Run a campus drive your team can keep up with.

Campus hiring compresses a year of recruiting into a few weeks. Hundreds of students, several colleges, a placement calendar you don’t control, and competitors visiting the same campus the same week. The companies that do it well decide almost everything before they arrive and reply to students faster than anyone else. This playbook covers the three stages: before, during and after the drive.

Six to eight weeks before: decide what you’re hiring for

Graduates don’t have much work history, so a résumé screen mostly measures which college someone went to. Decide instead what a strong new graduate can do in their first three months.

• Pick three or four skills that can be heard in a conversation. For a graduate trainee role that might be structured thinking, clear explanation, learning speed and ownership.
• Set the expected level to beginner or intermediate. You’re hiring potential. Marking students against an experienced-hire bar rejects everyone.
• Write questions that don’t need experience to answer. “Explain a project from your course to someone outside your field” works for everyone. “Tell me about a time you managed a client” doesn’t.
• Fix the numbers. How many offers, which roles, what pay, which start date. Placement cells will ask, and students decide based on them.

Then choose your colleges. Fewer colleges, visited properly, usually beats a long list where you send a slide deck and never follow up.

Working with placement cells

The placement officer controls your slot, your access to students and how your company is introduced. Treat them as a partner, not a gatekeeper.

Send them one short document at least three weeks ahead. It should cover:

1. The roles, locations, pay and start date.
2. Eligibility (branches, graduation year, any hard requirements).
3. Your process step by step, with dates.
4. How students take the first round: a link they can open on a phone or laptop, when it opens and when it closes.
5. When students will hear back, and from whom.

Ask the placement officer how they prefer to share links with students and whether they need a list of who applied. Many colleges track placement outcomes closely, so a clear timeline and a promise to share results makes you easier to work with next year.

One invite-only link per college

Running one public link for every college makes it hard to see which campus is working and easy for links to spread beyond the students you meant to reach. A separate invite-only link per college solves both.

• Copy the same interview for each college. Same questions, same skills, same bar, so students from different campuses are compared fairly.
• Add only that college’s student emails. The placement cell usually provides the list of eligible, registered students.
• Send invitations from your own inbox or through the placement cell. Students trust a message from someone they recognize.
• Read each college’s funnel separately. If one campus has many opens and few starts, the problem is probably the timing or the introduction there, not the students.

Set a closing date for each link that matches that college’s calendar, and say it in the invitation.

During the drive

A drive week has a lot of moving parts. A simple shape helps.

Day one: the talk. Keep the pre-placement talk short. Explain the role, show what a real week looks like, and walk through the process and dates. Put the first-round link on the last slide and leave time for questions.

Days one to three: the first round. Students take the first round in their own time, on their own device, within the window you set. Remind them once, halfway through.

Day four: review. Your team reviews everyone who finished, reading the evidence for each rating and moving students to next round, on hold or not this time. Look at a sample of the students set aside, too. Nervous graduates sometimes give short answers that undersell them.

Day five: final interviews on campus. Run them in fixed slots with interviewers who have the first-round notes in front of them, so they can pick up where the first round left off instead of repeating it.

After the drive: offer fast, then keep in touch

Make offers within a few days of the final round, not a few weeks. Students often accept the first good offer that arrives, and the placement cell may have rules about holding more than one.

Then:

• Tell every student who took part where they stand. Send it through the placement cell if that’s their preference. Leaving students guessing damages your name on campus.
• Keep a ranked reserve list. Some offers will be declined. Go to your reserve list before re-running a drive.
• Stay in touch until joining. Graduates who accept in December and join in July have months to change their mind. A short message every month or two, and an invite to meet the team, keeps them.
• Share results with the placement cell. Offers made, accepted and joined. It builds the relationship for next year.

Common mistakes

• Screening on marks alone. Grades are easy to sort and weakly related to how someone works. Use them as an eligibility line, then screen for the skills you chose.
• Grading English polish instead of thinking. Unless the job needs polished English, let students answer in the language they think in. That can be Hindi, English or a mix.
• Long gaps between rounds. Every week of silence is a week for another company to make an offer.

Where AI screening fits

The first round is where campus teams run out of hours. With LessRounds, each college gets its own invite-only link, students take the same AI interview in English or Hindi whenever suits them during the window, and your team reviews them scored per skill against a beginner or intermediate bar. Students never see scores, and nobody is rejected by email automatically. What each student hears is up to you.