Ans: My leadership role at BITS Pilani's Placement Team and my contribution in changing the placement landscape

Summary: From the year 2020 to 2022 I worked towards building a strong placement culture on campus for BITS Pilani. The reason why I use the word placement culture and not process is because the change was transformational not just in building a better process but also in terms of changing the DNA of how students approached placements. My reason of choosing this problem statement is because it helped me discover my personal identity of being a facilitator, be it for startups or students and the supreme joy I receive in doing so. Throughout this case I'd like to talk about the efforts made including that of setting up a pitching pipeline, building an ed-tech product for my campus and its following impact on BITS Pilani.

Background: The most important milestone in a college student's life in India is the kind of career opportunity that one lands for themselves. While parents end up spendings lakhs of rupees in their children's upbringing, it all is with the hope that one day their child will reap the benefits of it by having a glorious career for themselves. While there are so many different routes that one can take up most of us resort to campus placements. Thus being able to create a strong impact can benefit a large number of students becomes the holy grail for any higher education institute.

Observation: As BITS Pilani students we have always seen ourselves at par with those in the top IITs. While our differentiation is a healthy mix of EQ and IQ, a strong startup culture and great exposure of students from all walks of life; data did show that our placements were a notch below as compared to those of the top 7 IITs. As a student with big dreams in life this did not fly well with me and I took it upon myself to change the status quo.

Placement Value Chain: There are 3 major components to placements: The Supply Side of Companies, their absolute number and CTCs, the Demand Side from students and their preparation across soft skills, hard skills and interview related skills and the most important- the Match Making between the two which means matching the right type of companies to students with the right skills and aspirations. Thus solving for placements was almost like solving for a managed marketplace problem if I were to look it from a VC lens.

The Challenge:

1. From Student Side:

• Low Awareness: From the student's side there was low awareness around the kind of companies visiting campus, brach wise placements, split of companies across sectors etc. This information was gate-kept from students as seen in multiple educational institutes. Due to this it became tough for students to understand the Supply Side of the equation and prepare accordingly.
• Lack of direction: Students often fall under 2 categories: Students who are yet to understand and explore what they want to do in life and students who have identified their career aspiration but don't know how to go about the preparation.
• Lack of placement focused skills: While ed-tech giants such as Coursera, Udemy have multitude of courses to help students learn hard skills, content around placement preparation, interview prep, presentation skills was scattered and missing. While students had to avail help from campus seniors to understand this, COVID-19 posed significant gaps in this interactions.

1. From Placement Team Side:

• Low Engagement: It was tough to keep recruiters engaged as emails here mostly ended up being transactional and there was no way to track and re-activate lost companies