SIMSREE student shares his "challenging" pre-placement experience

By: Sudeesh Nair

Sudeesh Nair says that his pre-placement experience was really challenging. He had to go through various processes like group discussions on various topics, mock interviews, resume building exercises, Linkedin profile building exercises, video resume making, etc.

Pre-placement experience is indeed vital as it makes you well aware of the selection process of various companies and also helps you to prepare yourself mentally and physically. We at SIMSREE are trained for the placement process well in advance. The process includes mock interview sessions, group discussions, current affairs sessions, etc. The interview is taken for all specializations which makes us aware of a variety of questions that might be asked.

Questions that are usually asked:

1. Tell me about yourself (Introduction about your personality and skills).
2. Share your experience with your previous job.
3. What are the different projects that you completed during your work experience?
4. Why did you choose MBA as your career option?
5. Which is your favourite subject?
6. Why did you opt for this company?
7. What do you know about our organization?
8. What books do you read? What did you learn from that book?
9. Case studies, estimates might be given for testing skills.
10. Tell us about your extracurricular activities and participation.

My pre-placement experience was really challenging as I had to go through various processes like group discussions on various topics, mock interviews, resume building exercises, Linkedin profile building exercises, Video resume making, etc.

Group discussions are important as majority of the companies use GD as an eliminator method. You need to be well aware of the current affairs topics to crack GD. Resume building is another vital factor because shortlisting initially is totally based on how well your resume is built.

In my interview, I was asked all the above-mentioned questions and I was trained on how to answer them. You need to drive the interview in your direction and that depends on how well you know about your resume and how confident you are. The first impression is the best one and you need to start off well as the interviewee looks for something unique and different in you.

For freshers, the best they can do is to build their resume with certification courses, live projects, and internships. This will help them to have some valid points to share during the interview. Freshers have an advantage that expectation is relatively low as compared to the experienced so they need to focus on building their basics.

Certification courses like Coursera, Udemy provide, etc. provide free courses on a wide range of topics in different areas and live projects and internships can be searched through LinkedIn. You need to be active on LinkedIn to get more contacts and networking. LinkedIn profiles help you get live projects and internships as you will find many company delegates actively posting details about new opportunities. 

Ten qualities that will get you hired are confidence, honesty, uniqueness, attitude, knowledge, versatile, street smart, presence of mind, technology lover, smart and activeness.

About the Author:

Sudeesh Nair is a student at Sydenham Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai, pursuing his MBA. He has two years of work experience with Torrent Power Limited. He has studied Bachelor of Engineering (BE) in Electrical before he went on to studied MBA owing to his interest in marketing and operations field. He has also been a part of NGO Swapnapurti Career Guidance.