CHENNAI: Breaking away from conventional hiring from colleges, several top companies are thinking out of the box in the form of competitions and internships that examine a student’s worth through a practical approach.
Several competitions like Hackathon by Titan, Mobile App Garage by Daimler, Code Vita by TCS, CIO Challenge by Cognizant, The Great Mind Challenge by IBM and Nginx by TCS, for core engineering students, have been conducted in Anna University previously. Last year, Daimler shortlisted 12 students for an internship through Mobile App Garage, out of which a few got absorbed into the company. Google had also conducted similar competitions, while construction giant Caterpillar has been conducting robotics events for the past two years. Currently, Hackathon by Titan and Mobathon by Daimler are being conducted in the university.
T Kalaiselvan, additional director, Centre for University Industry Collaboration, Anna University, said that this trend has seen a surge in the past two years. “In recent times, there is a shift in industries’ perspective. They are shortlisting students based on the skills evident in the competition and giving internships to students, which goes on for a couple of months before their actual recuritment,” he said.
“These competitions help them in skill development and also in landing in good job profiles. Now the companies are also focusing on niche skills and not generic skills from the students,” said T Thyagarajan, director, Centre for University Industry Collaboration. “Java and C++ have become generic skills now, while particular niche skills like Python are more specific and popular skills among recruiters,” he added. Last year, TCS recruited 3,000 plus students from all over Tamil Nadu through this new form of recruitment, said a reliable source.
An IT recruitment manager said companies prefer people with practical knowledge, rather than being good in textbook knowledge. Another unconventional method, he said, was how companies offered differentiated salaries for specific job profiles like that of big data and cloud computing to get the best talents.
“The creamy layers mostly have interest in specific job profiles as a result we offer them such profiles. This new form of recruitment was started two years back, since conventional modes of recruitment weren’t delivering appropriate results,” he said.