Students’ Speak: Analyse the company before sitting for GDPI Round

Pre-placements can be the most important stepping-stone of your management career. Abdullah Salman shares strategies to stay prepared during the pre-placement season.

Pre-placements are very crucial as they require less effort compared to off-campus placements where we have to fetch job offers on our own and the process is very relatively tedious then the pre-placements offers (where a company comes to our campus and by means of Aptitude test and GDPI Rounds take candidates). The complete pre-placement process is quite simple and short. Moreover, in pre-placement, companies step into college campuses for direct recruitment and it is comparatively easier to crack and gives us an upper hand since the placements happen in our college campus.

Some important tips to crack pre-placements as follows:

1. Make sure you prepare a very crisp single-page resume (if you are a fresher) and you include more details about current MBA projects, summer internships along with various live projects and case studies. You can also mention participation in your college clubs’ activities and any management fest in bullet points. Refer online Resume builder website for making your resume a good look and simple. Your resume should have a readable font size - more white space and easily readable. So, make sure you make your resume is unique and it should sell you to the recruiter as soon as they see it. Do not copy from anyone because every resume and the candidate is different.
2. Prepare for Aptitude in advance and make sure you are clear with the GD topics as well. For aptitude, you could refer to websites such as Indiabix, Freshersworld, etc. or even R.S. Agarwal book. There are a lot of other websites such as FACE Academy that help in Aptitude preparation. Take at least 10 mock tests before you sit for placements and work on your strong and weak areas. You can usually prepare topics like Data Interpretation, Logical Reasoning, Time-Speed-Distance, Profit and Loss, Pipes and Cisterns, Ratios, Percentages and most importantly English where you can expect questions on Comprehension, Sentence Correction and few other basic topics which you prepared for during your CAT exam. Brush up those topics a bit.
3. For GD you can take a recent one-month newspaper and go through all the major topics happening in and around business, technology, government policies, etc.

My college had arranged for Aptitude mock tests and various mock GD rounds before pre-placements before the real GDPI session of any company on the campus.

Note: Before attending any interview, make sure you have done a thorough analysis of the company coming for pre-placements, especially from their website. Look out for different aspects such as in what verticals of business they are operating, what's the latest news about them in the media, the latest share price of a company if it is a listed company and their products and services. Also countries they are operating into, the company's CEO and other key people from the management.

Confidence is the key to success, just go and give your best.

About the Author:

Abdullah Salman M. is currently pursuing an MBA in General Management from TSM, Madurai. He has 15 months of work experience as a Network Engineer. He hails from Vellore, Tamil Nadu and has previously completed BE (ECE), from Anna University, Chennai.