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Recruitment | 10 Min Read

Virtual campus recruitment: The future of campus hiring

Introduction

The worldwide outbreak impacted human life, with lockdown and social distancing measures bringing everything to a standstill. The same repercussions were felt in the context of hiring processes across the globe. In response, organizations adjusted to immediate changes in demand and the new regulatory changes.

This included a quick transition to online recruitment and remote working, which brought substantial changes in the recruiting processes, including one of the most remarkable recruiting activities, campus hiring.

 


What does campus recruitment mean?

Virtual campus recruitment refers to sourcing, attracting, and hiring talented individuals for internships, co-op positions, full-time entry-level jobs and summer jobs. All organizations with high-volume hiring need to implement campus recruitment practices. Virtual campus hiring strategy involves working with university career development centers and participating in career fairs to meet with college students and graduates face-to-face.

 


The campus hiring season

Campus hiring caters to organizations’ growing talent needs by enabling them to hire candidates from educational institutions. Most organizations possess a campus hiring team or create one during every recruitment season. These teams visit different colleges and institutions and zero in on the best-in-class potential resources.

Let us assume a scenario:

There are four crucial steps in any campus recruitment process. Campus selection, campus engagement, screening the students and campus interviews. The campus team shortlists the campuses, initiates a relationship with them and promotes their brand on the campuses. After the first phase, the group visited the educational center and engaged with students through a detailed PPT, followed by a Q&A session. Afterward, interested students are offered a short test, typically a pen-and-paper exam. The campus recruitment team invigilates the proceeding to maintain the sanctity of the test-taking process.

The campus recruitment team scans each test to shortlist the students and create a final list for the interviews. This long-drawn process, spanning over one or more days, has its pitfalls. The interviewers often don’t remember to ask the right questions or lack a uniform approach. The challenges mentioned above only enumerate the tedious process in one hiring exercise on one campus! Only a handful of students are selected from one campus.

Meanwhile, the target is to hire 80 students. The recruiting team must visit several more campuses. Add the hassle of handling its team’s logistics while visiting them. This is a time-consuming and intricate process.

Organizations might have assumed there was no need for tech interventions in the campus recruitment process. However, the on-ground campus hiring drive is highly challenging for the corporate team on a college-visiting spree daily. The financial resources subsumed in the process undermine any benefits accrued from the strategy detailed above.

We now know that there must be a more efficient process to undertake campus hiring, especially amid the need to maintain business continuity with limited available options.

 

Infographic 2


What is virtual campus hiring?

Amid the pandemic and plunge in global job postings, campus hiring depended significantly on technology. Organizations looking to recruit students or new graduates or build a successful talent pipeline did so remotely by opting for virtual campus hiring.

Online technology-based tools enable universities to connect alums and students to employers, even without visiting their campuses. Like regular campus events, online campus drives provide an online medium where job seekers and employers can learn more about each other and connect to explore new avenues. They can leverage tools like video conferencing, chat rooms, and virtual booths to help students understand more about available opportunities and benefits of applying and becoming a part of a particular organization.

 


Who is a virtual recruiter?

A virtual recruiter involved in the process of conducting interviews may be a recruiting officer working online and remotely, a superior or hiring manager intending to save time and resources in the hiring process, or a recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) provider.

Virtual interviews standardize the candidate screening process by assessing candidates on crucial parameters that ascertain the candidate’s suitability for employment, ensuring adherence to work and anti-discrimination laws. Virtual recruiters perform the same duties and goals as traditional recruiters; their main objective is to enable their employers or clients to get the best talent to fill their vacancies. They can liaise between job seekers and potential employers and help companies focus only on those candidates who are fit for the job.

 


Why is online campus recruitment important?

For several reasons, virtual campus recruitment is essential for organizations, as it offers numerous benefits and advantages.

Provides access to fresh talent:

Campus selection and recruitment offers organizations access to a pool of fresh, young talent with the latest academic knowledge and skills. Hiring from campuses allows companies to bring in individuals eager to learn and adapt to the industry.

 

Helps build a talent pipeline:

The campus recruitment process helps organizations build a talent pipeline for the future. Companies can nurture potential candidates by establishing relationships with universities and colleges, creating a pool of qualified individuals for future hiring needs.

 

Helps evaluate cultural fit:

Hiring from campuses enables organizations to assess candidates for their academic qualifications and cultural fit within the company. This is crucial for maintaining a cohesive and productive work environment.

 

Is cost-effective:

While upfront costs are associated with participating in career fairs or conducting campus interviews with traditional campus recruitment drives, organizations incur no such costs with virtual campus recruitment, making it a cost-effective hiring process.

