How to get a job at a PSU

Job at a PSU is the ultimate dream of someone with little ambition, one who is satisfied with little work, no competition and foolproof job security. However given that the median age of the Indian population is in the early 20s so the competition for every post every seat is very stringent. Thus it helps if you can piggyback on a good college or university. PSUs recruit people through either a written test (open the employment newspaper and you would find myriad of jobs with their examination schedules) OR through direct recruitment from campus. Given that law school people lose steam after CLAT, to pass the entrance exam for PSU would be impossible for most (many complaint that National law school people do not want to become judges, I suspect partially the reason would be that they are not confident of passing the exam or those who sit for it never pass). However coming to the point at hand, in this post I would give you a step by step method of how to crack a PSU job at the law school: 

Step 1: Have more than 60% marks (or the CGPA equivalent of first class), PSUs being PSUs would have to follow certain rules so the first is that the candidates must have 60% marks, certain PSUs like CIL, NHPC, NTPC reduces the cutoff by 5% for reserved seats but certain others like ONGC, GAIL, SAIL are strict on this criteria. Thus if you do not have 60% there is no point sitting for PSUs. 

Step 2: Usually there is a small test for the candidates to take, the test is very basic having questions like what is difference between pledge and hypothecation; what is insurable interest etc. A very basic and cursory reading of the Contacts Act etc. would be more than sufficient. This test is just to get cut off non-interested people and in never taken into account when deciding the final list. 

Step 3: If you pass the test then comes the interview, some PSU executives do not want to correct papers so they skip the test and directly go for interview. To prepare for the interview it is helpful if one goes through a business newspaper for the last one week and look at what the opinion of the market is on that PSU, most newspapers are critical of PSUs (partly because they do not get advertisement revenues from PSUs), read the reports assimilate them and while answering the questions try to let the interviewer know that you know about the company that you are joining eg. CIL is readying a war chest to enter into Africa, so while interview let the Director who comes for the interview know that you could be an asset to them for cross border transactions and that you have done your projects on regulatory hurdles in Africa (of that matter if they want to goto Mars then you must have done a project on Mars). 

Step 4: This in continuation to the above point, after the technical interview there would be an intense round of HR interview and there is one stock question from the interviewer which trips most of the PSU hopefuls, why do you want to join a PSU? There is no right or wrong answer for this, one way of answering it would be to say that the sector has tremendous potential and would allow you to grow with it; another way would be to say that you do not want to work for a private law firm and fill up pockets of someone else but rather work for a PSU where government is the shareholder and general public is the stakeholder and thereby one would be working for oneself (say whatever you want to say but don’t say that you want to join the PSU because you don’t want to work hard and because you want overtime to work outside 10AM – 5 PM).