Are historical hiring methods still relevant or have off-campus hiring activities taken over?

“Let’s queue up at Tier I colleges to create a strong talent pool” - need we say more? 

This harsh reality cannot be altered by turning a blind eye to it! While we are all driven to hire candidates from premier institutes, we know we leave many good candidates behind. Example: The candidates who could not go to a prestigious university because of their circumstances or missed meeting the entrance criteria based on some other parameters. 

Most companies blindly come to esteemed colleges because they are sure that the results will be great there. And, this never-ending dilemma nags the employers all the time. But when that stack of resumes piles up, filtering candidates based on colleges seems like the only option (every time).

Fortunately, the industry is evolving into a whole new era in hiring and recruitment. The seismic shifts of the pandemic have compelled firms of all sizes to undergo digital transformation. If you retrospect the past few years of recruitment, you’ll see that the digital hiring tools were already on the rise, but the pandemic gave the much-needed friction to its applications. 

Now the companies have started trying better-streamlined methods! The most prominent of them is hiring challenges that help democratize the hiring process by letting candidates compete while evaluating them in some of the most relevant job skills. 

To show what we mean, here are a few examples: 

Walmart navigates through uncharted waters to recruit female coders (Diversity Hiring Hackathon)

Companies are now knuckling down to bring in gender diversity while hiring from campuses. Not only that, but some companies are currently conducting off-campus hiring drives for women, people with special needs, and the LGBTQ community. And why not, given that the industry trends reflect that companies that fail to meet their culture’s diversity and inclusion standards are at a considerable disadvantage when building a good employer brand. 

With these notions in consideration, Walmart decided to work on it and navigate through the hiring challenge’s uncharted waters, specially tailored for the female coders!

Hiring 100+ female coders from 51,053 girl registrations across all the engineering colleges through its coding challenge, CodeHers made Walmart the talk of the town! In addition, the retail giant benefited by highlighting information via social media to keep promising talent in the loop and giving insight into its employer brand. Well, when companies get powerful PR for free, it’s worth taking a chance on unexplored territories!

The quality of interviews and final hiring delighted senior HR and business leaders that everyone in the firm congratulated the campaign leader for attempting something new! As a result, Walmart hired almost double the number they aimed at the start of the campaign. 

10X employer branding of TATA Sons with 1X resources! 

Tata, as usual, left conglomerates panting for air with its ultimate employer branding by killing two birds with just one shot. It cast a wide net in attracting a rich pool of talent across the country and created better engagement with candidates in bare-bones resources.

As seen by over 85,000 registrations, Tata democratized the hiring process by inviting all students across disciplines to become a part of its leadership program, TATA Administrative Services (TAS), through the Tata Imagination Challenge. The cherry on the cake was its less arduous process, where Unstop (formerly Dare2Compete)designed their assignments and simultaneously helped in the assessments quickly. Tata is definitely the biz when it comes to employer branding! 

The Juspay case: Hiring challenges are not just for veterans!

Small or medium-sized companies often mistake the concept of employer branding when it comes to off-campus hiring challenges. But it cannot be stressed enough that such hiring challenges are not exclusive only to established brands. One of the finest examples is Juspay Developers Hiring Challenge! This hiring challenge drew over 1,00,000 registrations from working professionals and engineering students, tapping into an enormous potential reservoir. 

Understanding that demographics are useful when targeting candidates is another factor to consider. Undoubtedly, it can give new businesses a leg up on the competition. However, with the growth of off-campus hiring challenges across tier II and tier III colleges, it is of utmost importance not to target too narrow and unintentionally exclude ‘certain’ students, thus reinforcing unconscious biases. Remember, the more people know about you and your culture, the more the chance of attracting the right talent (irrespective of the size of your company)! 

Flipkart knows it all

Flipkart knows that the right and the easiest way to connect with the students is by engaging them in live business scenarios. And this fundamental is rightly depicted through its hiring challenges! 

Over the years, Flipkart has explored a rich talent pool through its campus challenges, WiRED (for all B-Schools) and GRiD (for all Engineering colleges). With close to 1,50,000 registrations this year, the e-commerce juggernaut has once again funneled down the sharpest minds through these hiring challenges!

Another remarkable attempt by Flipkart is their recently launched Girls-wanna-code challenge, which is as unique as it gets when it comes to targeting female coders across the engineering audience. The idea was to groom girls to code and make them industry-ready for the world. 

Image source: Quanta Magazine

Overall, putting in no distinctive efforts into attracting the right talent for the right role has the potential to drive a company out of the recruiting battle - regardless of its size. What we can learn from the Flipkart example is that curating a well-thought-out customized challenge for different tracks always serves the purpose!

Click here to read how an online hackathon helped Flipkart cast a wider net amongst budding engineers?

Over 80% of the Fortune 100 companies conduct hackathons (and so does Uber)

Hackathons have successfully developed into a seamless recruitment process. It cannot be gainsaid, that they have pretty much replaced the traditional hiring ways. Apart from hiring, the importance of hiring via hackathons is twofold. It not only helps the firms get a diverse set of quality ideas; in addition, the level of branding the company gets without breaking the bank is unmatchable.

On the same lines, Uber HackTag, a coding competition, capitalized on the advantages of hiring challenges by opening its door to all engineering students and working professionals. With over 24,000 registrations, we must say that the ability of hackathons to give redefined options to old-HR world issues shall always remain unbeatable.

All in all, whether on-campus recruitment has taken a backseat or not, it’s a safe bet that off-campus recruitment has gained a distinct edge in hiring more competent people from diverse institutions and backgrounds. These examples speak volumes about how such challenges are expanding the reach of the companies and preventing the colleges from serving as a quality benchmark!

Eliminate bias, speed up the recruitment process, get the best talent!

For anyone who has not tried their hands on virtual off-campus hiring challenges before, it may seem intimidating at first, but once you learn how they work and try them out, they can be an excellent tool for helping you find the most outstanding talent pool. 

After all, the proof is in the pudding!

Here is a unique set of benefits one can get via hiring challenges like case-study competitions, hackathons, quizzes, off-campus hiring drives can offer:

• Saves time: Placements take weeks and months to get over with, campus-wise. However, hiring challenges are executed end-to-end in a matter of a couple of weeks. 
  
  
• Saves money: There is no need to visit campuses separately, everybody gives the relevant assessments simultaneously, and the best of the lot moves ahead. 
  
• Saves resources: Internal recruitment & business teams make significant efforts to lure the new batches around the year. All of this can be done at a one-time larger-than-life event that gives you brownie employer branding points, just the way L'Oréal did it in partnership with Dare2Compete.
  
  
• Corporate diversity (Girls, LGBTQ++, Domains, Economic, etc.): People from diverse backgrounds apply for such hiring activities, helping you hire candidates who bring diverse perspectives to the table. Walmart & Myntra, in the past, organized women-specific hackathons and were able to employ a substantial number of girl engineers. 

With automation coming to the forefront as the necessity for growth in the ever-changing workplace, it is now upon the firms whether they decide to move with the status quo or give this new trend a shot.

Contact the Unstop (formerly Dare2Compete)team to get a free consultation on what can be your organization’s right hiring strategy.