Xobin Talks🎙️2.0 | Making Campus Recruitment Effective 🎯

In continuation of Xobin Talks 2.0, here we come with our second episode on how to make effective campus recruitment where we had the chance to interact with Mr. Madhavan Unni, Practice Director at Wipro Technologies who shared his insights on on-campus recruitment and how fresher hiring is evolving in the recent times.

We had numerous questions to shoot out to him on various aspects like, why hiring freshers is important because in every campus drive we see a huge number of young graduates getting recruited, what value they bring with them, what they bring to the table, and so on with an only base question in mind as to why freshers are an integral part of the organization.

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With his expertise in campus recruitment for around 15 to 20 years now, he told that fresh mindset, innovation, and tendency to learn things at a faster pace. Basically, the popular opinion is that freshers come out with innovative ideas and will be able to adapt to the situations much faster than seasoned candidates. With hackathons and ideathons happening frequently in the last half-decade most of the participants are fresh graduates who come up with innovative ideas, though they may be impractical to be implemented.

Looking at a problem with a fresh mind looking up to the problem in such a way that differs from experienced people, we actually tend to learn how to think with the current generation. Another advantage of hiring a fresher is like having fresh clay in hand, they can be molded into anything that you need. The most important attribute of a fresher is adaptability, you can put them anywhere that is challenging for them and they tend to learn since the passion to learn something that would develop their skill and expertise is always more for a fresher.

Setting the expectation right, even before attempting to recruit the candidate, what an organization must do is the duty of every college to let the students know about the company and set the expectations right. And categorizing the students based on their marks and linking them with the recruitment process is one thing that has to change from the college side since many candidates who score average grades are exceptional workers and vice versa. Basically, a college must be explaining to the students who are all the companies that are coming for recruitment, what their business is, what is their market share, and what can a candidate expect from the company. Transparency and clarity from the college is the first step in setting the expectations of the students.

Since hiring is an important part of an organization and hiring a large number of freshers in a short period of time is a daunting task, rather than putting everything as an organization’s responsibility, hiring a third-party trusted organization to do recruitment on your behalf is the simplest way to hire quality freshers. Another perspective of campus recruitment is always releasing 2 times the offers than what is required by the organization in case of huge companies, since the expected conversion rate is mostly 50%, this retraction of offers happens due to personal reasons, or students going up for higher studies, or some may find it difficult to cope up after coming into the company, the reasons are numerous. Usually, the offer released for campus recruitment is 2X and for lateral is 3X the openings.

There has always been a gap between the industry and academia, where students in the name of placement training get trained in aptitude and other skills rather than the skills that are required in the real world. To overcome this gap, what big companies do is, they have stopped going for campus recruitments in the final semester. They go to campus in their pre-year of graduation and assess students and offer the students a job while they are in their graduation. In this process, the candidates are put into a simulator environment, where they are exposed to the company’s UI and projects so that when they graduate and go to the office they will have the ability to work much better. And giving incentives to velocity freshers is another way of improvising the fresher’s experience.

The frequency of a long-standing relationship with the company is reducing in the present situation, back in earlier days a person used to work for around 10 years for a single company, but now the scenario has changed and it all depends on the priority, i.e., they move to the company which is challenging for them rather than a company which offers them a steady growth. Apart from everything on a lighter note the candidates now have been working from home in the present situation with the onset of the pandemic and the future workforce is definitely going to be hybrid and customers have also started to accept this paradigm shift in the work culture.