The Ultimate Guide for Off-Campus Placements / Internships

Hello Everyone, Myself: S Rohit Chandra Jagadeesh, a 2023 graduate from IIT Kharagpur. Unlike many, I didn’t have a happy ending to campus life as I was unplaced in the campus placements. Today I shall be sharing my story of how I progressed from being unplaced in campus placements to receiving multiple offers off-campus.

It was December 1st, 2022: Day 1 of our campus placements — This was the day from which most of my friends’s lives started getting sorted in terms of jobs. I didn’t even get an interview call from any Day-1 company and I was a bit disappointed but at the same time happy for my friends who cracked on day 1 itself, I told myself that everyone shall have a day and we must keep fighting till then

Picture captured during placement season phase-1 to check my background

The next day I got an interview call from Bank of America but couldn’t convert that into an offer. In the next couple of days, I was interviewed by companies such as JustDial, Essex Lake Group, Tata AIG .etc. Skipping these interview experiences but screwed almost every interview

Phase-1 of Campus Placements lasted till December 17th post which we were given a break of around 15 days before phase-2 commencement. This is when I decided to focus on Off-campus rather than campus placements. So during the next 15 days, sent over 500–600 DMs to Founders and HRs of various companies that align with my interests.

A few people reverted back with a sorry note while a few scheduled interviews and then again the same old story repeats.

“Rejections…. Rejections…. Rejections. I don’t like them but Rejections likes me, Can’t avoid”

After the 15-day break, I decided to enjoy my last days of campus life as a student at IIT Kharagpur while analysing where I was going wrong. Basically sat down at my table did my own SWOT analysis and then started figuring out what excites me.

The month of January just passed by with the amazing fests of IIT Kharagpur. February, March, and April months are so far the best months of my campus life I guess as I enjoyed them to the fullest with friends without even a single thought about life after college adding more pressure to the situation. I thank all my dear friends for all the lovely treats. Sharing a few pictures from those days as well

Placement treat by my friends at a rooftop restaurant in Kharagpur

As all good things must come to an end, My college life too came to an end in May and headed back home with no job in hand. Even after going home, I chose to enjoy IPL 2023 which might be the last season for my idol MS Dhoni and only after the IPL, did I start trying out various things and observed where I was most excited.

Somehow I decided to try out Data Analytics which seemed very interesting so decided to explore it further but I consciously gave it a shot till August upskilling myself with relevant skills such as MS Excel, SQL, Power BI, Tableau .etc.

To be precise, Started off-campus trails on a full-fledged level on August 26th. First, started by redesigning my resume which is ATS(Applicant Tracking System)-friendly using the website jobscan premium version. Also updated my LinkedIn profile with the help of ChatGPT and Jobscan subscription and bought LinkedIn Premium too.

Now starts the Off-Campus process: To all who are starting or yet to start off-campus trails, Make sure you have these chrome extensions installed which shall be very useful — Simplify, Grammarly, Rocketreach, Skrapp, Engage AI, GMass .etc. You can feel free to search individual ones to understand their capabilities.

Once you have the entire setup ready: Start creating your profiles on Job portals such as Glassdoor, Wellfound, Indeed, Hired etc., and start applying for jobs of your interest. After you come across each job opening, Go one step further and search for your connections working in that company and ask for a referral as most of these openings are filled by referrals only.

Just to support the argument, In a recent survey conducted by BCG almost 70% of job openings are filled by referrals only so don’t miss out on chances. Reach out to your college seniors, alumni or anyone who is in your connections on LinkedIn asking for a referral. One piece of advice for beginners is don’t simply message like “Hi, I want a referral at XYZ. Can you help me?”. Be more professional and spend some time drafting the message which you need to send.

I sent DMs to over 500+ connections asking for referrals and fortunately received referrals from many companies such as Standard Chartered, American Express, Genpact, Flipkart, JP Morgan .etc. As soon as I started applying on job portals as well as through referrals, Rejection emails started popping up in my mailbox, one must not get disappointed by any of those and instead just focus on the process rather than on the result

Rejection email from PhonePe for a Business Analyst (BA) — Analytics role

I was still figuring out how off-campus hiring works and how we can increase our odds and reached out to all my batchmates who got offers from off-campus. One of them was a girl named Sakshi who got her job at Deloitte through a referral from a professor. She suggested pinging all professors too for help.

Also spoke with one of my other friends Adarsh who had an off-campus intern in his final year. He suggested a unique way to reach out to companies enquiring about job openings i.e. by visiting top VC firms and checking their portfolio and then reaching out to people who are hiring at those startups.

I was clear in my mind what the process was and I was sure that this would be sufficient to get interview calls and hence started preparing for interviews. One piece of advice I received from my uncle who was an IIM C graduate was very valuable and helpful which was to emphasise more on the results of the work like accuracy going up by 10% or saving time by 80% instead of focusing more on the process.

For the next few days, I kept repeating the same process but I didn’t have as many interviews as I anticipated but didn’t lose my hope not even 1%. This is when one of my friends Deekshitha pointed out a mistake that I was making on LinkedIn while sending connection requests to potential recruiters which was not sending a note along with the request.

I took this feedback seriously and it indeed worked well. Received responses from a few Founders as well as HRs asking me to send the same resume over email. During the entire process, I realised that there isn’t a particular formula that can help us get a job but it’s a continuous process of learning and giving our best every single day

A few days passed with the same process and received test links for a few companies too which I attempted and received 100s of rejection emails. Still, at this point in time, I even stopped focusing on what the result of my process was as I set targets for myself like reaching out to 400–500 connections on LinkedIn today or Practising 10 SQL questions today .etc.

The process is something that gave me immense satisfaction which is very crucial to get a good sleep every night. I also started sending out LinkedIn connection requests to all founders & co-founders of all the Indian unicorns and even received replies from a few people whom I reached out such as Sameer Mehta: CEO of boAt, Kamesh Goyal: Chairman of Digit Insurance to send my resume to them over email.

Soon, I realised that even after sending out connection requests and connecting with them they were simply asking me to mail the resume to them so I thought why can’t I directly gather all the emails of Founders, Co-Founders, CEOs, CTOs, HRs somehow and start rolling out cold emails to them.

It took a couple of days to gather all their email IDs from various sources such as LinkedIn, RocketReach, Skrapp, and Zauba. etc and finally started cold emailing thanks to the extension GMass which made this streamlined using mail merging and easier with an automatic follow-up facility.

Cold emailing is so far the most powerful method to get a referral from CEOs themselves. Just to give context, I mailed around 500 people but only a few hardly 5–10 responded out of which one was Mr Nithin Kamath, CEO of Zerodha himself.

Had a couple of interview rounds from Digit Insurance as well as Vedantu both of which were a result of cold emailing. Finally, after 45 days of struggle for a job, Received an offer as Business Analyst from Vedantu an EdTech Unicorn Startup. Soon after receiving an offer from Vedantu, Digit Insurance also extended the offer and I carefully made a decision to go ahead with Vedantu.

Proud and so glad to be a Vedan!

I couldn’t share everything in detail but every conversation and every moment was a lifetime experience. I would like to end this blog here but in case of any further queries or require 1–1 Mentorship for Off-Campus placements or internships, Please feel free to schedule a meeting with me on TopMate. Shall be happy to share everything in detail, especially Dos and Don’ts and also provide the referral templates, email templates .etc which helped me get the job.

I would like to thank my parents, friends, and everyone for supporting me throughout my journey. Thanks a lot! See you soon…