 

Helps establish employer brand:

Active involvement in campus recruitment helps organizations build and enhance their employer brand among students. A positive campus reputation can attract top talent and create a competitive advantage in the job market.

Top industries leveraging virtual campus recruitment

  • Information technology (IT) and software development
  • Consulting and professional services
  • Finance and banking
  • Engineering and manufacturing
  • Telecommunications
  • FMCG
  • Automotive
  • E-commerce and technology startups

 


Top challenges of online campus recruitment

While the online campus recruitment process offers many benefits, it also comes with challenges. Some of the top challenges associated with online campus recruitment include:

 

Infographic 1

 

Limited face-to-face interaction:

Lack of in-person interaction can make it challenging for recruiters to gauge a candidate’s soft skills, interpersonal abilities, and cultural fit with the organization.

Technology barriers:

Some students may need more reliable internet access or appropriate devices, which can hinder their ability to participate in virtual recruitment processes.

Diversity and inclusion concerns:

Online recruitment processes may inadvertently introduce biases, impacting diversity and inclusion efforts. For example, algorithms used in resume screening may inadvertently discriminate against specific demographics.

Communication challenges:

Miscommunication can occur more quickly in virtual settings. Clear and effective communication is crucial, and misunderstandings can arise due to the reliance on written communication and the absence of non-verbal cues

Digital fatigue:

Extended virtual interactions can lead to digital fatigue for recruiters and candidates. This can affect engagement levels and the overall quality of the recruitment process.

Evaluation of practical skills:

Certain industries and roles require demonstrating practical skills that may be challenging to assess in a virtual environment, such as hands-on technical skills or problem-solving abilities.

Maintaining employer brand:

Virtual interactions make showcasing the company culture and work environment challenging. Organizations need to find innovative ways to convey their employer brand in a virtual setting during campus hiring.

Organizations looking to overcome the abovementioned challenges of campus hiring can do so with the help of Mercer | Mettl’s campus hiring solution. It allows companies to interview and evaluate without needing a 3rd party tool. Collaborative tools coupled with simulators enable companies to remotely assess candidates’ technical skills. Furthermore, it provides a seamless experience for devices, be they mobile, tablet, or PC.

 


Best practices for a virtual campus hiring drive

Campus hiring is integral to the recruitment process for most businesses. Companies invest substantial resources in their campus hiring drives each year, hoping to onboard the best talent.

Technology advancements disrupt the talent industry, setting the stage for a dynamic and exciting future of recruitment. From a business perspective, if an organization continues to use primitive technology, it is unlikely to corroborate the process with the eventual ROI.

With significant developments in recruitment technology, organizations can skip the conventional campus hiring steps, meaning:

  • No more booking of time slots and physical venues
  • There is no need for repetitive pre-placement talks and presentations
  • No logistical hassles, such as preparing for a large number of candidates to take the screening tests
  • No need to dedicate invigilators for every exam room to prevent cheating
  • No need to manually evaluate the assessments
  • No need to manually shortlist candidates for the selection interviews

The traditional process is resource and time-intensive, and organizations spend substantial sums on the campus hiring drives. Such an extensive and cumbersome campus hiring process is challenging to scale and requires technological intervention.

Campus selection

45% of Indian graduates are employable for top in-demand jobs and skills. 48% of Indian graduates exhibit the highest employability in AI and machine learning roles.

*India’s Graduate Skill Index 2023

Without any natural intelligence, shortlisting campuses every year is a tedious affair. What if we were to tell you about a scientific way to select the college that suits your requirements?

Campus intelligence is an essential campus hiring solution that helps organizations make data-backed decisions. Organizations often need to be made aware of how to undertake this process.

Campus intelligence relies on validated statistics. It consists of competency scorecards and heat maps that rate students’ performance on specific competencies based on the assessments. It creates a campus mean score to help shortlist campuses based on your requirements. Organizations such as Mercer | Mettl have conducted over 20,000 campus drives and have abundant data on numerous colleges and universities. You can rely on this information and obtain a campus scorecard for competencies sought by your organization.

Most organizations make their campus targeting strategy based on their previous years’ experience and the onboarded students’ quality. This strategy places organizations in a loop without avenues to explore newer campuses. This is where campus intelligence can help you with rich data and campus analytics built over time. Campus intelligence maintains a thorough record of campus drives held over the years, considering high and low-performing campuses. The latter is filtered out, which creates a dynamic and up-to-date process.

