4 Campus Hiring Trends to Redefine Your Recruitment Strategy

It’s that crazy time of the year! Recruitment folks accompanied by panel members march towards their chosen colleges by air, river, rail, road, whatever it takes. Candidates prepare and wait with bated breath for the countdown to begin. Colleges are all decked up with festoons, lights and razzmatazz, the smell of new paints fill the air and a sense of urgency wraps all. Each year, according to a conservative estimate, 1000+ companies, from startups to behemoths hire more than 1,20,000 students from 3,500+ colleges, across the length and breadth of India. Not an easy task, this annual ritual of placement, by any stretch of imagination is a logistical nightmare. For students, placement coordinators, teachers and even alumni, it’s a stressful time. Recruiters and hiring managers, on the other hand, are equally stressed. Intense competition, pre-hiring assessment, finding the right fit, wrong assessment of students, possible drop outs, outdated recruiting practices are among the challenges that recruiters have to face.

Here are four emerging campus hiring trends that recruiters are adopting to improve fulfilment:

1. Evaluate English proficiency: English helps us comprehend the ways of the world. Research indicates English as key to enhance collaboration among teams. No one could deny the benefits of being able to communicate well in English with overseas clients, suppliers, internal stakeholders and buyers. Standardized English communication tests are inadequate in establishing the right benchmarks and meeting high volume competency-based language assessment needs of organizations.

MeritTrac’s automated spoken English online test platform, SpeechTrac, objectively evaluates spoken English skills of job seekers. SpeechTrac uses the patented Carnegie Speech engine and pinpointing technology to identify errors in sentence reading, sentence correction, and impromptu speech. This technology facilitates testing a candidate’s spoken English abilities at the phoneme level against the grammar, pronunciation, fluency, and word stress of native speakers.

2. Bias free pre-hire assessment: Effectively assessing candidates around listening, speaking, writing and other soft skills proficiencies is one hard bottleneck that every recruiter wishes to conquer. That’s because many believe such efficiencies take up to 25% of the skills required to do a modern-day job. Employers mandatorily look for such hygiene skills in candidates that go beyond their qualifications and experiences.

MeritTrac’s Learning Branch is an automated web-based assessment and training platform that evaluates the listening, speaking, and writing proficiency of entry-level talent. Not just that, it streamlines and speeds up the pre-hire assessment process and attains accurate bias-free results for efficient decision making. Among other things, Learning Branch measures comprehension, vocabulary, pronunciation, multitasking, writing and soft skills. Its trademarked Use of Willow™ Intelligent Voice Analysis facilitates the auto evaluation of key metrics during a live performance.

3. Spot the sales star: When you have hundreds of willing students at the door, spotting a sales leader is as good as separating wheat from the chaff. Getting a quick, specific prediction around a candidate’s sales capability, motive and aptitude cannot be left to instincts.

MeritTrac’s SSPQ (Sales Situational Personality Questionnaire) is designed to assess six top personality dimensions of the sales star to interact directly with customers. It evaluates candidates on sociability, motivation, integrity, organization skills at work, flexibility and stress tolerance levels. It not only benchmarks scores against an ideal candidate profile but also analyses candidates based on descriptive feedback

4. Spot the coding turk: Who wound not like to recruit high-performing programming talent that drives Innovation and becomes a great culture fit. At a time when organizations pay 20% above the market for quality engineering talent, benchmarking young candidates’ coding capabilities and testing their domain knowledge is critical to identifying job-fit developers. And value for bucks too.

MeritTrac’s CodeTrac, a performance-based coding platform, provides real-time feedback to help companies assess candidates’ coding skills for performance benchmarking and effective recruitment. The platform is integrated with domain-based tests to assess candidates’ end-to-end full-stack software development capability and benchmark it with industry standards. By leveraging CodeTrac, organizations can design an efficient developer recruitment cycle, bridge skill gaps for employee career progression, build customized coding scenarios based on business needs, and tailor pre- as well as post-training requirements.