my post on Relevance of GMAT Score in Consulting recruitment

In memoriam

Of a dearest friend.
A wonderful human being.
A fellow participant in dreams, hopes and fears.

Will always be missed. Forever.

Imperfect combinations

When you combine a regular flu / cold and a late night party with strong long island tea (it's not tea, I assure you!), what you end up with is a miserable next day. As other fellow bloggers have mentioned, it's getting pretty stressful with exam preparation - they loom right ahead, next week.

 

No matter who says 'grades don't matter' and what not, when you see interim test results where the average score out of 25 was 22 for a batch size of 150 (Singapore) you know that you better hunker down and get to work and avoid being the last dud in the class. The Z-score grading is evil in the sense you could get 80% on your subject and still be a *failure*

 

That's the thing about INSEAD - things move at warp speed, you're settling down, getting to know others, and you're drowned in events, parties, case studies, company presentations and before you catch your breath to study, the exams are here. P2 promises to be harder -  10 less days. I also put in my preference for bidding - I plan to be in Fonty P4/P5. As expected, there was a huge rush for Fonty people to come to Singapore in P3 to avoid winter...tough luck many got wait listed due to the rush - Singapore is becoming very popular now :) and a large number do the switch of campus.

 

I'm looking forward to the little break after P1 (4 days) and then we hit P2 - I also plan to travel a  bit in P2 (cambodia, vietnam on list)

 

(my next post is something I've been asked to address quite a few times by potential indian applicants - i.e. recruitment styles in international schools compared to the Indian biggies like ISB and IIM. It's quite different so I hope to get some facts across without the hype.)

 

 

Of learning/and my influential blog readers!

before I get to that, I stumbled upon this new INSEAD blog. http://flyingalongonacurrentofhotair.blogspot.com - welcome, flyingalong!

 

So, what is it about learning and keeping an open mind? At INSEAD we meet people with a range of experience and from diverse functional backgrounds. We have engineers, investment bankers, commercial bankers, lawyers, consultants, reporters, sales managers, marketers, vice presidents, founders - name it. And then we have people from "every which" company - whether it is the usual suspects McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Roland Berger and then a multitude of other companies - Deutsche bank, Barclays, UN, Amex, Cisco, Total, Shell, Booz allen, Dell...and so on. The beauty of the mix is regardless of one's own experience, it is useful to hear other points of view. And then we have all these classes - Market pricing strategies, corporate finance, accounting, organizational behavior - subjects many of us are studying for the first time.

 

To me, this is excellent. You could be cynical and be critical of everyone and hate all your subjects or you could absorb the immersion constantly asking yourself "how will this help me next time." I chose to "unlearn" many things I did in my experience and understand how to do things better, how to manage people better, understand several new business concepts. When I look back at my experience, I can already spot areas where I might have done better with the tools I am equipping myself. Ultimately, it is about what we want to take out of a program - a closed mind is not one of them.

 

I am also researching my careers, and noted that there are people from my "target companies" who visit my blog. My dear readers, I may seek you for information and help sometime in getting to know your organizations better :)

 

In other news, I have also discovered, much to my consternation, that several wines and vodkas do nothing to me. I am not even a drinker - in fact, I barely touch alcohol except in some parties, but damn! And singapore is expensive - you don't want to get too happy during 'non-happy' hours or you'll leave with an unhappy wallet. It's so expensive it's almost criminal.

 

We've been having a bunch of activities - to name a few

 

* Australia/Korea/Japan week - loads of fun, BBQ, clubbing

* Deadlines for several banks - made many people run around

* Informal bar hopping/dinner events

* and huge loads to study

 

the coming week is very hectic and we have an interesting online game to be played between Fonty, Singapore and Wharton. Whartonies, here we come! The game lasts a week - and promises to be interesting. Provided we survive through all the activities and slogging as we get closer to the first exams. It's crazy, a month is over and it just whizzed by!

 

 

X60 tablet update/Learning/3 of 2/subjects

When you join INSEAD, they say that you can do 2 of the 3 things - Network, party or study. Very true. The subjects have caught pace and it's becoming really difficult to do all three and most people are beginning to prioritize. You ask yourself the question "is this relevant? is this valuable? should I do this?" for everything and then decide. There are tons of things you can do here, and it becomes all the more important to decide what your time is worth.

