Students’ Speak: Be clear and confident before responding to the interviewer

By: Sachin Kuman Singh

Placement interviews are not just about evaluating your knowledge or glossing over your credentials. Interviewers also assess a candidate’s attitude and ability to handle the pressure. Sachin Singh shares some interesting placement interview tips besides providing key stats from recently concluded placement season at KIIT University.

Every time there is a placement notification, the branches applicable for the particular drive are also mentioned in the same. For instance, if a company comes for IT branches, only IT students are eligible. However, some companies also invite core branches for a particular placement drive.

The pool of students nowadays is very huge in top private institutes, particularly in IT and CSE branches. In my university alone, almost 4100 students graduated in 2019 from 13-14 different engineering branches. From the last 2-3 years, the placement record has been pretty good for all the branches but the number of placements from core branches is quite less. The number of placements is much better and appreciable in the case of IT branches but for the core branches, the number of visiting companies was less in comparison to the number of students sitting for placements. Therefore, the percentage of placed students falls drastically in the case of core branches such as Electrical, Mechanical and Civil.

I believe almost 80-85% of students sitting for placements were placed, some with a very good package while others with average ones. In IT, the major recruiters were Wipro, Accenture, Cognizant, Deloitte, High Radius IBM, Tech Mahindra, MU-Sigma, ZS Associates, TCS, etc. For core branches, the list includes Fiat, Tata Power, Tata Projects, Sterling & Wilson, Shapoorji & Pallonji, ITD Cementation, Simplex Infrastructures, Jindal, Everest Industries and several more.

Most of the students were placed with a CTC between 6 and 7 lakh. Few students with 10+ Lakh packages were among the top grossers while the lowest salary bracket falling between 2.8 and 3.4 lakh.

As far as interviews are concerned, you will primarily face HR and technical interviews. In my opinion, with each interaction with the interviewer, you will get to know about your strengths and the points on which you need to focus. Therefore, try to sit for the placement drives of every company in which you are eligible. You never know where you will land up after qualifying the interview round. It may also be possible that you have to appear for technical and HR interviews separately but often that happens at the same venue and time.

Some frequently asked questions from the students of IT/Core branch are:

• Tell me something about yourself
• Where do you see yourself after 5 years?
• What are your short and long-term goals?
• What are your strengths and weaknesses?
• Tell me something about your family
• Who is your motivation?
• What are your hobbies?

Technical questions will be from your respective background and often they will ask you about your favourite subject to initiate the conversation. You must reply wisely as that will decide whether your interview was up to the mark or not because after your response the interviewer’s questions will only revolve around the particular subject.

You should be very careful while answering ‘tell me something about yourself’ and don’t extend beyond your name, a little about your education, something about your family and any quality which sets you apart from the lot. Be clear and accurate while answering all the questions; don’t bluff as the interviewer will get to know from your expressions. If you don’t know any answer just directly say, ‘I don’t know’.

Be confident while you are answering and always have a smile on your face. The most important thing is your attitude and other factors usually depend on that. Avoid the use of heavy words or technical jargon to impress and be short and to the point while responding.

About the Author:

Sachin Kuman Singh recently completed his Bachelor of Technology in Civil Engineering from KIIT, Bhubaneshwar. Currently, he is working with Simplex Infrastructures Limited as a Graduate Engineer Trainee. He is also a state-level athlete.