Future of Campus Placements and Role of Placement Officer - Conclusion
- Tejas Subrahmanya
- Feb 26, 2016
- 7 min read
In this concluding part, I will focus on highlighting the advantages for universities and colleges by using the LinkedIn Platform for running their campus placement drives. In addition, I will also highlight the cost savings that a university can incur by shifting their placement drives to LinkedIn.
In the previous blogs, I had highlighted the structure of the placement office and the role of placement officer as well as the skills required to be successful in future.
Let me reiterate this again here. For a university or college to successfully use LinkedIn to channelize its campus placement drives, the management of the university needs to develop a strong LinkedIn Policy requiring all stakeholders, especially the placement office, registrar, students and faculty members to actively take part in using LinkedIn for the betterment of the students.
You have to look at some place to begin, so the natural question is where to begin from. The right time to start is “NOW.” Based on what I have gathered by speaking to academicians in Shimla, Chandigarh, Bangalore and Panipat, I found that many universities are still yet to realize the benefits of utilizing LinkedIn, because of the absence of a LinkedIn Policy, and making sure that the stakeholders use LinkedIn extensively in their work-life, showcasing their achievements and expertise.
What should placement officers do now? As I mentioned in the previous blog, the designation of the placement officer will change to Director - LinkedIn Services, and he/she will have a comprehensive responsibility of not only ensuring that students keep their LinkedIn profiles updated, but also ensuring that faculty members are equally involved in the process.
Armed with Digital Marketing skills and concepts, the Director – LinkedIn Services will be responsible for charting out a multi-pronged strategy for the University to not only attract students but also ensure that they get placed. By getting placed, I also include students who have shown interest in entrepreneurship and have the will to set up their own companies.
I am available to provide my expertise to help students and faculty members to develop excellent LinkedIn profiles that Universities can showcase on their LinkedIn pages.
So, what happens when a University develops its LinkedIn Policy and the Director – LinkedIn Services is responsible for ensuring that LinkedIn is used extensively in the university?
This is where my book will come in handy. Though my book is titled “Get Recruited Through LinkedIn: Creating Your Personal Brand and Finding a Job Using LinkedIn”, you will find that a major part of the book focuses on how to create your personal brand.
You can use the book as a guide to create your brand. If you need any help, you can always get in touch with me.
When you are able to create your brand, you will be able to highlight your skills, expertise, projects and participation in extra & co curricular activities.
The Director - LinkedIn Services will ensure that the student who joins the University / college on the first day is required to create his / her LinkedIn Profile. If the student already has a profile on LinkedIn, the better. All the student will have to do is to include the university / college in his / her educational qualifications section.
As part of the student’s brand creating activities, the student records all aspects of his / her academic achievements, including, but not limited to:
Scores in examinations, quizzes and tests
Participation and awards in extra and co-curricular activities
Projects and Internships undertaken – in association with companies as well as with Faculty Members
Voluntary Experience with not-for and for-profit companies
Any other certifications and achievements during their student life
The Director – LinkedIn Services, through his / her deputies shall ensure that at the end of every semester / academic session, the students LinkedIn Profiles are updated, and their achievements are highlighted.
For specific information on how to write your achievements, please read my book or get in touch with me.
The Director – LinkedIn Services will follow companies and create impressive mailers using LinkedIn’s InMail services. This way, the Director can contact a large number of companies and invite them for campus placements.
LinkedIn also provides solutions to customize its LinkedIn Pages. The Director – LinkedIn Services can get in touch with the concerned people at LinkedIn to customize its pages.
While the book defines what an individual has to do to get a job through LinkedIn, the same procedure needs to be adopted by the Director – LinkedIn Services, and expand his network.
Well, I have got another idea. Let me write two books – one specifically focusing on the ways in which students can write their LinkedIn profiles, and link it to campus placements through LinkedIn; and the other on Digital Marketing for Placement Officers. I believe these books would definitely add value to students and Placement Officers (read: Director – LinkedIn Services) alike.
