Leadership Search: Leading B- School – Director – Corporate Relations

Institute’s Background

The client institute is a premier B- School, promoted by renowned industrialist, about 20 years back, with the vision to be a leading business school, globally recognized for excellence in management education. It has developed a niche for its programs that are contemporary & in-line with the demand of the corporate world. Institute focuses on holistic development of students with global mindset and cross cultural sensitization. Institute is based in a metro city, with state of the art campus. Through international collaborations and certifications, and global immersion programs with leading institutions across the world, institute facilitates an all-round development of its college students into managers of tomorrow.

Search Objectives

After the management changed hands from a philanthropist to next generation of professionals coming from investment banking background, the need was to change institute’s limited focus on student development to industry ready managers. Like most of the traditional institutes, corporate relations department was only concerned with student Placements. With a new focus, now institute management was looking for Director – Corporate Relations, a person with rich experience and existing relationships in national and international corporates. This position came directly from the Chairman of the governing board of the institute. After meeting with the institute’s management team, and based on understanding of the management’s objective for the institute, EduShine Consultant explained emerging trends in industry-academia relations. We suggested management to make a conscious choice between making corporate relations function a cost centre or a profit centre. The management wanted to make it profit centre.

After further diagnosis of the existing corporate relations team’s capability, EduShine suggested to look for a person with 10 to 15 years of experience in business development and key account management of HR services. The prospective candidate must have strong relationships with the top management and HR Heads of the corporates. The new job description was prepared in which, the role of Director – Corporate Relations was not limited to summer and final placements, but ensuring industry participation in institute’s conferences, MDPs and executive education programs was made equally important. Further, year long corporate communication strategy for the institute was also folded under this role.

What We Delivered

EduShine’s consultant conducted extensive research focused on the requisition of the institute and prepared a skills matrix for the role of Director – Corporate Relations. We mapped HR services organizations like job portals, corporate training institutes, HR Software vendors etc and shortlisted 3 senior business development professionals for the above role.
After selection process conducted by management committee of the Institute, a candidate with 11 years of experience, initial 4 years with a media conglomerate and 7 years with a reputed job portal was finalized. EduShine helped in negotiating work condition, compensation structure and easy transition. Candidate joined as Head – Career Management Centre independently reporting to the director of the institute and chairman.