Placecom is the place to be at b-school, right? But what do placement committee members do? How do they help their batchmates get placed? Meet Sayantani, one of InsideIIM's Best 50 - India's most employable graduates from the class of 2018-20. A member of placecom at MICA, Sayantani married her data analyst work experience with CV building needs and together with her team, worked on created an automated software to design CVs before placements. Pretty cool, right? Check out Sayantani's story and unique experience in this article.
The following is Sayantani Bandyopadhyay’s set of responses to a questionnaire floated amongst MBA graduates to determine the top-50 most employable MBA graduates of the Class of 2020. Amongst the massive number of entries and responses being evaluated by the Founder of InsideIIM-Kampus Konversations, Sayantani’s story and profile stood out. Here's her own story in her own words.
“I am an engineer from IIEST, Shibpur, one of the oldest campuses of this country. I am also a Data Scientist, and have worked with MuSigma, one of the biggest Indian unicorns for close to three years. Marketing as a field always intrigued me and I chose MICA to pursue my dream. As an individual who has led teams and client engagements single handedly, I leveraged my knowledge in MICA to come out as an individual who not only knows the tech side but also the business side of a problem. I was also part of the Placement Committee, giving me that added edge to learn from the experience. As an individual, I have always been driven to solve problems in a structured way, maximise my learning in every way and deliver high quality results. I have set personal goals for myself and I have ticked them off to upskill myself in this very competitive world. I am a driven individual and will proactively take up work and ensure its completion. Bringing to the table both business and technology, I believe I can contribute a lot to any organisation given an opportunity.”
Name an instance where you wanted something and went out of your comfort zone to achieve it OR Tell us the biggest risk you have taken so far in your life.
“As members of the placement committee in our batch, we needed to look at easing out the process of CV verification as it was not only manual but also time consuming with the batch size increasing every year. As a team we decided to onboard a new portal to automate the process before the Final Placements Season of 2019-20. It was a project aimed to ease out the entire placement season but with tight deadlines. A lot of obstacles were faced since students also were being introduced to a new software which they were not used to, being used to the old manual word format of CV and manual verification of CV. It was a risk taken on our part because in case the timelines failed and we ran into problems, we would have had to go back to the original manual process of verification and stretch the batch and the team out, keeping in mind the ensuing placements.
As any software brings in its own glitches and technicalities during on-boarding, we had the same problem: numerous formatting issues, data entry problems topped with rising student's tensions and anxiety in the new portal. But we not only solved the issues and handled the issues, we went ahead and completed the entire CV building and verification process of the batch. We even got appreciated by the recruiters for the concise and well designed CV of the batch. It was a risk which could have upset the entire placement season, considering how integral CV is to the process. However, we took a risk as we realised that sooner or later automation needed to be brought in and we were ready to take the call as a team. Now, the entire process is automated and the upcoming batches will continue to use the portal with the Placement Committee's help. This will also allow the future teams to focus on other important jobs like lead generation and more recruiter on-boarding.”
When was the last time someone relied on you? OR What did you do which was purely for someone else - a truly selfless act.
“As a team lead managing 5-6 fresh graduates in my 3 years of MuSigma, there were times when I had to take over certain action items because of a roadblock from the teammate's end. My onsite relied on me to make sure the action items are not only delivered on time but if there is any delay or roadblock there is adequate, clear and crisp communication with the client for the road ahead.
Apart from this, as part of the Placement Committee a lot of the job involves maintaining student databases for various recruiters and analysing them post the recruitment season to churn the official report out. As someone with a Data Scientist background, my team relied on me to tackle the data, maintain the quality and prepare the numbers right for the report.”
Tell us about a time when you disagreed with an opinion/idea/decision. What did you do about it?
“As part of the Placement Committee, there were a lot of things we needed to decide as a team that would affect the batch at large. One of those decisions included making changes to the Placement Policy which the students signed before sitting for the season. Keeping in mind the trend of the season in the previous years which included shortlisting and process data of the students, some of the members were of the opinion that certain hard decisions needed to be taken for a particular set of students to ease the season. As part of the team, I disagreed with this decision since I believed it was unfair to students and probably penalised more students for a limited number of people who might be spoiling the season for the batch. We had a discussion as a team and managed to convince the team that we can reach a middle ground keeping in mind the strain of the committee to place everyone and also the students intent for a process.
This was one of the major decisions we had to take. However, since the committee involves planning the entire year in terms of recruiter engagements and also planning in campus activities, we had a lot of disagreements and discussions to identify the right way ahead.”
What is the one thing you can claim to have some level of expertise or depth of knowledge in - it could be anything - a subject, a sport, a hobby, a venture, an initiative which has led you to do deep work in that field?
“As someone who has worked in the Data Analytics field for close to 3 years, I believe data is something that I am comfortable in and excites me in terms of exploration and analysis. Recently, I participated in DataMaze, a competition held by FMS Delhi where the task was to look at country wise global trade data, analyse the data and design a dashboard of it. I not only used the data that they gave but also downloaded additional data from the web to give a better picture to the data model, ran some analysis on it using R and built a fully functional dashboard out of it. I was declared the National Champion of the event, having more than 450+ participants both from UG and PG.”
If 10 Million Dollars (approximately INR 75 Crores) is given to you to use it any way you deem fit what would you do with this corpus?
“In the short run, I will pay off my education loan. I will also keep some for my future educational interests in case I would want to go for further studies. I would also give some money to my parents so that they can lead a comfortable life in their old age. I would plan a world trip for my family and keep some for my own travel and investment plans.
The remaining amount, I would like to contribute to some NGOs working with abandoned and homeless animals.”
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