In the preceding paragraphs, I had pointed out that the faculty members would also have to keep their LinkedIn profiles updated. You may ask me why should faculty members have updated profiles? Since the LinkedIn Policy is to help students get placed, what is the role of the faculty?
Well, the faculty has a major role to play here. Let me explain this with the help of an example.
Let us assume that a faculty member has developed a project proposal and has submitted it to a funding agency. Let us also assume that this particular faculty member has been awarded this project. Further, for simplicity, let us assume that the project is to undertake a baseline survey of student enrolment in schools – Government, Government Aided and Private – and do a comparative study on both enrolments and drop outs, in his/her city of work.
Obviously, the faculty member will not be doing this alone, and he will have a team to get this done. Since this is a survey requiring collecting statistical data, let us assume that the faculty member is a professor of economics / HR or Statistics. This will mean that the faculty member must be excellent at Research Methodologies and since appropriate research methodologies have to be used to develop appropriate questionnaires, surveys must be conducted and then the results analyzed.
If the faculty member decides to use a student or group of students for this project, the project can be highlighted by both the faculty member as well as the student in their respective profiles, and this will add value not only to the faculty member and student, but also to the University as a whole.
Similarly, if a civil engineering faculty member, with specialization in transportation engineering is approached by the local government body to suggest appropriate traffic plans for the city, and students get involved in such projects, it is prudent for both the faculty member and the student to highlight them in their respective profiles.
At the end of the project, if the concerned faculty member gives the student a feedback, it will only add to the university’s prestige. Similarly, the student can leave feedback to the concerned faculty member regarding how he / she felt working on the particular project.
So, when the Director – LinkedIn Services gets in touch with prospective employers, the employer (read HR / Recruiter) will not only look at the student’s profile but also check out under whom the student has worked on a particular project, and what was the feedback given to him/her and the feedback he/she left for the concerned faculty member. This will give the recruiter an idea of the maturity levels of the student.
An after effect of this is that the concerned faculty member will start getting additional assignments because he/she knows how to get them accomplished effectively, and thus, the University also stands to gain in the process. It could be in terms of sharing project revenue or increase in overall consulting projects for the University.
Thus, you can see that it is important for both the students and the faculty members to be active on their LinkedIn profiles; and the Director – LinkedIn Services will have a huge task at hand to ensure that the LinkedIn Policy is executed, both in letter and in spirit, across the institution.
Let me take some time to explain the cost of printing a brochure and how much an educational institution saves in opting for LinkedIn for their campus placement drives.
The average cost of printing a colourful placement brochure is about Rs. 750 per copy. For any year, the total cost of printing about 500 placement brochures would be about Rs. 3,75,000. The cost of acquiring an appropriate premium plan for a university would be about Rs. 60,000 per annum, leading to savings of more than 80%; 84% to be precise. And this is definitely a huge amount. However, as a placement officer, it is your duty to ensure that you have identified the right premium plan for your institution. On the higher side, if the cost of the premium plan is about Rs. 1,00,000 per annum, you still end up saving 73.33%, which is still quite substantial.
If I were a placement officer, I would definitely go in for this.
I will now summarize the content for easy understanding.
We started with the concept of how LinkedIn is changing the way companies recruit people, and how recruiters can use various LinkedIn services for this purpose. I then went on to describe the new structure of the placement office, and the possible designations of the placement officers.
In the second blog, I described the skills that need to be acquired by placement officers and their new role in the changed scenario.
And, in this blog, I have described why it is important for a university / college to go in for LinkedIn based services and how the entire effort should be team driven, with all stakeholders having equal stake in the transformation process.
Last, but not least, I have highlighted the cost benefits that a university can gain by opting for channelizing their placement drives through LinkedIn.
I believe this will be the harbinger of a new way to organize and channelize campus placements in universities and colleges. Today, when the entire world is going digital, sooner than later, this is bound to happen, and I do believe that the time is apt for universities and colleges to tap the potential that LinkedIn has provided to the world at large.
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