Banks are keen on hiring MBA students these days mainly due to rising focus in retail banking. With more emphasis being laid on aspects like customer acquisition and appropriate marketing of banking products, the demand for people having these skills is on the rise.

Lenders can now have easier access to the talent pool through the AMCAT-MBA Assessment Drive launched by leading employability assessment firm, Aspiring Minds. The pan India drive launched by the company aims to generate more than 3000 fresher jobs in the first half of 2011 alone.

Having coverage across more than 50 cities of the country, AMCAT, the largest employability test of India will be conducted in Tier II, III B-schools to assess students. Banks can thus hire from the huge database of MBA freshers created, based on their desired needs and requirements in the candidates.

Speaking on the issue, Himanshu Aggarwal, Co-founder and Director, Aspiring Minds said, "AMCAT has been successful in enabling employment by merit and mitigating barriers of geography. We've assessed over 55,000 MBA students already, and expect an upsurge in hiring this year. The recruitment drive would be pan-India and would enable companies to tap talent far, wide and deeper."

Students are assessed in all domains like marketing, human resource management and knowledge of financial services coupled with language and cognitive skills and evaluated on the basis of their personality befitting a particular job kind.

All candidates are evaluated on AMPI, a scientifically designed personality assessment index. Evaluation on the basis of personality can help banks in selecting the apt candidate for a particular job profile. The assessment works on five factor personality assessment model (Big Five) used worldwide and can help classify the right candidates for Sales, Relationships, Operations and other roles. For example factors like emotional stability, conscientiousness and extraversion are found to suit best for a sales job profile. All these factors are objectively measured by AMPI.

Each student is given a Seven Stroke Employability feedback which is a detailed report guiding students on their areas of expertise and domains needing improvement necessary to get a job of choice.