Placement Blues: What Ivy-League Colleges Should Keep In Mind Prior To the Next Recruitment Season
"Ask the companies to discuss their current financials and risks during the Pre-Placement Presentation"
By Sneha Banerjee •
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This year's startup recruitment patterns have been quite a disappointment for ivy -league institutes like IITs and IIMs. Flipkart and other well-renowned startups have failed to keep up their promise, which has forced colleges to rethink about their placement strategies with respect to "startups!"
Going by the string of challenges placed by startups, industry experts and recruitment portals believe that A-listed colleges should brace themselves up for next year's placement session.
JobLagao CEO and Co-founder Satyam Sinha said that companies should be categorized into two sets by colleges; the first could be" High Risk and High Paying". The second category could be "Stable Company with Average Salary". Allow the students to take offer from each of the categories. This would distribute the risk. He also said that colleges should ask the company for an approved budget before coming for the placement. In most of the companies a hiring budget is allocated to a department or a business unit. Ask the companies to get approval from their finance before approaching the campus. "Ask the companies to discuss their current financials and risks during the Pre Placement Presentation. It would be nice that the students are aware of the risk before taking an offer," he added.
Battered by markdowns and dry funding
Startups like Zomato, Flipkart have been de-valued this year by brokerages. The shortage of funds have forced startups to trip their costs, which has lead to them deferring placements or lowering pay packages.
Guruprakash Sivabalan, co-Founder and CEO of Xobin Technologies said, "I think the colleges should be more connected with the startup world. Proper due diligence about the company should be done by the colleges, even before allocating the slots. In case of Flipkart it was known that they were subjected to close investor scrutiny after reported losses."
"Many SAAS companies are doing extremely well and they should be prioritized more than these e-commerce giants. From Xobin's past 2 months interaction with startups , many of them are ready to give 12 to 14 LPA with good ESOPs. There are over 1200 such startups actively hiring in India," Guruprakash said.
The lure of the startup ecosystem
Despite the negativity that has spurred post Flipkart's deferring of joining dates, even today graduates are eager to join the startup brigade. Lucrative job profiles, work culture and faster growth opportunities are factors that pull the young brigade of graduates to startups.
In order to facilitate the recruitment process, Joby Joseph, CEO and founder of Freshersworld.com suggested that for each of the topics or subjects taught in IIM/IIT there can be company partners who give a live project to work on to the students. A dashboard can be build wherein there are live discussions between the candidates and company representatives so that the candidates can build on their hire-ability score. Once projects are completed companies can roll out offers to the candidates to work on full time once they are out of college.
With this year's recruitment season ending on a not-so happy note, it's important for the colleges themselves to keep track of the vulnerable startup ecosystem and decide on their next placement season.
