Campus Recruitment in India – Shift in Focus?

Campus Recruitment in India – Shift in Focus?

Campus Recruitment in India is no more the conventional method of hiring fresh graduates from colleges and assigning them to any generic work depending on the current business demand.  This program has come a long way and the organizations have been finding it changing in the past few years. For past few decades, most of the major companies in India have been actively going to colleges and made their presence every year.  Since there was no scarcity for the supply of fresh graduates, the effort was mostly about hiring and achieving the numbers.  Every company had exclusive training programs for these graduates and they were trained only to attain the knowledge, skills purely based on the immediate need.

Over a period of time, as the market transformed and matured, organizations have started to realize that it is time to hire graduates from colleges that have skills and talent what is required to match the requirements of the end customers.  Customer is the key in any business and this is true in every sense.  Organizations are now in a spree to hire the best talent from colleges that are productive without lengthy training or coaching. More efforts are made to hire those who are fast learners, understand what the customer needs and come up with solutions using their creative ideas. Any smart engineering graduate can be trained to be a great coder or programmer, but one needs to be extra smart to be able to deliver what the customer needs with creative ideas and design thinking.  This is a game changer situation for any fresh graduate out of the college.  Being creative and innovative is not taught to any student as a part of their academic curriculum, but it needs to be learnt by self.  It could be highly challenging for any graduate to learn these qualities during the season of attending interviews, but the efforts have to begin from the day they start their courses. Faculty, alumni and the industry stakeholders play a huge role in shaping the career of a student in the required direction.

Organizations give high emphasis for the quality of hires they make.  Most product engineering companies do not have new hire training programs that last for months. They do it only for a few days or weeks – not more than that. One of the reasons for this could be the fact that these organizations believe that they have already identified the best college graduates and they do not need long-duration training  These graduates are expected to deliver as early as possible and most of their training would happen on the job. The expectations from them will be sky-high and sometimes they are under pressure to work in a ‘no excuse environment’.  Also, these graduates typically work with teams spreading across countries and the atmosphere here is purely global. Their deliverable and performances are assessed and compared with their global colleagues and this is a massive exposure to any college graduate. Generally, most of the product engineering companies will not treat their college graduates as ‘second class citizens’, but they are treated at par with the senior colleagues in the team and they equally contribute to the success of their respective teams and the organization.

In order to find a right match for the right role, most organizations have been coming up with ideas and initiatives to engage with students starting from their earlier years of their graduation. Companies have started believing that it may not be great idea to engage with colleges and students only during the season of campus interviews, but they see advantage in doing this much early. It could be a good idea for organizations to start building relationships with selected colleges and engage with the students throughout their semesters thus adding value to their personality development as well. This may happen through coaching them through workshops, guest lectures, mentoring, ambassador programs, offering internships, projects on short & long term etc. It could also happen through continuous engagement with the key faculty members and giving them incites about what the industry looks for in a graduate and how these faculty group can help shaping these students for the respective industries to be the future leaders. Apart from the organizational focus specific to industry and customer, each organization must have a goal towards the society and this can be achieved by contributing to the welfare of a college graduate in million ways.