B-School Admission Interviews!

B-Schools still carry certain prestige despite recent downward trend in salaries on offer. Therefore there is a presumed tough selection process beginning from entrance exams to group discussion to interviews to final selection. Incontestably, given the supply-demand mismatch, more than two thousand B-Schools have mushroomed across the country.

To a prospective recruiter, B-School degree of the candidate is essential no doubt but the degree itself carries less weight. It is the prestige of the college that matters more. Harvard graduates do not get jobs because they are Harvard graduates but for the fact they managed to Harvard in the first place itself. Institutions have input barriers and the more tougher the barrier, presumably on  the toughest of the students manage to gain an entry. If someone has gained an entry in an Ivy League B-school, it sends a signal that there is something in the candidate that allowed him or her to crack the Ivy League (global or national). Hence the candidate would be a good catch for the company.

The slope tapers sharply once the top league schools are factored in. For a large number of Tier-II or Tier-III B-Schools, the palpable difference in inputs is minimal. There is virtually a perfect competition at Tier-II or Tier-III B-Schools. The institutes are under constant pressure to fill their seats. Students have a variety of choice to opt for different schools. There is constant rush towards attracting students towards their institutes. Yet the B-Schools cannot be seen as sacrificing rigour in terms of admission. They have to demonstrate that they want to pick the best.

So an elaborate rituals of B-School selection process are evolved. The first ritual is usually the entrance test. While many B-Schools impose a certain minimum percentile in MAT or any other similar exam, relaxing the rule is often routine than exception. Prospective students are advised to appear for interviews to test their suitability for relaxation of eligibility limits for management entrance exam scores. The interviews are carefully designed and executed to demonstrate pretensions of seriousness than a reality of seriousness. At times it descends into a farce of a reality show. There are multiple rounds of interviews by many B-Schools. Technology through Skype etc. come in handy. They save the time of interviewers as well as interviewees. Further it allows the candidates to be interviewed multiple times.

If an interviewer rejects a candidate repeatedly, some institutions keep repeating the interview till such time someone finally selects the candidate. More often than not, all candidates who have applied and appeared for interviews would be given an offer letter irrespective of their past academic performance. There are few institutes however, who are very candid and skip this interview process completely and offer admissions on first cum first served basis.

There are institutes who go through a process of Hang-Out based virtual group discussions which itself might not just be one but of multiple rounds. The entire process is designed to convey to the student as though he or she has to various difficult steps before getting receiving the offer letter. The process would be invariably of student getting a touch of N_ACH of the McClelland theory of Motivation. The fact would be every student in the pipeline would have been offered a seat, the realisation which it might come a bit late. For a prospective candidate locked in the entire pipeline process, very little option exists but go through the ritual to get a confirmed seat before seeking other options. Many candidates too know the process and therefore appear very causal for interviews and do not seem to take things seriously. Any tough questions too are met with some smiles or some casual reasons knowing they would be given a seat but perhaps have to attempt more rounds of interviews. The career consulting agencies of intermediaries of B-School admissions encourage this approach and many times take it upon themselves to get seats for their preferred candidates.

Few institutes go a step further and involve alumni or industry persons to conduct the interviews igniting a perception of very tough, robust mechanism, a funnel in which hundreds might enter, yet only a few get through at the other end.  Often it seems a virtual reality being played out in physical reality. The student should at the end of the day must be made to believe that he or she has achieved akin to climbing a Mount Everest just that it is on a ‘VR app’ that merely happens to physically manifested!.

At times it apparently gives a feeling of institutes playing on the information asymmetry between what institute desires and what the student knows about the admission criteria of the institute. The institute might be desperate for students but the student does not know or at least will not know the number of vacant seats. Therefore the elaborate rituals of selection can be carried out with little collateral damage. To any student who gets selected for admission in Tier-II or Tier-III B-School, the placement offers are very similar. All that B-School needs to do is get 10-20% of its students in desk jobs and place the rest in mass recruited sales jobs. Some of these profiles in financial services industry recruit 20-30 at one go with most of them quitting in year or two allowing for the fresh cycle of recruitment.

To a prospective B-School candidate, given deemed pre-requisite for MBA to ostensibly  progress in the career ladder, interviews, group discussions and other rituals associated with the selection process might very well be a unavoidable evil. Yet in an era where an industry on the verge of creative destruction and in denial, it is interesting times to be on the interview panel.