Having said that, I'm actually enjoying the subjects - for the first time, I feel smarter when I read FT or WSJ. Some of the terms make sense. I actually feel like I'm learning something. We're covering broad microeconomic theories, use of statistics, fundamentals of corporate finance, organizational behavior and accounting. Everything is new to me and it feels to good to learn all that. The teaching started slow but is now really fast paced and it's critical everyone reads for the next day and does all assignments, or it's really hard to catch up. The professors are great - no surprises there.

INSEAD conducts huge number of exec education programs - these are also excellent sources for us to network with senior executives from influential organizations - Shell, Nokia and what not. We are given the opportunity to set up meetings with them, and I think it's a fantastic chance to learn details of organizations we are interested in. We also soon have a INSEAD alumni gathering which is attended by some real heavyweights.

In other news, I had written about my use of my tablet. I can tell you now officially that it works really well. I use it for all my study note-taking, solving exercises and it works like a charm. Here is a screenshot.

A day in the life of an INSEADer

Is a picture worth a thousand words?


INSEAD classes are formed into groups. Each group is of 5 people, and everyone in that group is from a different country, and often a different function. This is intentional. My group is great, so far we're getting along very well.

Like they say, it's all about networking. You get to talk to company representatives post presentation. It works well sometimes, and sometimes it doesn't. We've only started.

Ah, the parties! So many parties and so many bars...and so little time.And in the middle of all this, we have to study, do coursework, do homework, join clubs (lots of activity clubs), read mails, talk to loved ones, friends, attend presentations, network with classmates.

Hey, who said INSEAD was easy?

Busy day @ INSEAD - short note

Quite a bit to blog on 2 great (and interesting) days at INSEAD. I have a busy day tomorrow and need to sleep, so look to some larger update in the next 2-3 days.

A small glimpse -

1. Great welcome speeches by deans
2. Very interesting day with clubs and ensuing confusion (and an elevator pitch opportunity, pretty nifty and I got laughed at)
3. Welcome gift and party from Bain next week, welcome gift and letter from McKinsey, a welcome presentation by AT Kearney next week.
4. Diverse groups and friends - you really need to be here to understand what it means.

I also have a few mails that I need to answer, sent from "blog acquaintainces", I ask for your patience while I respond. It might take a couple of days.

More soon.

INSEAD, Singapore. Here I come!

It's been 5 days since I arrived in Singapore and settled to my apartment. The first impressions of the place and the campus has been very positive, and the interactions with many INSEAD-mates has been great. Things are looking up for the year to come.

Singapore is super-efficient and beautiful. The ease at which we got our mobile, Internet, apartment papers was testament to how Singapore works. You could just get all comfortable here and go nowhere.

Turns out I got me a great set of flat-mates too. One of them's done more in his relatively younger career (compared to mine!) than I did since I was born ;) The other too works for a large Brazilian retailer and focuses on strategy. Let me put it this way - I'm the dumb geek. We seem to be getting along very well so far and hope to keep it that way. I thought I could break the will of one of the guys by making him fail at something -- i.e. cooking some egg curry. But damn, he did that well too. Now I'm left eating my words (and the egg curry)

Over the days, we've met a diverse bunch of INSEADers. Consultants, bankers, engineers, doctors..name it! And we've only met a small group so far. This is what makes it pretty amazing - just the ability to learn from such a varied set. My batch has people from 69 countries - I think. For someone like me, who had most of his career in the technology industry, this is a breath of fresh air so to speak.

Our apartment is pretty much a luxury condo. A lot of INSEADers stay here too - it's expensive (Singapore rents have gone up in the last 2 years and it's crazy) but a great place. Gym, Jacuzzi, three pools, landscaping...living in style for students! For new batches, my word of caution is to look for housing early. It is expensive, the agents are not always reliable and can up the rent based on the panic in your voice. You are also better off staying close to the institute and with others - that way you enjoy the experience more.

The location couldn't be better - 10 minutes (or less) walk to INSEAD. Affordable eateries close by, cabs are very reasonable especially when you share, the metro-train stations close by - convenient to do anything. The INSEAD campus is compact, and it is dwarfed by a mammoth - behemoth construction beside it called 'fusionopolis' which will eventually house aparments, multiplexes, malls and a new metro station. The INSEAD class of 2010 or 2011 should have a fantastic time. Once you get into INSEAD, it's very nice. Spacious, clean and very pleasant inside. I am yet to see inside the classes - we've so far seen the entrance, cafe etc and they're sweeeeet.


