THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: With job fairs witnessing a low turnout, tech companies have turned their focus to offline campus recruitment to hire fresh graduates with innovative skills rather than academic brilliance. These placement drives have had a tremendous response, as more than 100,000 final-year students were recruited in two drives held during the second quarter of 2021-22 fiscal year and the first quarter of 2022-23, from engineering colleges in the state.
The drives were delayed in both years, more so in the former quarter, as the pandemic held sway.
The two top-ranking colleges in the state capital -- College of Engineering Thiruvananthapuram (CET) and Barton Hill Engineering College -- had 100 per cent placements in the last two years. Average salary packages ranged from Rs 3.6 lakh per annum for freshers to Rs 7 lakh for skilled candidates.
According to companies, their priority is to recruit fresh talent with great ideation skills rather than academic brilliance. “Though online campus interviews were held during the pandemic, two offline recruitment drives held in 2021 and 2022 got good response as recruiters got to directly interact with students. The companies prefer to appoint students with good ideation and innovative skills.
Academic brilliance is only a bonus. Since colleges have incubation centres and other innovative projects to sharpen the engineering skills of students, the job of companies looking to select appropriate candidates is made much easier,” said V Sreekumar, secretary of GTech and Centre Head of Tata Elxsi, here.
According to V P Suresh, Chief Operating Officer of Experion Technologies, the company is scouting talent from engineering colleges, B-schools, design schools, polytechnics, and arts colleges as there is more talent in such institutions. “We handpick the best talent from across colleges in South India. Through our recruitment programme this year, we reached as many as 3,000 students from 63 colleges. We are scheduled to meet another 4,000 in the coming weeks,” Suresh said.
Meanwhile, Deepu S Nath, Convener of Academia and Technology Focus Group and MD of Faya Technologies, said, “The companies which are laying off employees are mostly the ones specialising in product development,” he said.