4 Challenges ‘Placement Cells’ Face During Placement Season
Most students in India join colleges for their higher studies with the end goal of securing a job after graduating. Hence, it becomes a very important task for colleges to help these students achieve their goal. Campus Recruitment is an integral part of any university in India. Colleges every year approach multiple companies in their district, state, or even MNCs to visit their campus for fresher hiring. Companies also leverage this system & reduce their hiring pain points. Students put in a great deal of effort to grab that one opportunity to kickstart their career by getting a campus job. This entire process of matching companies with the right candidates & talent from campus is handled by ‘Placement Cells’ of universities.
Much before the start of the academic year, placement representatives of colleges start ringing up company HRs to ask when they are planning to do the recruitment drive, what are the branches they’d like to recruit students from, how many days their recruitment drive will last, etc. Placement Cells work hard to fulfill all the requirements from companies, meet deadlines & have seamless placement season in the university.
Limited outreach to companies
About 98% of graduating students every year are from Tier 2/3 colleges. These colleges have a limited number of companies visiting their campuses and hence, have a lower placement percentage. The gap between the industry requirement and student skill set is huge, leading to companies hiring a smaller number of fresh graduates. Companies end up visiting a lesser number of campuses and prefer premier/ Tier-1 colleges. All of this leads to a smaller company outreach for most college placement cells.
Huge amounts of administrative work
Placement Cells whose main task is to help students get placed in the right companies through recruitment drives, spend a large amount of time in doing the administrative tasks. These tasks include — collecting information from students, communicating necessary details from companies to students, communicating necessary details from students to companies, verifying students do not submit incorrect details to companies, scheduling different recruitment drives, intimating students to reach venues on time, generating placement reports and much more. All this work is currently being done using Google Forms, Emails, Whatsapp groups, etc. If Placement Cells spend less time on all this work then they can spend more time in inviting more companies to the campus & getting more students placed.
Dealing with students
Though college students in the final year of college are job-ready, they still haven’t given up o their college lifestyle yet. They do not understand corporate etiquettes and tend to make silly mistakes during the recruitment process. Placement Cells need to ensure high student engagement to maximize their placement percentages. They need to communicate information across to students timely and ensure that the student reads and acts on it. Placement Cells run after students to make them submit details before the deadlines. A tool to increase student engagement could do wonders for the placement officers.
Working with other College Departments
Placement Cells work with multiple college departments — Administration team, Examination cells, Logistics team, Department Heads/HODs, Student Councils. Co-ordinating with all these departments & aligning them with recruitment drives is very important & involves some hassles too. Placement being the top priority, many other departments need to change their plans due to companies visiting the campus & unavailability of students.
We, at Acciojob, are solving these pain points for University Placement Cells. We’ve built a platform which caters to all possible needs you could have. It helps you increase your outreach to companies and also digitizes your current placement process, saving about 80% of your manual effort. We are partnering with colleges across India to make their placement process seamless & easy. Please feel free to reach out to us at (+91) 9586952826 (or) contactus@acciojob.com.
