Building a winning combination for Fortune Institute of International Business (FIIB)

FIIB is an institute built with a deep management development focus. The cornerstone of its foundation is developing progressive and innovative leaders with the potential to transform the world. The institute has an unrivaled capability to deliver learning through a world-class curriculum, be it honing skills needed for career development or providing a spectrum of immersive experiences.

FIIB is also instrumental for weaving successful career stories by leveraging strong corporate connections, and value-adding partnerships. The portfolio of available opportunities emanates from the institute’s continuous engagement in the employment domain to match the students’ career trajectory with the right companies. FIIB has been continually raising the bar by maintaining the quality of its learning experience and prioritizing its academic affairs in a competitive landscape.

However, FIIB had been facing some issues in improving the quality of its student enrollment. As an institute specializing in generating future-ready management professionals with academic excellence, its applicant pool wasn’t up to its expectations. Despite the energy, intelligence, and commitment demonstrated by students, their attitude and personality issues raised concerns among the faculty on the institute’s selection criteria. Till a year ago, FIIB’s approach in admitting students had been more aptitude focused. The process of evaluating students’ abilities and performance was based more on the results of the competitive exams and academic backgrounds. Conducting aptitude tests to deduce students’ problem-solving skills and learning agility wasn’t an accurate indicator of their potential. Also, occupations and skill sets are evolving continually with technological advancements. Hence, FIIB wanted students to possess a winning combination of both knowledge and behavior, both aptitude and attitude. Suitable recruitment companies found a shortage of prospective candidates that met their industry-relevant hiring criteria. Dissatisfaction with the applicant pool was impacting the status of the academic standards nurtured by FIIB with decades of effort.

Challenges

There was a visible need to enhance the professional purpose and perspective internally. Also, FIIB wanted to create a synergy between education and skills for seamless career advancement. However, it faced specific challenges in bridging the gap.

• Holistic admission profiler

Cultural competency and the ability to collaborate effectively across varied environments are now critical components of a student’s profile. It is important to understand whether an individual is capable of honing them in a competitive ecosystem. FIIB wanted to measure their students before admitting them to ensure developing them into well-rounded individuals. The college needed an innovative, evidence-based assessment that measured relevant personality traits required for management students. A comprehensive understanding of the candidate’s predispositions and behavioral manifestation in a fast-paced environment was going to be a significant filter in the college’s enrollment process.

• Robust assessment platform

The students were assessed basis grades, standardized test scores, and other accomplishments. But now, FIIB needed a dynamic, secure, and scalable platform to measure students’ skill, personality, and ability cumulatively. An in-depth analysis of these assessments would further be leveraged by its Learning & Development (L&D) team to integrate a signature training approach. This means the institute would work on students’ skills and traits specific to a profession to maximize their chances of success, consequently improving the placement’s quality and levels.

• Ensuring academic integrity

FIIB needed an airtight solution to prevent cheating and usage of unfair means during the remote online personality and written communication skills tests. Therefore, the college required the same quality and academic integrity as conducting exams at physical examination centers. Hence it wanted a sophisticated monitoring mechanism to ensure that test-takers did not indulge in unsavory activities.

The institute wanted to employ innovation to deal with the gamut of challenges. It sought collaborations to enrich the campus community, being mindful of both yield and quality. Quantifiable measures had to be adopted to seek insights needed to make critical decisions.

Mercer | Mettl deep-dived into constructing a possible course of action for FIIB. It knew its set of solutions had to serve as an enabler to improve the existing best practices and standard academic procedures for growth, ensuring the college’s standing in the industry. Hence, with a broadened observation, and a comprehensive approach, the team suggested a slew of performance-measuring solutions to the institute. After a couple of pilot demonstrations and deliberations, Mercer | Mettl offered a three-part approach to solve FIIB’s challenges and fulfill its requirements.

a) Mettl Personality Profiler (MPP):

With a pedagogy focused on ensuring a student’s academic achievement, MPP was employed to measure an individual’s strengths and growth opportunities relevant to his/her success as a management candidate. Mercer | Mettl factored in FIIB’s unique needs and determined a configuration and scoring grade to fit its specific parameters accordingly. With 86 questions listed in a semantic differential format to be answered within 25 minutes, mapping students’ behavior and understanding their competency could be undertaken with ease.

