Campus placements are the way most final-year engineering students in India get their first job: companies come to the college, or recruit through it, and hire students before they graduate. Each college has a placement cell, the office that invites companies and arranges their tests and interviews. Its head is often called the training and placement officer (TPO). Around the placements, a set of software products helps students prepare, apply and show what they can do.
Consider a final-year electronics student at an engineering college in Nagpur. In July, before the placement season starts, she writes her résumé on a resume builder. It gives her a template and suggests wording for each line. Her college also pays for AI resume review, which scores her résumé line by line and tells her what to fix.
Her résumé also needs proof of her skills. In her third year, she entered a contest on a hackathon platform, where a company set a problem and teams of students built a working solution in 36 hours. Her team reached the final round. She also did an eight-week virtual internship, working online for a company in another city, with a mentor who reviewed her work every week.
Then she applies. Her college uses a campus recruiting platform. Companies post their jobs on it, and the placement cell sends each job to the students who meet its conditions, such as a minimum CGPA. She applies to eleven companies, with one click each. The same platform lets companies hire from hundreds of colleges that they could never visit in person.
Each company then tests the students it has shortlisted. Most begin with an online test on a coding assessment platform, a timed set of coding problems that the software grades automatically. Those who pass are interviewed, often on a technical interview platform with a shared code editor. Inside the company, every applicant is tracked in an applicant tracking system (ATS).
She also keeps a second plan: a master's degree abroad. She has registered on a study abroad consultancy platform, which prepares students for the IELTS English test, applies to universities and arranges an education loan.
Who pays for all this? It depends on the product. Students pay for some, such as resume builders, often through freemium pricing: the basic version is free and the full version is paid. Colleges pay for others, because good placement results attract the next year's students. Employers pay to reach students, through job posts, campus hiring and contests. A platform that brings students and employers together, and earns from one or both of them, is a kind of marketplace. The page on the marketplace model explains the idea.
One question is still open. Entry-level work, such as writing simple code, testing and customer support, is the work that AI models now do first. So these services are starting to prepare students for a different kind of first job.