CII as part of its EmployabilityBridge program organized a one of its kind Job Fair recently in Trichy to facilitate Industry to recruit engineers & management graduates from colleges specifically based out of Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. These students had participated in the employability enhancement program offered through the Employability Bridge initiative.

In the increasingly competitive campus recruitments space, academic institutions from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities often struggle to attract companies to visit their campuses for recruitment. On the other hand, companies also face several challenges in connecting to these colleges to recruit entry level graduates. More importantly, companies that are in these Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, are unable to recruit students from academic institutions in their own backyards!

This is primarily due to the lack of a structured initiative to bring in all the stakeholders under one roof and facilitate recruitment programs. Yet another shortcoming among students from academic institutions from the smaller cities and towns is their lack of exposure to soft skills and industry expected technical skills due to limited access to student internship programs with industries in the region and elsewhere.

CII's EmployabilityBridge primarily and literally focuses on bridging this gap, which has been detrimental to distributed growth of industries and creation of job opportunities in the non-metropolitan areas of the state.

Students of colleges who are members of EmployabilityBridge were exposed to competencies expected by the companies. Students completed a training program on the required competencies for over 160 hours and took up a certification test online at the EmployabilityBridge.com.

In essence this job fair was programmed as a "Meet the Industry Ready Talent" initiative.

This data of certified students was made available to the industry members of EmployabilityBridge.com. Corporates on the other hand published their vacancies on the EmployabilityBridge portal along with the eligibility criteria required by them. Only eligible member students can apply online through the portal ensuring that companies get to meet only students who meet their criteria at the Job Fair.

The companies also have access to the portal to view the profiles of student that have applied against their vacancies and were hence able to know in advance who they were going to meet at the job fair. This proved to be the differentiator which was highly appreciated by the companies.

The companies shortlisted eligible students who have applied and this automatically triggered the hall ticket of the students.

The Job Fair was also environment friendly as the students were notified not to carry their resumes since it was available online for the companies to access, avoiding use of paper.

The most important aspect of this EmployabilityBridge Job Fair was the transparency in the whole process and all students who had undergone training and certification were provided with the opportunity to compete for employment with the participating companies.

The Trichy Job Fair saw 20 Corporates publishing 538 vacancies to the students. Students could pick and choose the company that they wanted to be part off. There were written test schedules published and the students were allowed to participate in any number of tests. This also presented a different experience for students as the students from Non IT streams had the opportunity to appear for both IT and Core Engineering Companies.

At the end of it all 238 vacancies were filled up by companies and the results from few others are still awaited when this article went to press.

The Job Fair was also environment friendly as the students were notified not to carry their resumes since it was available online for the companies to access, avoiding use of paper.

The biggest benefit for the companies was that they were able to meet 800 students under one roof on a single day. Corporates could administer their tests and complete their entire selection process in a single day

EmployabilityBridge reduced the time, effort and the cost which is usually the deterrent for companies to visit these cities. Interestingly many of these companies were also competing amongst themselves to attract the students.

It was also provide a great sense of achievement to the placement officers as this is the first time that they had their students presented to a large number of companies on a single day.

The most important beneficiaries of the EmployabilityBridge Job Fair were the students themselves, some of whom had multiple offers under their belts.

For the organizers, the CII EmployabilityBridge Job Fair in Trichy was the successful culmination of a yearlong effort in making students and companies cross the metaphorical bridge and shake hands to enter into an employer-employee relationship.

This is just the beginning, and CII's EmployabilityBridge now aims at expanding its footprint all across the state and country, and repeat the success of the Trichy Job Fair, which has brought in a new paradigm of opportunities to the budding professionals from our nation's smaller cities and towns.