Campus Hiring- The Digital Way

This is the time of the year where organizations, campuses, and students get ready for the massive campus recruitment drive that happens across the country.

Campus hiring has emerged as one of the prime recruitment channels to feed the ever-growing demand for talent in the companies. If an organization just depends on lateral hiring, they are only targeting the same pool that everyone else is targeting. Also, that pool is not sufficient enough to meet the burgeoning demand for fresh talent.

Campus hiring helps organizations dive into massive young talent pool with diverse educational backgrounds available with the educational institutes that are eager to learn "walking the ropes" and contribute to the organizational objectives.

There is a growing competition amongst the organizations to pick the best talent available from the campuses and organizations are leaving no stone unturned to hire the best. This has led to a lot of organizations redesigning and rethinking their recruitment strategies for campus hiring.

Campus hiring is not devoid of its own challenges as well. With a very high volume of job applications, different educational backgrounds and different people dependent grading or manual pen and paper assessments make campus hiring a challenging process.

As a result, more and more organizations are investing in technologies to gain a competitive advantage to hire the best talent. With the freshers having little or minimal practical job experience, the focus has moved on to the soft skills and the personality traits besides the job skills.

Based on the research across hundreds of campuses and speaking with talent acquisition leaders, these are the four most widely available and acceptable digital solutions available for campus hiring

1. Aptitude & Cognitive Assessments

1. The most elementary yet the most accepted way of evaluating talent and skills of an individual is the aptitude tests. The aptitude tests are used to evaluate verbal, problem solving, analytical and reasoning skills. While, IQ Assessments are used to judge an individual's cognitive skills, analytical and logical reasoning skills, and the overall response that their intelligence has when placed in certain environments. Combined together, these assessments provide a highly accurate and reliable Performance Index of an individual with respect to a particular job role. Technology-based proctoring enables users to give tests "Anytime-Anywhere" and enables organizations to deploy these assessments at a wide scale.

2. Coding Tests

1. Software development still remains the most hired job role amongst technology institute campuses and evaluating coding skills still remains a time taking and challenging pursuit for campus hiring. Web-based ICE Coding tests help evaluate an individual's competence in coding pertaining to a particular coding language and also help evaluate the logical skills of an individual which is highly critical for coding. The assessment also evaluates finer nuances like efficiency, probability of syntax and compilation errors and proficiency in multiple languages.

3. Game-based Assessments

1. Organizations across industries are taking a game-based approach to assessment for informed decision making. Pre-hire psychometric assessments are one of the best predictors of success on the job and game-based assessments are psychometric assessments intentionally built as games.
2. Game-based assessments make the recruitment process more effective and efficient for employers and provide an engaging experience for students. Based on a survey, game-based assessments have shown following compared to traditional psychometric assessments
• 91% reported that the game-based assessment gave a better or the same impression of the company.
• 94% said that the game-based assessment was better at engaging them.
• 93% reported that the game-based assessment held their attention more (or the same as) traditional tests.
3. Game-based assessments convey an enhanced employer image. The enhanced candidate experience creates an important competitive edge for companies in an increasingly global war for talent at campuses.

4. Digital Surveys

1. Surveys are the best way to scrutinize the pulse of campus if conducted well. An unbiased survey gives organic feedback about the people, processes, and practices in an organization and in turn ensures continuous improvement and success of the campus hiring processes.
2. Leverage best-in-class survey platform to assess the impact of your campus hiring initiatives with students who got selected or rejected to find out what worked and what didn't. This should go back as feedback for modifying the policies and processes for next year's or next campuses to win the talent war at the campus.

Here are three benefits that Digital Assessments offer with campus hiring

1. Taking the pain out of the administration of assessments. The digital assessments allow measuring aptitude, behaviour, and skill evaluation using a single platform saving a lot of time and resources for organizations. Customized registration pages allow employer branding and actionable analytics allow an in-depth overview of students for interviews and hiring. IP restriction and time restriction allow timely delivery and instant result declaration fast tracks the overall hiring process without any bias.

2. Finding the best-fit candidates. Leveraging an assessment platform to provide a highly accurate and reliable Performance Index of an individual with respect to a particular job role is very important can help organizations ease the hiring process. The development guides with these assessments help with subsequent training and individual development.

3. Hire from a pre-assessed pool. As these assessments can be rolled out before you visit the campus, you have the advantage of spending more quality time with pre-assessed candidates. This results in reduced hiring time and greater student engagement and experience.

It is therefore crucial that organizations commit their resources in digitally transforming the campus hiring by using the online assessment tools. In addition to assessing the student's job fitment, digital campus assessments are able to measure the soft skills such as quick learning, problem-solving, teamwork, etc. thus providing a 360-degree view of the candidate. Considering the volumes of job applications, they can be used before the campus visit or during the visit to be rolled out to a large number of students at one time or can be rolled out virtually before the visit. Specifically designed and validated digital assessment solutions have now become an inseparable partner for campus hiring.