What is the work of a placement coordinator | Should you consider becoming one? | Anmol Sahu

After serving as a Training & Placement Coordinator for one year, I received a question from many people: "What exactly is the work you do?"

With the onset of a new placement season and new teams being formed in each college, many students are confused about whether they should apply for this responsibility or not?

In this blog, I want to explain things in detail wrt my experience.

For those of you who are interested in watching the video version, here is the link:

Quick summary of what I will cover in this blog:

• Section 1 - What is a placement coordinator?

• Section 2 - Skillset Required : What skills are necessary to handle this position

• Section 3 - Process of Calling a company : I'll go through the entire process to show the exact work

• Section 4 - Why should you apply for this responsibility? : my views about this responsibility

• Section 5 - Breaking a myth : Here I will break a common myth which many people have

• Section 6 - Conclusion

Without further ado, let's start.

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1) What is a placement coordinator?

I have been a placement coordinator myself (of NIT Warangal 20-21 batch :D). According to me, they are intermediaries between a company & a student. If a company wants to hire from your college, they cannot directly go to each student and notify them. Instead, they go to the placement cell, which then releases the notification and handles the further process. Everything in this process is managed by placement coordinators.

2) Skillset required:

i) Verbal Communication skills:

A major time of yours will be spent communicating with different people while doing this work. for eg: Speaking to HR and coordinating with them or speaking to students and clarifying their doubts, etc. so you do need good communication skills.

ii) written communication skills:

These are official works, and all of the communication takes place over emails too. So while working as a Placement coordinator you'll need to write emails.

iii) Time management:

You'll have to manage your studies, your real-life, your daily work, along with this responsibility. So you do need good time management skills. It is just like any other job. like you have a work-life balance there, you have a work-life balance here too. When you manage a company you might be really busy & have to work the whole day, and on some days it will be really chill.

iv) Team spirit:

A major time of yours will be spent on discussing with your teammates about various companies so you should also show some good team spirit and teamwork.

3) Process of calling a company

I feel, discussing the process will show you what exactly is the work involved in this thing. These are the general steps when I follow.

i) before calling a company I search for the contact of its HR (either from friends in other colleges or on LinkedIn or any other website).

ii) Then, I call HR and ask them about the hiring plans for this year. At this point, I also negotiate with them (about increasing the CTC, reducing the CGPA cutoff, extending the eligibility to other branches, etc).

iii) Once all of this talking stuff is done, I sit down with my team and schedule the companies for that week. For eg: if we have 3-4 companies then we decide which company should be called 1st, which company should we call 2nd, etc. it can be based on various criteria viz ctc, cgpa cutoff, branches, profile, etc.

iv) During the interviews, I ensure that the entire process is going on smoothly. if any student faces a problem, I inform HR and get it rectified.

v) especially during these covid times everything was being conducted online so all of us had to be very active over WhatsApp because that was our means of communication. so you would also have to be active on whatever platform your college is using.

for now, all of this might look a bit hectic to you but trust me, once you start working, you understand all of it.

4) why should you apply for this responsibility?

There are various reasons for that: for some people, it might look good on their resume (Yea! it definitely adds up to your resume). It might be another management task for some people, and because they like managing things, they want to apply. for others, it might look really cool. But whatsoever is your reason, if you feel that you want to give back something to the college and you want your batchmates to get placed, then you definitely should consider applying for this responsibility.

it's like this: if we have a team of 20 people and after getting selected 10 people stop working, so what does it do? it adds load on the other 10 people. So this should not be the case: that after getting selected, you would stop working. Apply only if you feel like you will be able to devote your time to this thing.

5) Breaking the Myth!

Many people have this myth that they think after becoming coordinator, you can easily get placed. Trust me on this, that is not the case. Your placement depends entirely on your skills and your hard work, it has nothing to do with this position. Since you are directly in contact with HR, if you think you have an advantage over the other students, you are Wrong! Many colleges follow the conflict of interest policy which basically means that if you are applying for a company, then you cannot manage it (i.e. you cannot contact HR too). so it doesn't give you an undue advantage. but yeah, it definitely adds up to your resume.

6) Conclusion:

Overall if you ask me, it's such a great responsibility that while working for it, you learn a lot of things. So do consider giving it a shot.