Campus placements no longer need to be synonymous with campus visits. Fresh graduates and companies hiring fresh talent have a meeting ground in job portals dedicated to those looking for their first jobs. The Indian IT-ITeS industry in particular, famous for its bulk fresher hiring, is making the most of this idea. Global leaders like IBM too are hiring via websites like freshersworld.com, cocubes.com, firstnaukri.com and efreshers.com, among others. IT companies or knowledge-based businesses alone make up 70% of hiring at these freshers? job portals.
IBM India, considered India?s second-largest private sector employer, hires 10-15% of engineering graduates from such job portals, admits VA Rangaranjan, recruitment leader, IBM India/SA. ?We observed an accelerated traffic to graduate hire programme sites since 2008, when hiring activity on campuses slackened due to the slowdown. This trend has continued, as graduates see online portals having an edge over campus events conducted by companies,? says Rangarajan.
Adds HR consulting firm Globalhunt director Sunil Goel: ?As an industry average, fresher hiring from niche websites has today reached 25-30%, which was almost negligible in 2008. And this trend will only accelerate in the future.?
Harpreet Singh Grover, founder of Cocubes.com explained how the model works: ?Companies pay us an annual fee of R 5-10 lakh to use our filtering process of various resumes. Even colleges pay us R700 per student to upload profiles on our website.? Cocubes today counts big names like Cognizant, Patni Computer systems, Accenture and CMC as its partners.
While there were only 25-30 firms which partnered Cocubes last year, the number has now reached 200. Even Freshersworld.com recently tied up with Wipro, TCS and Cognizant to promote hiring programmes and, in turn, these companies use the Freshersworld database to hire graduates, says Joby Joseph, founder and CEO.
Hitesh Oberoi, MD and CEO of Naukri.com?s parent company Infoedge India, says though big companies too hire from Firstnaukri, (a sub-segment of Naukri) it is the mid-sized companies, which miss out on the best talent at campuses, that use Firstnaukri as an important platform to engage with students and promote their organisation.
The BPO industry, which relies heavily on freshers, is also making full use of these websites. Says R Swaminathan, CPO, WNS Global Services: ?In the last financial year, (2010-11), approximately 21% of our total hiring (freshers) was from job portals specifically for freshers. There has been around 3% rise in fresher hiring through job portals in FY11 compared to FY10.?
Convergys, a BPO employing 10,500 in India, too takes the indirect approach. ?Less than 10% of our fresher hiring happens at physical campus visits. We get in touch with various recruiters for fresher hiring, which might be advertising on these job portals for freshers,? says Hanumant Talwar, managing director and country manager India for the company.
Justifies Pangea3, a legal process outsourcing firm: ?Campus placements are getting challenging with colleges increasing in number every year. We often find ourselves juggling between internal recruiting deadlines and campus deadlines. Out of 800 hires in 2010, 550 of our hires (about 69%) were either freshers or candidates with 0-3 years of total experience.
Of the 550, 230 (about 42%) were from such websites/job portals,? notes Plasy Fernandes, senior manager, talent acquisition, human resources, Pangea3. Another mid-sized IT company, NetApp, looks at this channel very seriously.
“We have hired through Freshersworld recently. Youngsters are also highly networked on social sites like Facebook, and job portals are becoming increasingly popular. We have hired around 5% freshers through this channel,? says SR Manjunath, senior HR director, NetApp India.
Hinduja Global Solutions, driven by a fresher recruitment strategy, hires approximately 7.5% of its freshers from Naukri. The 13,500-employee BPO hires 900 freshers a year.
