A campus recruiting platform is software on which employers post jobs and internships for students, and students at many colleges apply for them. It connects three groups: students, the placement cells of colleges, and employers. A placement cell is the college office that invites companies and arranges their tests and interviews.
Without such a platform, campus hiring is slow and local. A company sends its recruiters to perhaps 20 or 30 colleges a year, usually the best-known ones. Each placement cell collects applications by email and in spreadsheets. Students at smaller colleges, in smaller towns, are rarely visited.
Here is how a platform changes this. The employer creates a job once, with its conditions: the branches it wants, such as computer science or electrical engineering, the minimum CGPA, the year of graduation and the salary. The platform shows the job to every eligible student at the colleges that have joined. At each college, the placement cell approves the job and applies its own rules. For example, a student who already holds an offer may not be allowed to apply to a company that pays less. Students apply with their profile and their résumé, which is often made on a resume builder. The employer then invites the shortlisted students to an online test on a coding assessment platform, and later to interviews on a technical interview platform. The students who are selected move into the employer's own applicant tracking system (ATS), where the offer is made and tracked.
Take, for example, a software services company in Pune that needs 300 freshers. Its recruiters can visit only 15 colleges in the season. On the platform, it opens the job to 140 colleges across Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Telangana. About 9,000 students apply. 2,100 of them pass the online test, 600 are interviewed by video, and 340 receive offers. Most of the 140 colleges were never visited by a recruiter.
A platform also shows more than marks. A student's profile can list her results in contests on a hackathon platform, and her virtual internship. Recruiters can search for these.
Who pays? Usually the employer, who pays a fee for each job posted or a yearly subscription. Colleges sometimes pay too, because good placement results attract the next year's students. Students usually pay nothing. A platform that brings two groups together and earns from one of them is a kind of marketplace. The page on the marketplace model explains the idea.
How is it different from a job portal? A job portal is open to anyone who is looking for a job. A campus recruiting platform is only for students and recent graduates, and it runs through the colleges' placement cells, which apply their own placement rules.