Is it all sunny? No downsides? Well there are a few little ones

• Apartment rent is rather unreasonable and is the biggest expense. It hasn't been easy for people to get the place of their choice in a reasonable budget. Adding to the misery is the unwillingness of some landlords to give apartments to students, and difficulties getting shorter term contracts. INSEAD doesn't make or break the local rental market so there's really no bargaining power.
  
• Be prepared to walk with an umbrella - it rainy in a jiffy and rains hard.
• Pre-paid mobile isn't all that cheap. Post-paid phones require contracts.

No place is perfect. But so far - it's been great and I'm looking forward to orientation/start on Monday. I got myself a dapper suit -- wooohooo -- and hope to look all official during the dean's address.

After a long break!

I've been out of action for a long time. Returned to India to bid good bye to my job and started making preparations for leaving to Singapore.

 

Recently, my fellow blogger DTLF too wondered where I was - "wake up!" she/he said! So I'm waking up..sort of. Well, where I am right now, free-riding in my dad's house, we don't have broadband and dial-up is bloody slow. That, along with a lot of running around tying several loose ends, has kept me away from the blog. But I will be back soon once in Singapore from Aug 21st.

 

There were a few interesting things though - apart from being amazed at the incredible rate of change in my city after coming back with a gap of 3 years. So I was trying to get myself a really small education loan just to bridge the initial month or two until I could some of my money out of fixed deposits etc. Not that I desparately need it, but I figured I would not touch all m life savings and instead use a little loan. The Indian banks certainly operate interestingly (I've never taken any kind of loan, so this was kinda new to me). Here's the gist of it

 

a) They won't give me a loan, but only to my dad! So here I am, well employed for many years, far wealthier (relative terms, don't start imaginin' me as a tycoon on a yacht) than my dad, and I can't get a 10,000$ loan! Maybe they will even expect me to walk into the bank holding my dad's pinky finger.

b) Tons of paperwork, close to 14% interest, and they want me to pledge a property as collateral. Riiight..I should pledge property worth several times the loan.

c) Official-1 says one story, official-2 says another, and one of them categorically told me "We don't fund correspondence courses!" hmm...I now have to suffer the belittlement of INSEAD being turned into a third rate correspondence course! I never said that to him, but something about me on the phone must have sounded like I was super dumb. Duhhhhhhhh.

 

So I finally gave up on that. Perhaps I will have to beg a friend or two of mine in US to sign me up for a IEFC loan. Let's see.

 

In other news, I also took the career leader test. My experience was a better than DTLF (who was mighty pissed...pissed is an understatement really). I answered the questions quickly and went with my gut feel. I have to say that the results were pretty accurate about how I feel/want to do barring a point or two. Anyway I'm not too worked up about it - I want to go with an open mind. Though at this point I am reasonably clear I will not bother about getting into finance/banking. Not too much fun sitting with someone 7 years younger to me and getting my ass kicked ;)

 

My last day at work was nice. It was great to meet many in my team, who reported into me but who I never saw. What suprised me was the warmth I received, and it was a nice send-off after meeting several senior managers/CEO. Feels good to walk out with a good relation.

 

We also had a good alumni + new admits reunion at my town. I was impressed with the alumni, all doing well, and I have a great set of class mates. It was a pleasant harbinger of things to come. If I get time, I'll write more about it. Couple of us have already met several times, and so that tells you that the vibes are good.

 

Housing in singapore has been a b*tch. Rentals are over the roof, and it took a lot of running around (so to speak..though it was all on email/phone) before we finally nailed a place in Heritage, which looks pretty cool and very close to INSEAD. I wanted to be close to the school so it's easy to do a lot of activities and might as well have a great time in the limited period.

 

So that's about it for now. More soon when I have time, or once I reach INSEAD!

 

funny - dean's list video

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZc-ogaVQRk 

 

heheh - pretty funny..

 

Given that there are many bankers, consultants, VPs, economists and what not in my class, a poor sod engineer like me can abandon all ye hopes of becoming a dean's lister... ;)