BizTalk360 Recruitment Drive @ VIT University – Our Experience

Published on : Oct 6, 2016

Category : Kovai.co

Sriram Hariharan

Author

BizTalk360 (as a company) is now little over 5 years. Over the last ~36 months, the company has taken shape in terms of the products on offer as well as on the people hiring side of things. We have been slow but steady in recruiting the right candidates for our organization. The team size has grown to 32 in India and 10 in UK. As we plan to roll out new products such as BizTalk360 Cloud and ServiceBus360, we are in the process of expanding our teams as well. Given the challenges in getting the right talent with the right attitude, we took a different strategy – to produce talent through our BizTalk360 Recruitment Drive. We were successfully able to select 6 candidates out of a gross total of 150 candidates across multiple BizTalk360 recruitment drives.

Think Different; Think Big

While we decided to move on and organize the next BizTalk360 recruitment drive, we asked ourselves a question – “Why not try a campus recruitment in one of the leading universities/top ranked colleges in and around Coimbatore?”. The idea was definitely out of nowhere and we pitched this idea to our Founder/CTO Saravana Kumar. To our surprise, Saravana mentioned that he was already referred to Dr. V.Samuel Rajkumar, Director of Placement and Dr. Karthikeyan Sivashanmugam, Assistant Director of Placement at VIT University by his friend at a get together in London and they had a discussion about exploring the campus placement opportunities. This was a huge breakthrough and we immediately initiated the campus recruitment formalities. Within a couple of weeks, we received an invitation from VIT University with October 1st as the date for the BizTalk360 recruitment drive.

About VIT University

Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), earlier known as Vellore Engineering College (VEC), was founded in 1984. In 2001, the college was conferred with the “University” accreditation by the Union Ministry of Human Resources Development. VIT is ranked as the No. 1 Private University and 13th overall best University ahead of many prominent IITs and NITs in India by National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), published by Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India in April 2016. VIT has also been ranked as the 4th best engineering college in India by the renowned India Today Nielsen Survey 2016. The university has close to 35000 students with 10000 staff (including faculty and support staff), and spans across an area of 400 acres. Every year, ~5000 students get recruited by the top companies across the world. It was definitely a dream come true for BizTalk360 to get such an opportunity to organize a campus recruitment drive and hire best of the best for the company. BizTalk360 Recruitment - VIT University

Screening the candidate profiles – a Humongous task

We were informed by the VIT placement coordinator Mr. Ganesh that there were about 350 eligible candidates for the Dream Offer category. Our technical lead Arunkumar Kumaresan took the initiative to screen all the 350 profiles. In order to make a fair selection, Arun requested the placement officer for the resumes of all the 350 candidates. It took him almost 9 hours to screen all the 350 resumes, understand the projects done by the candidates in their academic career in order to arrive at the final shortlisted count. We were able to shortlist 218 out of 350 candidates.

Drive to VIT University and the warmth on offer

The recruitment team from BizTalk360 started the drive from work to VIT University on Friday noon (September 30th). It was a fantastic drive and our “pilot” flew us to the destination in 5.30 hours (~400 kms/250 miles). We were given a warm welcome at the VIT guest house. We could immediately feel the warmth of being in one of the top and finest Universities in India. After a quick shower, we met for a sumptuous (read: spicy!) dinner. Post dinner, a quick chat on how to carry out the proceedings next morning, and off we went into our cozy beds that awaited us. BizTalk360 Recruitment - Drive to VIT University BizTalk360 Recruitment - VIT Guest House

BizTalk360 Recruitment @ VIT

It was a beautiful day at Vellore and we were all set for our first campus recruitment drive. We were escorted to the auditorium in the Silver Jubilee Tower. The final turnaround for BizTalk360 recruitment drive process was 175. It was an absolute pleasure and dream come true for me (Sriram Hariharan) personally to deliver the pre-placement talk to the young aspirants. At this juncture, I would like to thank the BizTalk360 Management for giving me this golden opportunity. It was an out of the world experience and feeling to be representing the face of the organization. The pre-placement talk lasted for about 40 minutes. Take a look at the presentation that was presented below – After the pre-placement talk, it was time for the candidates to take up the online test. For the online test, we used HackerEarth portal with 22 Multiple Choice Questions (valued at 50 points) and 4 programs (each valued at 100 points). The online test started at 1030 hrs for a duration of 2 hours.

Evaluation Process & Interviews – BizTalk360 Recruitment Drive

Post the online test, it was time for us to evaluate the candidates performance in the online test. To ensure a fair judgement and not compromise on the quality, we took the online test result as just one parameter to shortlist the candidates for the technical interview. The other parameters were their technical skills and the types of projects they had done as a part of their academics. Taking all these factors together, we shortlisted 14 candidates for the technical interview. We were committed and eager to interview the selected candidates that we almost skipped lunch. Candidates started to come in one after the other, and the technical interviews (done by Arunkumar Kumaresan) easily lasted for 30-45 minutes. Arun tried to understand the skills and capabilities of the candidates and made his evaluation on whether the candidates would be the perfect fit for our organization. There were also instances when the candidates had some interesting projects and Arun was interested to view the demo, take a look at their published research work (on IEEE etc.,). BizTalk360 Recruitment - Candidate Demo From the 14 candidates, only 4 candidates made it through to the final round of interview by Subramanian Pillai, Head of Operations and Delivery, India. Finally, at about 2030 hours, it was time for us to announce the results. We were happy to recruit two candidates given their perfect fit both in terms of technology and career aspirations.

Building the rapport

During the course of the interview drive, we got an opportunity to interact with Dr. Karthikeyan from the Placement department. We were introduced to Dr. Pradeep Reddy (Associate Professor and Placement Coordinator) from whom we came to know more about the Microsoft Innovation Centers (MIC) and the type of training students get benefited from these streams. We initiated talks about signing an MoU that will facilitate and foster better relationships between BizTalk360 and VIT University. BizTalk360 Recruitment - Building the rapport BizTalk360 Recruitment - Building the rapport

Thanks and Gratitude

On behalf of BizTalk360 Management, we would like to extend our special thanks to the VIT Placement Department (Dr. Karthikeyan, Placement Coordinator Mr. Ganesh) for giving us the opportunity to organize the campus recruitment drive. Our heartfelt thanks go out to the support staff at VIT (Mr. Venkatesh – Head of Support, Shanmugam and his team) for keeping us energetic throughout the day. Their team made sure we never felt tired, delivered food and refreshments at frequent intervals. Not to forget, our word of thanks to the student coordinator Mr. Sinthanaiselvan for his tireless efforts throughout the interview process. We would also like to extend our gratitude to the support staff at the VIT guest house for the warmth offered during our stay. This recruitment drive will be cherished forever and we will take this learning forward in the years to come! BizTalk360 Recruitment - BizTalk360 team with VIT team

How to be part of BizTalk360?

If you’ve read till this point and you are passionate about programming, learning new skills every day, then you might get chance to work with us. As a first step, you need to send your profile to us. For more details of our recruitment details, you can visit our website BizTalk360 Careers page. The right candidate will be selected for the final interview where we will test their attitude, eagerness to learn new technologies, their adaptability to challenging environment and cultural fit with our organization and our BizTalk360 team.