1-Year MBA Recruitment vs 2-Year MBA Recruitment

Some of you have been lately asking me regarding the difference(s) in the nature of 1-year recruitments & the traditional 2-year recruitments.
Job placement for experienced folks like us is a whole lot about specific roles and fit - A lot of emphasis is on specific profiles and positions. So, this makes fit extremely important. There is very little of "We'll come in a bus, pick a bunch of grads, and then put them anywhere in the organization" which happens in case of freshers in the traditional 2 year MBA. This is a critical difference between the recruitment style for experienced hires vs. recruitment style for freshers.
The other question was how important are grades in terms of getting placed in one's dream organization. For freshers one can quite easily infer that "Good marks equal good money". Grades are probably the only way by which recruiters can hope to separate the wheat from the chaff in a homogeneous bunch of youngsters who walk, talk & breath alike. One observation about the freshers campus placements here at XLRI is that the whole ritual borders on mass hysteria. With students unwilling to walk on anything but the beaten path, choices get determined by a systematic caste system of grades and placement-day rankings that show scant regard for individual choices.
For us, understandably, there is absolutely no correlation between the academic performance and the quality of job placement. Placements are more a function of the incoming profile, target industry and the level of (interview) preparedness.