You can access campus data across various profiles based on your requirements. Whether you intend to hire engineers, business graduates, marketeers, or researchers, campus intelligence can customize a campus scorecard based on your competency framework and skills demand. Campus intelligence provides a holistic strategy to approach campuses, enabling you to make decisions about salary benchmarks. Such an insight is the first step toward a virtual campus recruitment strategy. It reduces manual interventions and offers a seamless experience for organizations selecting campuses.

 

0_Table 1

 

Pre-placement engagement

After selecting colleges through campus intelligence, student engagement is the next step in campus recruitment. Presentations and talks offer little value in a world where information is available at the click of a button. Organizations need to create an impression on students by connecting with their aspirations.

Every fresh graduate wants to work in a new-age organization. It would help if you exhibited the company’s culture and offered them a glimpse of the stimulating environment and the work being done by the company. You must use this opportunity to give them a brand recall value and gain their interest, ensuring a wider reach.

The solution to this is online contests like coding hackathons, innovative ideathon, and case study competitions.

Pre-placement talks are a thing of the past. A virtual campus recruiting strategy involves organizations taking engagement to the next level, using technology, and offering students a unique platform to connect with the brand. Online competitions provide organizations with an excellent platform to introduce themselves, enabling candidates to showcase their innovative problem-solving skills.

Hackathons and ideathons are events where people from different backgrounds, such as coders, analysts, designers, business strategists, and creative thinkers, cumulatively solve predefined challenges within a specified time frame and create a working solution or a prototype of a product, service, or business model. A hackathon is not just restricted to coders and engineers but can be designed inclusively, challenging the best minds to find ‘out-of-the-box’ ideas. A case study competition is a valuable means to assess business graduates’ understanding and give them a glimpse into some of the fundamental challenges they would be working on.

Pre-placement talks are likely to attract dispassionate students. Conversely, interactive and high-energy contests can be extremely useful icebreakers, ensuring participation from fresh graduates genuinely interested in the business and its products. This would ensure quality hires.

Online competitions, such as hackathons, can be a one-stop-shop for your recruitment process. If you want to hire coders, you can stage multiple coding rounds in a hackathon to lead to the final interview. The hackathon can be your engagement, screening and selection tool.

Online competitions can be conducted on online platforms to implement all processes together in one place efficiently. Easy outreach is the most significant upside to using an online platform to conduct virtual contests. Hackathons or case study competitions can be rolled out simultaneously at numerous campuses nationwide. Additionally, most platforms provide marketing support by promoting them on social media channels for improved visibility and outreach. The online buzz helps gain significant traction among college students, driving better participation and high-quality submissions.

Hackathon platforms and a team of subject matter experts help you create an engaging problem statement, design an online event, define multiple stages of participation, enable students to form groups and submit their projects in a streamlined manner. They ensure an excellent student experience, doubling as a fantastic branding exercise. Judging the submissions and declaring the winners without any manual intervention is easy.

Hackathons and other types of online contests are innovative campus recruitment strategies. Virtual hackathons are cost-effective and save considerable time compared to traditional student engagement events.

Candidate screening

Online assessments

The next step is to roll out the screening assessments to interested candidates and shortlist them for the final interviews. The four pillars of screening are technical or domain skills, cognitive skills, behavioral and personality traits and effective communication. A screening method based on these four pillars can uncover a student’s potential.

Online assessments are used widely in the screening process. They enable organizations to test the candidates’ core skills and suitability, considering the role and the company, and shortlist them for the selection interview. Most organizations choose skill-based assessments to ensure they hire people who can adequately perform the desired tasks. However, no team in an organization works in silos in this age of digital transformation and collaboration. Hence, psychometric assessments empower you to find the right fit for your company’s culture.

Domain or technical skills

Let’s assume an IT company has to conduct campus placements to fill multiple vacant positions in its various global centers. It wishes to test students’ coding knowledge and hands-on coding ability. Distributing a coding test with MCQs that can filter many students is an excellent way to undertake it. It would ensure that students who match the benchmark scores and are serious about the organization will make it to the following screening round: hands-on coding in a natural coding environment. Coding simulators allow students to apply their skills and showcase their problem-solving approach, graded on predefined parameters without manual intervention.

Organizations can use readily available assessments, combining them with a coding simulator for a holistic overview of a candidate’s coding potential. This would ensure that students making it to the subsequent rounds possess a certain degree of proficiency.

Cognitive skills

In a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world, organizations stress the importance of cognitive skills such as learning agility, problem-solving, innovative thinking, etc. These open-ended skills can be applied to any job and are sought-after.

