10 Things to keep in mind during campus placements

Campus placement is the most awaited event in every student’s college life- full of excitement and stress. It offers students an arena of opportunities in various sectors of corporate world. To enable students to bag the best placement offer, every college has a well-structured corporate placement training programme. However, preparing for campus placements can be a bit challenging. With the changing requirements of the industry, digitalisation and emergence of new technologies, the students cannot ignore the importance of thoroughly preparing oneself for campus placements.

Here are a few things to keep in mind during campus placements that will help you secure a good placement:

Know yourself!

‘Tell us something about yourself’; ‘Introduce yourself’; ‘Take us through your resume’. This is one of the most predictable and cliched question, yet the most unprepared and underperformed answer. To master this question, you need to reflect on who you are as a person; analyse your strengths; identify your areas for improvement; and list down the achievements; identify your interest areas and gain clarity on the type of job you want. You can browse through various job portals to gain awareness on the different types of job profiles being offered and the ones that interests you. This will simplify the process for you and help in gaining better clarity.

Introduce yourself!

Based on the self-evaluation, plan your introduction in advance. Thumb rule is “Storytelling”. It should be well structured; concise; and gauge the attention of interviewers. This introduction lays the foundation of your further interaction with the interviewer.

Build your resume

Your resume should reflect everything that differentiates you from others. The role of the resume is to get you shortlisted in the screening round. Format, font, and content of resume needs to be thoroughly thought through. Take feedback from faculty, seniors and peers and incorporate the same. One thumb rule is “Be Honest”. Do not mention anything on your resume which is not true. It can cause more harm than good.

Know Them!

Study the Job Description thoroughly. Visit the company website, application, and other platforms. Gain anin-depth knowledge of the company and its business. The same will be reflected in your conversation with the interviewer. Interviewers do not expect the candidate to know everything about the company but to know the necessary details.

Match the Job Description

It’s important to map your skills with the requirements of the job profile.It is important thatyour resume not just shows how experienced you are in a general way but also shows that you are a perfect fit for the specific requirements mentioned in the job description.  This not only helps recruiters to filter your resume from the overload of resumes they receive but also optimizes your resume for the technology they might use to filter the resumes they receive.

Don’t run after package

It’s a common mistake that students commit during college placements. Students usually decide to apply based on CTC numbers. This is a big NO! Instead, apply based on brand name.Initially location and package shouldn’t be the deciding factors. If you can crack a good brand placement, you are more likely to have a sustainable career.

Aptitude Tests

Most of the time the first hurdle to cross in a recruitment process is the aptitude test.  A number of times, people with good technical knowledge and communication skills also have a hard time with the aptitude test.  Hence it is important to take the aptitude test seriously and to prepare for it. Only if you clear the aptitude test that you can attend the further rounds.  Though the structure of the aptitude test may differ significantly from company to company, the overall test, most of the times, may be divided into the sections ofquantitative ability, verbal ability, logical and reasoning ability. Your preparation in these four sections gives you the general ability to solve any type of aptitude test designed.

Technical skills

Technical skills are those skills that are needed to perform a certain task and hence difficult to describe in a general list.  A resume may not be selected if it does not display the technical skills that are needed to perform the tasks described for the role. For example, in finance, technical skills may consist of the knowledge of topics such as computing abilities, quantitative analysis, financial forecasting techniques.  Marketing related technical skills may be content management, data visualisation, web analytics, etc. Highlight these skills in your resume and during your interview.

Stress management

Being stressed out during the placement process is natural. Therefore, managing stress becomes crucial. Few things that will help manage your anxiety right before the interview are trying tongue twisters; think about the present; think about positive things; and lightening your mood. Think of the personal interview as a conversation, conversations don’t go wrong! The Thumb rule is ‘Act confident, feel confident!

Personal Interview

Once clearing the hurdles of resume selection and clearing the aptitude test, interview is the next big step.  To clear the interview, you need to orient yourself for the same.  There are certain steps that should be followed in preparing for an interview- review the job description in-depth and understand each term mentioned there;  know about the company; prepare a list of expected questions and rehearse the answers with your friends or family; practice mock interviews; organize your documents and thoughts about yourself so that you do not appear confused in any way; and update your social media profile with the latest work that you might have accomplished.  All these preparation tests take you a one step closer to success and give you an advantage compared to your competitor applicants.

About the author

This article has been co-authored by Dr Jyoti Ahluwalia and Dr Ekta Singhal, PGDM programme faculty at SOIL Institute of Management. 

 

Note: The views expressed in this article are solely authors own and do not reflect/represent those of Shiksha