Ushering in the campus season!
For the past few months, I have been associated with Sahaj software in a few different capacities. While the first few months got me involved in an interesting tech project, I now find myself in a relatively new area of work — I am helping out with the hiring activities in the company. This is probably the first time in my career I am getting so deeply involved in tech hiring. One of the key hiring activities for the year is the ushering in of the campus season. June — September is the time when companies visit campuses and hire for the upcoming year. For example, 2021 campus visits would get us people who would be joining us in 2022.
Remote + campus hiring
Every year, we at Sahaj, visit campuses across India in search of fresh, young talent. Thanks to the pandemic situation, the past two years’ visits have been remote, adding its own layer of complexity to the process. The entire process, right from the qualifying round to the final round, is conducted online, within the span of 1–2 days.
It’s Pravesh time!
Sahaj interview process typically involves a coding challenge, followed by code pairing with a Sahajeevi, a tech round and a final round. Campus hiring is no different. However, the initial numbers are much bigger compared to the regular hiring process. Hence, this calls for an additional filtration round that would help us manage the crowd better on any given day. For the past two campus seasons, we have successfully been able to use our home grown software, Pravesh for the same. Pravesh, built by Sahajeevis, just for this purpose, helps us administer the test to hundreds of candidates at the same time and what’s more, it also scores automatically at the end of the test, thereby making it easy for us to shortlist candidates to the next round. We have several checks in place to ensure that the candidates put in their sincere efforts to clear the test.
Solving the problem
Once we have a shortlist, these shortlisted candidates are given a timed coding problem to solve. Administering this challenge to multiple people at the same time has also been a problem area for us over the years. This year, we have set up another platform that helps us in this process. We have had a couple of campus visits so far and we have been able to conduct our coding tests fairly smoothly with the help of this platform. While basic checks like build failure and test cases failure are checked automatically, we have Sahajeevis who sign up for taking a closer look at the codes and shortlist people for the technical round.
Tech round and beyond…
From a few hundreds of candidates, typically, we have single digit numbers getting into the technical round. For every campus visit, a lot of preparation goes into lining up panels. Once we have the shortlist of tech round candidates, our panels meet them the very same day and have a detailed conversation. The potential and the learnability aspect of the candidate is of prime importance as Sahajeevis question them on their interests, learnings, passion projects and more.
End of the day
Ah, its end of the day, phew! A long tiring campus day typically tends to hold smiles at the end of the day, in store for us. The happiness in identifying and offering the Sahajeevis of tomorrow is matchless. I have experienced this new kind of joy in the recent past. This has also helped me appreciate and respect sourcing/hiring professions much more than ever.
A fresh new day dawns with the hope of more potential Sahajeevis to meet, greet and offer!
If the idea of Sahaj interests you, please feel free to connect your college alma mater with us. We are also currently looking for senior FullStack Developer profiles with 7+ years of experience and passionate about technology. If you fit the bill, please write to us at connect@sahaj.ai.