Rutul Shah is currently a second-year MBA student at IIM Lucknow. He is due to join Amazon after securing PPO post his internship with the company. At IIM L, he is a placement mentor as a part of Team Disha and co-leads the operations domain preparation vertical. Prior to this, he had a 36-month stint at John Deere as a product design engineer. He worked on various product development projects of earth-moving machinery for the US, Canada, and Australian markets. Rutul is a B.Tech in mechanical engineering from NIT, Surat.
1) Hi Rutul, can you please tell us how one should start his / her preparation for summer placements?
There are 5 aspects to operations prep. HR prep, GD prep, Guesstimates, Operations Caselets, and Domain Prep. One should start with the basic practice of guesstimates. B-school case books and YouTube videos are good resources for it. The key here is to practice with peers. Parallelly, one should start brushing up their HR answers and practice them through mock PIs. This will refine them. Another aspect of HR answers is writing them formally in word so that it can directly be used in various company application forms. The next step in operations prep would be to learn to solve operations cases. I would recommend starting practising cost-side cases of profitability as it helps students in exploring the value chains of various industries. After that one can move to company-specific cases that are asked in Amazon, Uber, Myntra, etc.
2)What are the resources one should go through to be ready for an Operations role in summer placement?
For domain prep, brush up on basic concepts of SCM. At IIML, Team Disha provides a handbook which is a good resource. An online summary of SCM by Sunil Chopra is also a good resource. On top of it, one should read articles related to various SCM practices followed in various industries, particularly FMCG. One can read about it on the websites of consulting firms. To prepare for e-commerce, one should read about various eCommerce models and warehousing capabilities of companies like Amazon and Flipkart. At IIM L, Team Disha share many articles and handbooks to cover most of the aspects of Operations prep. In the final month, one should start practicing for various types of GDs, specifically case-based and chairman GDs. All these will pretty much cover various aspects of operations domain preparation.
3)Being a Placement mentor at IIM Lucknow, what according to you, one should do to make a CV more appealing for the summer placement process?
According to me, there isn’t any major change required to make an operations CV. One should focus on highlighting operations skills in their work ex and to some extent the POR section. The key here is to include certain keywords for operations and highlight skills like stakeholder management, process automation/digitization, and analytical skills.
4) How you prepared for Amazon's interview? Did you prepare differently for Amazon's interview?
Amazon requires a little specific prep. For Amazon, the most important thing is knowing their leadership principles and aligning your HR answers to that. A good starting point is various videos on YouTube of Jeff Bezos wherein he explains what actually do each and every leadership principle mean. One should prepare at least one incident wherein they demonstrated each LPs. Furthermore, read the latest news about Amazon, its businesses, etc. Lastly, there are videos explaining Amazon’s operations including various aspects of its value chain like warehousing, & first, middle and last-mile logistics on Amazon’s websites. It was the most important resource to deal with Amazon-specific cases. Guesstimates are also generally asked but for that, no specific preparation is required in my opinion.
5) Any advice you would want to give; you wish you would have known before the Summer placement process?
As my last thoughts, I would say focus, do focus on guesstimates and case prep. It indirectly helps you to develop a structured thinking process that is helpful in GDs as well as PIs. Also, I cannot put more emphasis on HR prep. That is the single most important thing that would be helpful on D-day.