Ahmedabad, Dec 25: Focusing on giving better job offers to its students in terms matching their choices, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA) will be changing its campus placement process from a run-on daily basis to a cohort (group) based system to be conducted only on weekends. The new system will begin from the forthcoming placement season in the second week of February next year.
After a first of its kind, a recruiter conclave that was held at Mumbai on Tuesday where the IIMA placement committee had invited recruiters for their feedback, IIMA has decided to adopt the new placement process. The process would be conducted over continuous weekends called cohorts.
Each cohort would host various firms offering similar roles and opportunities irrespective of which sector they belong to. The sequence in which the cohorts would be invited to the campus would be as per the batch preference.
The cohort-based process will be a longer placement process as the placement activities will take place every Saturday and Sunday of a week till all the students are placed. The placement season might go on for more than a month.
Talking about the advantages of the news system, faculty chairman of IIMA placements professor Saral Mukherjee, said: “In this system, we are not focusing on the time factor at all. Though it takes a longer time, it has significant advantages as the move essentially aims at a better match-making process, ensuring a better fit between the students and the firms.”
Talking about the need of the new placement system Mukherjee said, “Since the number of students in the campus has been increasing every year, the previous system of placement had faced various problems in terms of logistics and high cost. The new system aims to look into this issue and to achieve the right fit between candidates and recruiters.”
This change is envisioned to provide a better platform for interaction between recruiters and students than the erstwhile day process. The day process led to great pressure on firms to make offers early and on students to accept offers on the spot. The cohort-based system will allow more time to the recruiters per student.
Mukerjee said, “Given the ever-increasing batch size, we have deliberated over the ideal placement process for long. Though this may not be the ideal system, it is definitely a move towards one. We believe the process will ensure that decisions are not made hastily on either side.”
–Agencies