Higher scores, strong communication skills, longer interviews, hand-written code, psychometric tests- technology companies are demanding all this from freshly minted freshers at some of India’s top engineering colleges.
Placement cells say IT companies have made the selection criteria far more stringent for engineering graduates passing out in 2024 for entry-level jobs, at a time when the headcount addition of Indian IT companies is at a multi-decadal low, triggered by the double whammy of over-hiring in the pandemic years and demand pressures hitting the $250-billion industry.
Placement officials told Moneycontrol that companies are demanding expert-level skills and coding flair from college graduates. Certain companies have also made psychometric tests mandatory, with more likely to follow suit, they said.
Anjani Kumar Bhatnagar, who has been running placements for one of India’s premier institutions -Amity Education Group - for over 1.5 decades, says only crème de la crème students are receiving offer letters from the information technology (IT) industry that employs over 54 lakh people in India.
“Processes have been made stringent and students are finding it comparatively difficult to qualify for the screening rounds,” said Anjani Kumar Bhatnagar, Deputy Director, Amity Education Group, which has 12 campuses in India.
He further said, “So here only the best of the best candidates will be selected by the companies.” Amity counts SAP, IBM, Accenture, Genpact, Tata Technologies, as its top recruiters, among others.
If companies demanded 60% marks earlier, the benchmark is now 75% for the same position.
Bhatnagar spelt out another deviation from the norm, saying top Indian IT companies, that hire talent in bulk, are asking questions like those asked by global giants such as Amazon. This wasn’t the case earlier as basic IT knowledge, aptitude, and basic communication skills would get an engineer through the gates of the famed IT offices of Bengaluru, Pune, Hyderabad, et al.
Communication is the key
On communication skills, John Bruce, Dean-Placements, Sathyabama Institute of Science & Technology, said companies are now expecting even the base-level employees to interact with the client the moment they join the company.
The ability to communicate better is playing a huge role and companies have started giving much more weightage to it, placement officials said.
“Technically they (students) are strong and can do the job easily, but it is not the case anymore, they (companies) are asking for the communication part,” Bruce added. Sathyabama’s top recruiters include the likes of Accenture, Cognizant, HCLTech, Infosys, Wipro, among others.
Recruiters said almost every company has made its selection process difficult, at a time when students are already worried about fewer job openings, therefore more the competition.
India has over 5,800 AICTE-approved engineering institutions in 2023-24, according to data from the All-India Survey on Higher Education published by the Ministry of Education. In 2020-21, enrolment in engineering and technology courses crossed 39-lakh mark, with only around 50 percent of them being employable at the end of the course, revealed the same survey.
Other hurdles
For the batch of 2024, students of Amity were asked to write programming codes on a piece of paper, which eliminates the possibility of auto-correct while writing codes on a computer. Additionally, a candidate usually used to spend around 10 minutes for interviews earlier, which now stretches until 30-45 minutes.
Moreover, the timeline for a candidate to be hired by even the large IT companies now extends up to 3-4 months. In certain instances, companies have dropped hiring plans after having taken final interviews and dragging the process for over 6 months.
At least 5-10% of companies are also using psychometric tests for screening students, according to Bruce.
These tests are designed to gauge student’s cognitive ability, personality, and consistency in decision-making.
V. Samuel Rajkumar, director Of Career Development Centre, Vellore Institute of Technology, said many of the companies are bringing in psychometric assessments as part of the selection. "Some of them have it as a separate section and others include the psychometric questions in their aptitude tests," Rajkumar explained.
To address the issue of low hiring, recruitment officials are now inviting thrice the number of companies than earlier to campuses. This move will take the placement numbers to approximately last year’s performance.
“So, people like us who are in campus placement, need to explore other regions also where students can also be deployed,” said Bhatnagar.
The hot cakes
Companies are now looking at skill-based hiring rather than students with generic knowledge. “Students with proficiency in artificial intelligence skills are a hot cake for the industry,” a placement cell executive said who did not wish to be named.
Other skills such as data science, machine learning, big data, cyber-security, full stack, DevOps, etc. are also in demand.
“So you need to master a specific technology, in other ways people are looking for plug-and-play material,” Bruce explained. This is in contrast to the earlier practise of training fresher’s for months and then deploying them into the workforce.
Educational institutions are now preparing and designing courses for students, keeping in mind the changed scenario, he said further.
“University has aligned the training program as well as the course curricula for students according to the industry requirements, and the students have been trained on GenAI, ML/AI, MERN stack, Data Science, Cyber Security, DevOps, UI/UX etc. in form of credited as well as non-credited inputs, practice assessments, etc.” said Rashmi Mittal, pro chancellor, Lovely Professional University.
What next?
However, to bridge the employability-skill gap at a macro level, staffing firm TeamLease Digital’s chief executive officer Sunil C said a holistic approach is required from colleges, industries, government, as well as from the ed-tech ecosystem.
For example, Amity has a Board of Studies and Area Advisory Board, comprised of industry veterans and alumni, which advises the college on course curriculum. The panel brainstorms amongst themselves and conveys the kind of expertise that clients are looking for in the current market, every six months.
Bhatnagar says artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have been a part of the curriculum for at least for the last five years in Amity. It has been observed that some students also learn interesting and in-demand short-term courses online, which is mostly freely available on websites of top engineering colleges.
“AI will disrupt every industry… and it is going to improve the productivity of every job. So, you will require more talent and I think India can produce that,” he said.
Going forward, experts say the selection criteria will remain stringent as companies continue to grapple with demand pressures.
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