Off-campus hiring

While there are a series of factors that drive a comprehensive recruitment strategy, it is important that one weighs a few key factors before making a decision in today’s economic environment.

Today’s business environment is volatile and dynamic; there is no less clear growth visibility beyond a couple of quarters and companies are realising that staffing fresher’s rampantly and keeping large bench sizes is not viable. The mellowing economic climate has fagged the frenzied edge of tech- sector hiring from campuses.

Global business environment has changed, and so have industry business models. Reduced demand for IT services and delay in decision making by clients are forcing the IT firms to go slow on hiring of freshers on campus. There has been a decline in campus offerings and the industry is a bit cautious in hiring fresher’s both technical and non-technical.

The IT companies are not in a position to wait for long periods of 12-18 months for selection, induction and training of freshers. A good number of organisations are looking at just-in-time recruitment. The overall economy has witnessed a rationalisation, companies are increasingly deploying their resources more efficiently and –tier 1 IT companies are adopting a further rethink of the traditional campus recruiting route even though it provides less expensive, defined access to talent.

The recent developments and behavior of economic conditions are such that companies are drastically cutting down campus offers, as they align their talent supply to dynamic business demand and it makes more sense to do off-campus, just-in-time hiring of freshers that caters to their quick demand. In the wake of current market sentiments and organisations evaluating opportunities, it is obvious, that lateral hiring in the coming days will be done on project basis, to meet the routine work demands.

The road ahead

To hire eligible candidates, firms are looking at expert and experienced consultancies as they realise hiring from the market provides them a candidate who is right-fit for the job. Amidst this major shift of focus from on-campus to off-campus, the specialised recruitments companies are expected to gain more relevance among IT companies since they offer a 360 degree solution, right from identifying the right candidate to assessment, selection and delivery.

The off campus hiring mode will also provide and offer opportunity to students from tier II and tier III colleges to compete at the same level for a job.

In campus hires, companies have to make offers and hang out till the student finishes degree, therefore, organisations are now choosing to hire talent off-campus and this makes more sense & in-sync with the changing economic dynamics. Given the uncertain scenario, the on-campus placement numbers will be moving at a very moderate pace and eventually going to come down in the coming days as companies may want to see how their next set of projects turns out and then decide on talent intake. Organisations would wait for the economic environment to stabilise and then gear-up to unfold their hiring plans.

The normal large-scale induction from campuses by the top IT / IT-enabled & mid –market companies is a thing of the past, the present trend is to hire fresher’s off-campus. The bench sizes has been reduced drastically, majority on the bench being freshers, eagerly waiting to join as soon as the project is live, whereas, HR is all out to increase the utilisation of their present workforce and reduce intake of freshers from campuses.