KOCHI: Leading IT companies are hiring. So what? Just that their hiring practices have become as innovative as their products. Enter coding competitions and hackathons! Delete campus placements!!
Prioritising top quality talent over mass recruitment, IT majors like TCS, IBM and Wipro are giving the traditional modes a miss.
“The requirement for software developers from the IT sector has come down significantly,” Biju Skaria, placement officer at Mar Athanasius College of Engineering, Kothamangalam, told Express.
“This means, the companies can select better- skilled students through coding contests and hackathons.”
He said the three students hired by TCS through its ‘CodeVita’, a global coding contest, were put directly into a company’s software project without having to go through the Initial Learning Programme or ILP.
“The typical campus hiring is not a foolproof method to select the right talent as quality cannot be assured by their performance in online tests and interviews,” said a senior TCS executive.
The ‘CodeVita’, which began in 2012 with the aim of ‘Programming-as-a-Sport’, has since gone global with 2.6 lakh registrations in 2015. The registration for ‘CodeVita 2017’ ended on June 30.
“An interesting fact about the contest is students can test their programming capability in any of the programming languages like C, C++, Java, C#, Python, Pearl, Java Script, Ruby, PHP etc.,” he said.
Companies regard spotting talent through contests a superior mode of recruitment.
“This move is a welcome change for the student community too as it gives a level playing field where all students, irrespective of the college status, get an opportunity to compete for a common target,” the executive said.
James Varghese, placement officer at Cusat School of Engineering, said companies are introducing testing contests. He said L&T, the leading heavy engineering company, gave hardware design tests for students.
“Basically, recruiters are now looking at how students solve a problem,” he said. “This helps them hire quality talent without having to train them again after recruitment.”
New approach
The conventional campus recruitment process involves taking the entire batch of students to the Computer Lab for online assessment, preparing shortlists based on cut-off marks, conducting interviews and releasing offer letters. This model is slowly on the way out, said a senior TCS executive in charge of campus placements in Kerala.