A unique experience of conducting a virtual campus season…

With the restrictions on mobility and with college campuses physically shut down, we were faced with the gloomy possibility of not being able to visit them for hiring like we do every year.

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that” — MLK Jr.

In the work we do for clients, we don’t just keep their lights on but craft new lights for them. We approached this situation in the same way to craft new technology solutions for a completely online or virtual campus hiring season. Students no longer had to come to a college to meet us. They could participate from the safe comfort of their homes and hometowns. Our teams did not have to travel out either. The experience became richer for the students, the selection process easier for us, and overall — it was faster as well as safer for everyone. In so much that we are today having conversations with some institutes and universities who are exploring if they could use some of these solutions themselves.

The technology solutions started with a system we called Pravesh (Hindi: Entry), a state of the art platform to administer and evaluate competency-based tests. In past years, we’d use it on campus to administer tests in real-time. We now transformed it into an intelligent online testing platform with new capabilities that went from concept to live use within weeks. As an online platform, we enhanced it to intelligently adapt to unplanned disconnections without impacting the test-taker adversely. Remote proctoring capability was added based on computer vision techniques optimized for low-bandwidth and intermittent video streams. We built a purpose-built auto-grader for code reviews in different coding languages, and a solution based on natural language understanding to evaluate free text responses.

We were just happy that we could simply use the commonly used platforms for rich presentations to a large group and small group technical discussions, with collaborative whiteboards and screen sharing capabilities. In our desire to move forward, we might otherwise have built that too.

In just over a month, we were able to reach 10000+ students from 70+ colleges spread across various 100+ cities across India. The testing platform supported 1200+ concurrent users at its peak as over 5000 students took the technical and coding tests remotely and securely. Over 30000+ lines of code have been processed by the autograder which was purpose-built to enable remote autograding with support for 4 different languages — C, C++, Python and Java.

We are excited to welcome the largest ever group of campus hires. And we are proud that the artisanal technology expertise and the mastery of AI that our clients count on us for inspired us to respond brilliantly as a team.