Behavioral and personality traits

Every organization has its culture and mission, and potential employees must easily fit into the company culture. Thus, assessing behavioral tendencies and personality traits offers recruiters insight into a person’s behavioral patterns and helps predict their ability to deal with pressure, conflict resolution, and other typical workplace problems. As there are no right or wrong answers, scores are often in the form of a scale and the percentile in which a student falls. These include aggression, motivation, honesty, etc. It helps recruiters to map candidates’ personalities to organizational benchmarks.

Communication skills

Effective English communication is one of the most critical skills. Communication is an essential consideration for most roles and organizations. However, only some companies assess candidates’ verbal English skills, except perhaps in the interviews.

However, with increasingly global roles, spoken English must be measured using the latest technology, i.e., language proficiency evaluators. This allows for conducting evaluations at scale. An English language evaluator auto-evaluates the results. The review can be sent to multiple students simultaneously, and the results can be fed into the student’s final scores. To assess all communication elements, language proficiency evaluators combine assessments for pronunciation, fluency, listening and comprehension. They highlight a candidate’s trainable and non-trainable aspects, depending on the role’s requirements.

Why are online assessment platforms important to your virtual campus hiring strategy?

Virtual campus hiring can produce measurably better results in a relatively short time with online assessments compared to campus visits. Therefore, instead of employing traditional recruitment processes, recruiters can view their candidates’ performance and scores virtually from the comforts of their offices.

Online assessments can fast-track the efficiency of a virtual campus hiring process in numerous ways by enabling students to take the test from anywhere. This also removes the logistical hassles of booking venues and time slots to conduct the screening test on campus. How does one ensure a cheating-free test environment when students sit at different locations without invigilators? Well, the answer to that is ‘proctoring.’

Remote proctoring can be an enabler in the digital campus recruitment process, whereby companies roll out online assessments in a secure proctored environment and leverage technology. Remote proctoring uses manual and AI-based remote invigilation technologies to conduct online evaluations that prevent candidates from indulging in unfair means. A test can be taken from anywhere using remote proctoring, and the candidate only needs a computer with an internet connection.

There is no limit to the number of candidates one can proctor, allowing access to a larger candidate pool. As remote proctoring will enable candidates to attempt their test at their chosen time, a higher participation and attempt rate can be expected.

Risk-free proctoring lends credibility to the results, also significantly reducing manual intervention in the initial phase. The campus hiring season spreads simultaneously, and multiple assessments at multiple campuses coincide, enhancing the benefits and criticality of remote proctoring. It helps create a campus pipeline for future recruitment needs. Remote proctoring enables you to set benchmarks and target campuses for an efficient hiring strategy.

Here are ten reasons an online assessment platform can make or break your virtual campus hiring strategy and the various features you can look for when choosing a platform and assessment partner:

  • Online assessment platforms provide complete control to the employers over test creation, distribution, invigilation, evaluation and report generation. Recruiters can easily create and administer a test.
  • Companies can reach out to many previously unexplored colleges due to resource limitations, i.e., time and personnel unavailability.
  • Enhanced reach aside, this system addresses the significant challenge of simultaneously conducting thousands of tests. Imagine the administrative expense and time you would need to visit each campus and give hundreds of tests.
  • It allows adding layers of tests onto a single defined assessment. For example, apart from general MCQs and essay-type questions, you can add coding simulators, language proficiency evaluations, case study simulators, and psychometric and personality tests.
  • Minimum system requirements - a computer, a browser, and internet connectivity.
  • Autosave the candidate’s answers to manage infrastructure issues, such as the internet, network, power outage, system crash, restart, etc.
  • Proctoring empowers companies to curb cheating and other assessment-related malpractices.
  • The turnaround time is the most notable advantage of online assessment platforms. Since the tests are web-based, the test evaluation and report generation happen in real-time. After the candidates finish their tests, detailed reports are generated within minutes, with scores on each assessment on a single dashboard. This expedites the decision-making process, enabling recruiters to select quickly and wisely.
  • Actionable analytics allows companies to compare different campuses and performance trends and gain granular and regional insights.
  • The flexibility to conduct the test in a contest, game, or code challenge format enhances engagement and maximizes student participation while strengthening brand recall.

Final selection interviews

While organizations often prefer to hold an in-person interview round, adopting a virtual campus hiring strategy means not stepping on the campus while ensuring better results and ROI.

Numerous video interviewing platforms available on the market, like Google, Skype, Zoom, etc., can be used for virtual interviews. But the right interview platform offers power-packed features, such as setting a path for your interview process by defining key competencies, the option to choose from a library of sample questions to evaluate specific skills, rating the candidates, and ultimately making data-driven decisions by assessing candidates’ data from multiple interviews and screening modes.

Competency-based interviews are consistent, structured and unbiased. They provide a platform to list the various competencies and related questions based on the job role and allow interviewers to score on the same platform.

