Tanish Verma from IIM Bangalore has earned his place among the 50 Most Employable MBA Graduates from the Class of 2026. His story is one of seamless transition from an engineering and global corporate background to elite management consulting, marked by a rare blend of analytical rigor and genuine empathy. Scroll down to discover how Tanish has transformed opportunities into milestones and challenges into stepping stones on his path to professional excellence.
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The Ascent: From Global Strategy at ExxonMobil to Consulting at Kearney
Tanish Verma, an engineer from NIT Nagpur, began his career at ExxonMobil, where he swiftly took ownership of market strategy projects spanning eight countries. This experience provided him with a foundational understanding of large-scale, complex business operations and cultural coordination. He brought this expertise to his MBA at IIM Bangalore, where he further honed his skills during a summer internship with Kearney in the Management Consulting domain, focusing on organization design and strategic engagements.
At IIMB, he serves on the Placement Committee, coordinating high-stakes relationships with companies and peers, demonstrating his capacity for responsibility and management under pressure. His profile is defined by a passion for solving real-world problems and a commitment to showing up for others, both in the corporate room and as a volunteer for NGOs supporting underprivileged children.
The Inner Core: Ownership and Emotional Intelligence
The achievement Tanish is most proud of is leading the largest market survey in ExxonMobil's recent history, covering eight countries and gathering critical data from over 66 firms. This project was meaningful because it gave him early career ownership, requiring him to coordinate across diverse cultures and with senior leadership, ultimately seeing his insights directly shape strategic decisions. This experience pushed his boundaries, teaching him to manage complexity and trust his instincts, and crystallized his interest in large-scale business problem solving.
Tanish’s top three strengths, not immediately visible on his resume, are:
- Emotional Intelligence: The ability to read a room, connect with diverse people, and quickly build trust in various settings, from team collaborations to high-pressure discussions.
- Strong Sense of Ownership: A drive to take full responsibility, often going the extra mile outside his formal scope to ensure project success.
- Calm-Under-Pressure Mindset: The learned ability to stay composed during chaos, such as organizing placement processes or managing live projects, allowing him to break down problems and move forward without panic.
The Employable Edge in an AI-Augmented World
The trait that makes Tanish highly employable in today’s AI-augmented business world is his strength in contextual decision-making, which involves seamlessly blending raw data with real-world judgment. In both his roles at ExxonMobil and Kearney, his primary function was not merely number crunching but interpreting data and connecting it to human priorities and strategic business context.
He explains that while AI excels at processing data, the ability to interpret what that data means for a client's specific business outcome, which involves empathy and nuanced strategic judgment, is what sets decisions apart. This capacity for holistic, context-driven synthesis is where his value truly lies.
The Character: Stepping Up in Crisis
A powerful instance of Tanish’s selflessness occurred during a high-stakes project at ExxonMobil when a colleague had to take emergency leave for a family health crisis. The team was facing the final deadline for a comprehensive market analysis, and the colleague’s work—complex data modeling and key insights—was crucial for the senior leadership presentation.
Without being prompted, Tanish volunteered to absorb his colleague’s responsibilities on top of his own. This required working late nights and weekends, coordinating across multiple time zones, and ensuring the deadline was met without any drop in quality. He maintained transparent communication with his manager, emphasizing that the goal was to support the team while protecting his colleague from stress. The project was delivered successfully, and Tanish's teammate was able to focus on his family without guilt. This experience reinforced Tanish’s conviction that supporting people in their toughest moments is just as important as meeting business goals, and that empathy builds strong, lasting teams.
Tanish Verma’s candidature is strengthened by a combination of resilience, range, and responsibility. He led high-impact projects across eight countries, worked with CXOs during his Kearney internship, and took complete ownership from data gathering to final decision-making. His personal resilience—bouncing back from missing sectional cutoffs in his first attempt at the IIMs to making it into IIM Bangalore the following year—demonstrates his approach to failure: not as an end, but as a springboard. He brings a unique balance of execution, empathy, and energy, making him not just job-ready, but impact-ready.
