Most companies, especially small to medium sized enterprises and startups struggle a lot to hire freshers. Getting campus drive in best colleges would be a challenge if you don't have a big brand name. Also, your requirements for freshers can popup anytime during the year - and college freshers are available only at the end of the academic year. In that case, how can you still hire quality freshers?
Our Experience
It would be worthwhile to share our own success story here. Few months back we decided to hire two freshers in our development team. This was a relatively sudden decision, like most startups. We decided to have a drive at our premises for the same. We published the requirements on social media and websites like freshersworld.com on Thursday - for the Saturday drive. I was not so hopeful for the footfalls - however to my pleasant surprise, 70+ freshers showed up on the drive day, making it a bit of logistical challenge for us! We ended up hiring two freshers from that drive, who were able to join us on immediate basis.
Your Social Footprint Matters!
While talking to most candidates, we realized that your company's social media footprint matters a lot to attract freshers for the drive. Especially, our good ratings and feedback on the Glass Door were mentioned by most freshers. Regular updates on FaceBook and LinkedIn on what the company does, glimpses of the culture of the company etc. are highly regarded by freshers too. If this is true for startup like ours, it's true for any size company.
Quality vs Quantity
"Selection Process" is more challenging than "Sourcing" for freshers. You will receive a large number of applicants for your freshers opening. Doing a "resume reject" is more difficult for freshers compared to experienced job seeker, as there is no prior experience or domain knowledge that you can use as a criteria. Many companies do artificial filtering, such as aggregate percentage in degree college or even percentage in 10th or 12th grade! Such filtering risks loosing good candidates. Here's where we applied "Eat your own dog good" and made use of our platform. FloPlatform has two components: our primary strength is "Interview as a Service", but we also have online assessments.
Automated Interviews at a rescue
Automated (bot-based or one-way) Interviews are Assessments++! We created an automated interview structure with three assessments to select right candidates for the job: Aptitude test, Python assessment and Programming test. Aptitude and Python assessments were multi-choice objective tests, while programming test was a subjective test, where candidates were asked to write two programs. These automated interviews can be taken on smart phone too, so as and when candidates arrived at our premises on the drive day, we invited them for the assessments.
Aptitude and Python assessments were objective tests, which were auto evaluated. We decided a threshold, and anybody who did reasonably well on these two tests, we manually checked the quality of the code they wrote in the Programming assessments.
How much time it saved?
On the drive day, we had 78 walk-ins. Using automated interviews, we reduced the number of face to face interviews to just 12; and later analytics showed us that many of the rejected candidates were doing academically better than the selected candidates. 3 of the selected candidates, whose programming and problem solving skills were above average were performing below average when it comes to the college degree percentages. When we were having face to face discussion with selected 12 candidates, we were able to spend more time with them; we already had the program that they wrote in front of us, and were able to focus on their solution and brainstormed about alternative solutions. While we liked 4 out of 12 freshers at the end, we had only 2 vacancies, and were able to fulfill our requirements.
A Happy-Happy solution
At FloCareer, our focus has always been a Happy-Happy solution! Automated Interviews and Expert Driven Video Interviews from the home environment saves tremendous time and energy for job seekers as well as employers. Employers need to focus on the employees who would be happy working for them and provide more productivity. Focusing more on qualified leads helps them on that mission!
Conclusion
A good branding of your company will attract large number of freshers. A carefully crafted selection process will give the best of the lot very quickly. Automated Interviews save lot of time, and energy, helps you focus more on relevant profiles, and reduces the risk of losing good candidates if you use the alternatives of putting arbitrary filters.
