How to run a campus placement drive, start to finish

Every placement officer knows the shape of a campus drive: a company writes in, a notice goes out, students apply, a test is held, interviews follow, and a few weeks later some offer letters arrive. What the outline hides is how many small decisions sit between those steps, and how many of them are made in a hurry the night before. Most drives that go badly go badly on logistics that were knowable a week earlier.

This is the runbook we walk placement cells through. It assumes the common Indian engineering college setup: one placement office, a batch spread across departments, a mix of mass recruiters and smaller companies, and a lab that has to double as an exam hall.

Before the drive: agree the criteria in writing

Start with the job description, and get the eligibility rules out of it in a form nobody can argue with later: the CGPA cutoff, whether active backlogs are allowed, which branches and which passing years qualify, and any rule about students who already hold an offer. Put the numbers in the notice exactly as the company gave them.

Then decide how the rules are checked. If eligibility is checked by hand against a spreadsheet, two things happen every season. An ineligible student slips through and is caught at the interview, in front of the company, or an eligible student is left off because their CGPA was updated after the list was made. On Assessly, the placement cell sets the cutoff, backlogs and branches once on the drive, and each application is checked against them automatically. Students see which drives they qualify for, and for the rest, why they don't.

The eligibility list is the first thing a company sees of your college. It should be correct before anyone has to check it.

Getting the right students to apply

A notice pinned in a WhatsApp group reaches everyone and informs almost no one. Students miss the deadline because the message scrolled away, or apply without reading the role because applying costs nothing. Both waste the company's time.

• Publish one notice per drive with the role, the package, the location, the criteria and the rounds, and one clear deadline
• Let students apply themselves, so the list of applicants is a list of people who chose the role
• Send reminders to eligible students who have not applied, a day before the deadline, not to the whole batch
• Close applications on time, and tell the company the count the same day

On Assessly, students follow drives on the web and in the phone app: the drives open to them, their applications, their interview slots and their offers, in one place instead of a chat history.

The test: one paper, one room, one set of rules

Most companies begin with an online test, and many are happy for the college to host it when the paper is theirs or set with them. If your college hosts it, the test day is where your reputation with the recruiter is made.

• Confirm the pattern with the company in writing: sections, timing, languages allowed for coding, and the cutoff they will apply
• Book the labs and check every machine a day early, with the same software the test will use
• Seat students with the spacing you would use for a paper exam, because software watches the screen, not the neighbour
• Brief students on what the proctoring records, before they start
• Have a plan for the machine that dies mid-test, because one will

Assessly runs the test on your lab machines in its desktop app, with an ID check and the anti-cheat checks the paper calls for. Work saves as the student goes, and the timer runs on the server, so a power cut costs the student neither time nor work. Faculty review every flag before any result is final; the software never fails a student on its own. We wrote a longer runbook for running a proctored test at scale.

Shortlists, interviews and the day itself

Share the test results with the company as a shortlist it can act on the same day, not a spreadsheet it has to clean. Then plan the interview day like an event: rooms, a waiting area, a schedule by slot, a student volunteer at the door, water, and a printed copy of the day's list in case the Wi-Fi goes.

Tell each shortlisted student their slot, their room and what to bring, and tell the students who were not shortlisted too. Silence is the thing students remember worst about a drive.

After the drive: close the loop

The drive is not over when the company leaves. Record every result against the student, round by round: who cleared the test, who was interviewed, who received an offer and at what package. Collect the offer letters. Ask the students who took part what the process was like, because the next batch will want to know what to expect, and so will you when the company returns.

Clean records are also the ones your college is judged on. Placement numbers, packages and offer letters feed accreditation and ranking submissions years later, and they are far easier to produce from a record kept as the season happened than from memory. We cover what those submissions ask for in keeping placement records that survive NAAC and NIRF.

The short version

Get the criteria in writing and let software check them. Let students apply themselves, and remind only the eligible ones. Host the test on checked machines, with rules briefed in advance. Hand the company a shortlist it can use the same day. Record every round against the student, and ask the students how it went. Assessly Place runs all of this from one board, and a demo will walk it against your own season.