Campus Hiring & Career Roadmap

Recently during one of the recruitment drives, I came across an interview evaluation and I was highly impressed with the resume, qualifications and big brand to back the aspiring young candidate. All pointing towards assured successful assessment, which made me look forward for meeting with the candidate.

The candidate arrived with an anxious face but opened up as discussions progressed, and took us back to his college campus hiring days. The candidate was one of the bright students of the college and managed to overcome the stringent norms of campus recruitment to finally bag an offer from his dream company to serve them.

The employment evaluation did not go through as per expectations and the obvious disappointment made me think beyond and go back to the basics of campus recruitment.

The campus recruitment is one of the best possible gateways for any youngster to land up in an organization which gives him a good footstep in early career and students look forward for such placements. With lots of hope, the youngsters join the organization and are required to undergo multiple trainings and evaluation, finally to be awarded and compartmentalized in one of the technologies which the organization deem perfect fit for the candidate.

Normally, such organizations are very professional and on their behalf do take due care to give confidence to recruitee regarding the projects, type of work, location as well as some soft skills boosters regarding multi culture fitment. However, many a times, the recruitees are found to be hesitant and low on morale as they realize that whatever they had learnt all through their undergraduate program with plans to build their career based on their learnings and there hardly is any correlation or connection with the education imparted to them. They wonder with the usage of degree, syllabus, all the hard slog of years to find themselves sharing cubicles with peers, who in no way match their background or aspirations but are deployed for the similar profile. The only common thread between them, is being confused with the education and job profile at hands.

Why does this disappointment happen ? Can this be avoided to have a better career roadmap for aspiring students ?

Isn’t it a time, the industry needs to address the overall career planning of the students. Shouldn’t the organizations and the industry as a whole revisit, rethink, reassess, revert to old days of fitting candidates according to their skills and education, rather than getting a bunch of talented youngsters and placing them according organization’s own assessment irrespective of the resource’s interest and liking.

Primarily the recruitment runs on few basic principles, which in my opinion should also be extended to campus recruitment :

1.Demand vs Supply Ratio :

a.  Every organization runs on an yearly roadmap and budget for hiring and has clear vision in terms of percentage of employees hired under campus program.

b. The organization is also aware of the Technology trends, Technical demands and skill requirements.

c. The same demand supply ratio needs to be in sync with institutes and target for recruitee should be mapped to educational streams along with percent allocation of count from each stream.

 2. Job Clarity and role expectations :

a.  Let the students know the criteria as well as have clarity about the job before they appear for campus hiring process. They can choose or let go an opportunity with a particular technology if the role/profile/technology is not as per their liking. This will avoid, post deployment heartbreak or mismatch of expectations from the job profile after being placed.

b. The choice would also help the student as well as the organization to come out with transparent roadmap for the hired students.

 3. Evaluation of skillsets for the right fit :

 a.  Cut off for the necessary skillsets during campus recruitment itself

b. Compartmentalize the fitments based on organization’s assessment of student during campus evaluation

c. Hiring post cutoff for particular technology will take care of Go/NOGO for the student as well as organization ( The technology training will happen as per regular process, post joining).

The concept and intentions of campus hiring have been very holistic and translucent all these years and many aspiring careers have taken off through this program. However in my opinion we need to make small adjustments to this program as the volume requirements have gone up and the student fraternity looking more focused and assured what they want to do with their careers.

Though its institute which ties up with organizations for campus hiring, the students also need to have their homework in place and need to reassess themselves and the opportunities offered.

The students :

1. Need to overcome the temptation of lucrative packages and revisit their own liking and where do they see themselves in professional life in few years down the line.

2. Should be clear with the type of companies and technologies or domain with whom they want to make a career with.

3.  Make a statement for himself through the skills and not through the numbers.

4.  Not to go with the flow and start learning to say NO as well, as this will make them stay true to themselves.

5.  Not be part of ocean, instead focus more on making a place for himself in this competitive professional world.

Let it not be a number game deployment, instead let it be right fitment. Else, sooner or later we would end up having bunch of qualified professionals working in monotonous and thankless jobs and not to forget, education and professional qualifications would only be required for employee files and ECNR stamps.

Time to awake, time to plan roadmap, time to give justice to young talent. Ultimately nation is built through its youngsters. Let’s build them first, so they build us again but this time more compact, more robust and long term .

P.S : The blog is written in a personal capacity and has picked up a story from past observations. It has nothing to do with any individual or any specific organization. The blog also does not assume that all the placements are mismatch and talks about some instances wherein wrong mapping of the candidates lead to displeasure or abandoning of the career path chosen by choice or default.

Feel free to share the blog.

- Jayawant