This tool solved a significant criterion for FIIB:

Academic enrollment

Competent students, in the most diverse areas, are essential to an institution’s success. Therefore, filtering the admission process at the initial stage is significant.

• MPP provided relevant and accurate information about a student’s attributes to the management.
• A semantic differential item format reduced the respondent’s chances of ‘faking to be good’ and improved the assessment’s usefulness.
• The result enabled the institute to understand candidates’ real behavior and their likeliness of engagement, based on their preferences and predispositions.
• The tool’s validation reduced the manual and cumbersome effort undertaken by the faculty to navigate through the complex admissions processes, entry requirements, and testing applications for shortlisting candidates.
• MPP had been normed after a sample of 6000+ respondents across different geographies and a varied representative sample. Thus, it was an ideal tool to strengthen and distinguish FIIB’s admissions qualification benchmark.

b) Assessment Platform

FIIB also wanted to invest resources in making students future-ready. The college wanted to gain a first-hand insight into students’ psychometric, cognitive & competency acumen and analyze their skills. The user-friendly assessment platform, based on a sample of 10000+ respondents across different geographies and representative samples, was employed to provide a blend of assessments.

This tool solved two major challenges for FIIB:

Learning and development:

• An in-depth evaluation helped identify crucial skill gaps needed by graduates joining the workforce.
• Flexible and intellectual learning spaces were deployed in the classroom and curriculum based on strengths and weaknesses.
• Apart from developing new skills and essential elements, existing ones were also enhanced through training, courses and programs.
• Resourceful and timely L&D added a layer of qualification by building relevant skills and making them compelling candidates fit for lucrative jobs.

Campus hiring:

• The detailed scores from the assessment platform as listed in candidates’ profiles provided FIIB placement team insights into the background, cultural fitment, retention and advancement rates, cognitive ability, and the unique skills they were likely to bring to the workplace.
• Recruiters had to no longer necessarily screen students over various rounds.
• Ample time and effort were saved by shortlisted candidates directly through their past academic and test performance based on goals, preferences and personality.
• A lucrative candidate pool augmented the number of good placements and recruiter pool-size.

c) AI Proctoring

It was an enormous responsibility for the institute to conduct such large-scale, high-stakes assessments successfully. FIIB had to ensure the authenticity of the test and the test-taker to eliminate any suspicious behavior during the online tests. Mercer | Mettl’s state-of-the-art proctoring tool was proffered owing to its remarkable cheating predictions and 95%+ accuracy in detecting instances of cheating. A prerequisite of the online test was that students had to enable proctoring on their devices. They had to accept sharing their screen, video, and audio for the intelligent algorithm to flag a variety of suspicious cases, such as the non-visibility of face/ presence, the detection of mobile phone, presence of an additional person, a distracted eye movement, etc.

This tool solved a major criterion for FIIB:

Academic Integrity

• Mercer | Mettl’s AI proctoring technology eliminated the problem of security and authenticity of assessments.
• Real-time updates on candidates’ activities on screen and the ability to quickly identify malpractices ensured excellent and relevant results.
• Generation of candidate’s integrity reports using Mercer | Mettl’s proprietary algorithmCredibility Index empowered and assured FIIB of the most deserving students.
• The institute saved significant resources, financial and otherwise.

• The institute could better assess a large pool of applicants, quantitatively and qualitatively, taking high-stakes online tests.
• Establish benchmarks based on the existing data would be used to fine-tune the filtration process further and facilitate effective enrollment decisions.
• The L&D department would also leverage detailed reports to gauge a deep and focused understanding of applicants’ specific personality traits for tailored training.
• The institute plans to devise various training programs and strategies to give students a head-start in their career.
• The institute is also keen on digitizing its academic process and saving on resources, which is otherwise spent on various academic shortlisting guidelines