Required: MBAs With Prior Industry Experience

 

 

The world's leading provider of pathology and clinical laboratory testing, information and services, Quest Diagnostics is a Fortune 500 company that set up operations in India about twoyears ago. With 43,000 employees worldwide, the Indian operations comprises talent acquisition in three major categories: those with deep domain medical knowledge, those with medical knowledge as well as business acumen, and those with business acumen as well as sales and marketing skills. For the last category the company recruits from business schools, an initiative they started a year ago.

Quest spent the first year in India in laying its basic foundation and preparing clear-cut roles. Explains Bagchi, “In the second year, we went actively scouting for talent. We wanted to build the Quest brand, and we started with MDI, which is in our neighbourhood, and then went on to cover institutes like ISB.” Bagchi admits that there is a shortage of a healthcare orientation in B-schools today; however, ISB is an exception. It has tied up with the Max Group for a special-interest course. The lack of qualified healthcare business graduates is an area of concern, and especially in tier II and III which offer even lesser clarity in this regard, but Bagchi feels this will be solved over time, giving the example of how telecom and related courses really sprang up after the industry itself started flourishing.

The look and feel of the Quest brand, he says, can vary from market to market. However, the basis lies in the fact that they “want to provide a unique opportunity for the best talent to work in a company that excels in both medical and business prowess.” The company has held its own during the slump experienced in the last two years. Bagchi partly credits their “aggressive” IJP programme, which he says has helped in employee engagement. While visiting campuses for recruitment, the company sends a strong contingent for effective representation of the brand. This includes three major groups: people who are in similar roles and can therefore be considered the right kind of brand ambassadors, senior people with business acumen (such as the VP of sales and marketing), and of course, members of the HR team since the company is so clear on finding people who are a good culture fit with Quest. Interestingly, Bagchi tells us about how one interviewer almost always de-sells the organisation to the student, saying that this helps them separate fly-by-night operators from the genuine contenders who would have done adequate research about the company. They have also found that the people recruited through this process have been able to hit the ground running from day one, showing qualities of self-motivation.

Talking further about expected qualities in business school graduates, Bagchi says that domain specific knowledge is a given. Besides this, baseline soft skills include those related to interpersonal relations, grooming, etiquette and communication. Also, given that these candidates would be managing client accounts, they require people who have good stakeholder management abilities and a knack for understanding the needs of customers. .

Going forward, Bagchi is glad to see positive changes taking place in the Indian B-school education system, which includes deeper industry interface, with some institutions even having more visiting than residential faculty on their rolls. However, the gap lies in intake procedures, which he feels are still fairly academic. “We would like to see people with prior work experience signing up for an MBA, as they can understand and relate to concepts better. They can also ramp-up faster and can add more value to companies,” he explains. With regard to industry interface, he suggests that the system needs to be well-thought-through, rather than sporadic. This will ensure greater employability of graduates.

Finally, we quiz Bagchi on his career outlook for 2010 and he responds, “Investment banks are back! A lot of graduates are expressing confidence in the sector. Also, various newer industries and sectors are hitting the placement scene, which means that the share of the recruitment pie will now be more evenly spread over a larger field than before.”