The Ringside

CRISIL HR Interview

Pagalguy.com has interviewed the top HR team at CRISIL (which is now a S&P company). Definitely a place where MBA Finance folks would like to go.

Notable quote on the annual B-School marketing campaign:

What advice would you give a to B-school students if they wished to get into a credit rating company, in particular CRISIL?

..... Majority of MBA students spend their time preparing brochures, coming out with CDs and visiting us with all this for their placements. We get around 500 such CDs and brochures. Do you think we really have the time and energy to look through all of this? I would request them to stop wasting their time and money. When we go to their campus, we see that the quality of their thinking process has not been properly developed. This is because these students were busy marketing their B-schools over the two years, rather than developing their own thinking. What we are looking for, is someone of the sort who is, for example, interested in the steel sector and tells us how he has followed the whole steel sector right through his two years of MBA. An ideal person would know what is the global market of steel like, what are the global policies for steel, what happened in the Mittal and Arcelor deal, what is the impact of the global market and the global growth phenomenon, what is the impact of all this on the Indian market, does the Indian government have a favorable budget for the steel sector, what are the likely issues that are going to impact the steel sector, what are companies like Jindal and Tata steel doing for this, what are the skill sets required to be the top player in the steel market, and so on. B-school graduates could take up one sector and cover it from the global perspective down to the micro-level. It shows that the person has the width, the ability to look at micro-details and that is the kind of person we want. No B-school teaches you this and one needs take it up himself and understand it well.

A lot of people tell me that they don’t get time to read many books in B-school because of their rigorous schedules. At best, they say that they have read Philip Kotler, but that’s not good enough. Your reading should be more plural and diverse involving topics from domain areas, non-domain areas, history and more. It is your ability to make a big picture and connect to it because MBA or post graduation diplomas are basically to see how well you can apply theory to practice.

Our problems with B-school graduates are firstly, that they don’t read well enough, they don’t have the time because most of the time they are doing a whole host of things which actually are not required. Secondly, when they come after completing their two years at B-schools, again they stop reading altogether. A good MBA is good enough for the next six months in terms of understanding, but after that one needs to keep educating oneself, otherwise we will become outdated. One should not read for getting promoted or any other advancement, but you read to rehabilitate yourself. The easiest part of an MBA is getting a job, but the tougher part is retaining it, even tougher is building upon it and building a brand. The organization should be able to mention five things for which an employee stands for and those qualities make him stand apart for the rest.


Find the complete interview here:
http://www.pagalguy.com/index.php?categoryid=68&p2_articleid=518&p2_page=1

posted by Aditya @ 10/21/2006 11:14:00 AM