Besides being cost-effective, video interviews promote real-time collaboration for everyone involved and address time and location constraints. Digital transformation requires organizations to scale up quickly, yet more scalable models exist than face-to-face interviews.

Many video platforms also allow pair programming, enabling technical hiring managers to combine interviewing and code testing into one platform.

 


Conclusion

Technology pushes every business function to adopt innovative and cost-effective methods to streamline and accelerate their processes. The time is right to choose the virtual campus recruitment process. It is an opportune moment to transform your organization’s campus hiring processes and move toward the future of recruitment with an all-in-one platform solution.

Traditional campus hiring Virtual campus hiring
Deliver a pre-placement talk Conduct a highly energetic and interactive contest - hackathon, ideaathon, or case study competition
Book a physical venue and schedule slots Roll out online assessments (personality, behavioral, cognitive, technical, domain, communication) that are time and location-agnostic
Send a dedicated team of recruiters and invigilators Evaluate from the comfort of your location employing manual proctors or let Al flag malpractices
Risk candidates using unfair means to cheat and clear the test Use anti-cheating software to prevent impersonation, with a lockdown browser, detect objects in the background, such as phones and multi-factor authentication, etc.
Logistical costs and execution Cost-effective solutions without the need to physically visit any campus
Spend long hours to interview candidates Interview candidates anytime, anywhere with structured video interviews
Long and unstructured processes Decreased time-to-hire with innovative sourcing, screening and interviewing tools

 


How Mercer | Mettl can help

Campus hiring drives demand significant resources, financial and otherwise. Therefore, an increasing number of organizations are seeking to transform this process. Mercer | Mettl enables organizations to break away from traditional and redundant hiring processes and take a step toward better hiring using the best available technology.

Mercer | Mettl’s technology-driven solutions can help you conduct large-scale online campus recruitment drives through the following offerings:

Mercer | Mettl's offeringsTool description
Campus hiring strategy for an end-to-end implementationMercer | Mettl's campus hiring strategy has enabled India's leading organizations to reach and filter a large pool of candidates, increase campus footprints, and improve turnaround time. Our comprehensive 6-step campus hiring strategy includes i) Building campus intelligence, ii) Building relationships with campuses, iii) Connecting with the students, iv) Using modern screening tools, v) Conducting structured interviews, and vi) Engaging students post the rollout of the offer. Mercer | Mettl's team of experts can help you develop and execute a strategy that meets your business needs.
Xathon for an engaging pre-placement activityXathon is a platform for conducting fully online hackathons. It offers complete control over the event with the ease of scheduling multiple events and coordinating with numerous stakeholders with just a few clicks. Mercer | Mettl's team of subject matter experts helps execute a successful virtual hackathon, from ideation to execution.
A suite of assessments to screen efficientlyOur vast library of tests and simulators allows you to create tests and challenges to evaluate the shortlisted candidates' fundamental skills. Choose from various psychometric, cognitive, domain and coding assessments to secure the best fit for the role.
SpeechX to evaluate the candidates on the nuances of speechPowered by a reliable artificial intelligence speech technology, SpeechX is a fully machine-administered and auto-graded tool to test the ability of a non-native speaker to speak and understand English. It is a ready-to-use, scalable and highly accurate assessment solution.
SecureProctor to conduct credible remote assessmentsSecureProctor is Mercer | Mettl's cutting-edge tool, driven by artificial intelligence, to provide a holistic solution to ensure the integrity of your assessments in a cost-effective and scalable manner. It comes pre-integrated with Mercer | Mettl's examination platform.
Interview platform to conduct innovative and structured interviewsOur intelligent interview platform supports competency-based structured interviews with collaborative tools that allow you to create a panel of interviewers, define the grading framework, and schedule interviews easily.

Redefine your Campus Hiring Program with Mercer | Mettl’s Suite of Campus Hiring Tools

 

 


FAQs

1. What are on-campus and off-campus recruitment?

2. What does a virtual interview mean?

3. How do college students engage virtually?

4. What are the steps involved in the virtual campus hiring process?

5. How do you measure the success of your online campus recruitment process?

Originally published July 22 2020, Updated January 15 2024

Written by

Harsh Vardhan Sharma, with 6 years of content writing expertise across diverse B2B and B2C verticals, excels in crafting impactful content for broad audiences. Beyond work, he finds joy in reading, traveling, and watching movies.

About This Topic

Campus hiring is the process of recruiting fresh graduates from colleges. Campus recruitment starts with campus selection, following which a recruitment team visits campuses for engagement activities, candidate screening and interviewing.

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