Dear Sajith,
It is that time of the year when all the recruiters face the classic problem of balancing the see-saw of quality vs. quantity during campus hiring. Everybody wants to hire good talent from the herd at an optimum cost and time.
It becomes tricky especially when educational institutions including both T-Schools and B-schools have become mass production houses! All the profiles look very similar - these students have worked on similar projects, taken same classes, and are part of the same clubs. With cover letters throwing the same jargon and resumes reading as if they were photocopies, how do you distinguish good talent from the crowd in a short period of time? How do you filter quality while hiring quantity?
We, at Jombay, have been successfully helping companies to deal with this problem by deploying a mix of Aptitude and Attitude Tests and establishing company specific benchmarks to sift candidates into Red, Amber, Green categories (RAG). Pretty much like a traffic signal, a green stamp on the candidate’s assessment report means that the candidate is good to hire, an amber on the report means that the candidate should be probed further, and a candidate into red category can be eliminated from the next round.
This approach has helped several companies across sectors like Retail, FMCG, Insurance, Banking, Internet, Hospitality solve the Elimination (using Aptitude) + Selection (using Psychometrics) problem efficiently at scale.
I am happy to share some quick case studies of our Campus Hiring roll-outs:
1) Aptitude & Values Assessment at a leading Private Sector Bank:
This is a very interesting use case where a Bank wanted to check Aptitude and Values both, of all the hires in the front-line. Jombay configured a seamless solution to measure the numerical, verbal and logical aptitude along with values on customer centricity, guilt consciousness, innovation and selling skills. A diversity benchmark was established by profiling the existing population and cut-offs were configured to classify the incoming candidates into RED-AMBER-GREEN. The company easily saved the interview bandwidth of interviewing about 35% of the candidates (Total Pool: 2000) who fell in the RED category.
2) Job Role Sync at a fast growing Internet start-up:
One of India’s fastest growing startups in the Healthcare space has been on a rampant hiring mode for Sales and Operational roles. The start-up visited many Tier 2 and Tier 3 institutes across the country and attracted more than 15000 applicants. Jombay helped them identify candidates that fit the role by assessing job-specific competencies like Target Orientation, People Connect, Customer Centricity and Learning Agility. The company was able to filter out 30% of the candidates that fell in the RED category saving costs and time spent in the Interview process.
3) Culture Fitment at a Retail Giant:
Culture rules supreme for this particular retail giant that produces and sells watches and eyewear. The company visits Tier 1 and Tier 2 B-schools to hire store managers for their 220 stores across India. Jombay enabled an integrated Psychometric and Aptitude assessment to help them identify Culture Fit among potential hires. The technology enabled administering of assessments, generating instant reports and notifying all the stakeholders helped them bring standardization and efficiency to the entire hiring process which was non-uniform since it was spread across locations with 1000s of applications to handle. The company found Jombay’s Interview Guide present on the report extremely useful in further probing the candidates on their alignment with company’s culture.
4) Multi-lingual Assessments at a QSR chain:
This quick service restaurant (QSR), a ubiquitous fast food chain in India, primarily hires for frontline sales and restaurant manager roles from Tier 2 institutes. Jombay configured a combination of Aptitude (Analytical Skills, Verbal Aptitude and Numerical Aptitude) and Attitude (Customer Centricity, Learnability, Team Work and Accountability) to shortlist candidates that fit to the role. This was an interesting rollout where assessments were administered in local languages including Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi, and Hinglish The candidates will further go through focused training programs before joining full time.
All the companies that have adopted this approach have relied on this RAG technique as the simplest and most effective measure of short-listing candidates at scale. Based on the hiring requirements, the cutoffs that govern the RED, AMBER, GREEN can be relaxed to allow for more candidates to be shortlisted or can be tightened to restrict the selection to a narrow pool.
Do let us know if you are hiring from Campus (or even otherwise) this season!
Regards,
Mansi Mehta | Head - Assessments Business
Jombay | Behavior to Bottomline
360 Feedback | Psychometrics | Virtual Assessment Center
