One of the latest trends of the employment market today is an increasing preference to recruit freshers.  Large corporate are investing more and more on recruitment of freshers. Companies recruiting freshers are not only on the rise, but this investment is based on a long term cost effective strategy. This trend has not been limited to BPO (business process outsourcing), LPO (legal process outsourcing) or the KPO (knowledge process outsourcing) sector. It has very much entered into other professions such as Engineering and Advertising Journalism, IT sector, Travel and Tourism, Data Entry, among others.

The number of benefits of hiring freshers outweighs some of the risks associated with the same.  In the process, most of these companies recruiting freshers have tie-ups with campuses and universities, and spend considerable amount of time interacting with students who are about to graduate. One of emerging trend being observed now days is to hire or use the services of fresher job portals as a part of recruitment strategy.

There are several dynamics in hiring of fresh candidates. One of the most important is the cost effectiveness of hiring a fresher.  Companies find it easier to train a fresher rather than “converting” the experienced staff to unlearn their past practices and notions to readjust to the culture of the current company. Hence, the preferred practice is to train these freshers to reach the middle level positions in the same organization.  This would also increase the loyalty of employees and help companies to retain quality performers for longer period of time.

While the qualifications required may differ with respect to the nature of the industry and sector, there are also differences with respect to the entry level jobs, the nature and the pay packet freshers are offered. Freshers who have some internship experience have always an added advantage. Most of the companies from technical field recruiting freshers look for candidates with a technical background. However, it has commonly been observed that freshers, generally, lack sound technical knowledge due to lack of hands on experience. Hence, companies have to spend considerable resources on enhancing their technical knowledge and skills, through workshops, seminars, lectures and assignments. The training centers are becoming essential part of modern companies’ infrastructure.

Intensive training programs are meant to equip freshers not only to face the stiff competition, but also groom them for the challenges ahead. This works well with the freshers as well, as they get first hand experience in a work environment. At the same time, most freshers, based on their talent and skills have a high chance of remaining in the same company. Some of the MNCs, are known for offering internship programs to students, during their collage study, followed by a position in the company based on performance. Such internship programs are undertaken after a rigorous process of interview and group discussions. A separate fund is allocated for recruiting and then training freshers in such companies.

For a fresher, both personal and professional growths are two major advantages of the whole deal and are a win – win situation for both him an his or her employer.

These sites can help job seekers expand contacts to join the pool special professional groups, and directly touch the ground with employers

For almost two years, based in Ahmedabad Rajeev Shah had been looking for a new job. He sent his resume on the sites of many jobs, but without success. But in January this year, he was surprised when he received an offer via LinkedIn, a networking site. "I created a profile to connect with friends and former colleagues, but I never knew it could land me a job," says 32 year old Rajeev Shah, who now works as Sales and Marketing Manager with a software company.

Today, almost everyone connected to the network, is present in at least one of the networking site. For workaholics, the most popular social site is LinkedIn.

Realizing the large number of candidates that can be contacted easily used in these portals, companies and headhunters have begun to rely on them to find potential employees. "Out of the large pool of talent, only 20% is available in the job portals. The remaining 80% are still untouched. To go to them, social networking sites are truly an effective tool," says Suyash K, Head official campusrecruit, India's first private employment exchange, an initiative of CR2.

Here are some tips to help you take advantage of networking sites.

Reach specific groups

All networking sites have formed groups of people with specific skills or a particular industry. You must include these as they will expand the network and then use these contacts when you need to start a job search. In addition, recruiters often publish vacancies in the pages of these groups. However, never  think that once you join a group, you will be flooded with job offers at once. It will take time to build a network and relationships with members. After all, it's hard to trust someone who has never known you personally.

Keep an active profile

You will need to keep a updated detailed profile, because this is the first thing a potential employer reads about you. Highlight the skills and competencies, but be brief about your personal information. Title or information "about me" should be concise and interesting. Use keywords that will help your profile pop up when someone is trawling the site looking for a candidate.

Try to be active as much as possible. Provide answers to questions posed to people and regularly post news about what is happening in your industry. If you are looking for work, often send messages regarding your research, because it keeps it fresh in the minds of the people in your network.

Recommendations

Your profile must have positive feedback on your work. Recruiters prefer if the recommendations are written by more experienced colleagues. "request your colleague to write one for you, ask them to focus on the positive aspects and achievements over the last 1-5 years. Do not ask someone who knows you for less than this time, as this will  come across as a biased view, "says HR representative of a Energy Conglomerate.

Online behavior

You may have to change the privacy settings of your website so that recruiters can post or send a message.

Although the social networking site can help you find a job, could also land you in trouble, if you're not careful, what you send. Do not start writing about a job change before you inform your current employer as someone in the network may also reveal this to your employer.

Avoid mentioning faults of your current and past colleagues, as this could sour relations within the network and may potentially harm your future. Also, potential employers may avoid you. Monitor what you put on your personal life. No racy photos, derogatory comments, jokes or risk strong political views should be aired.

LinkedIn

There are specific skills or industry on the professional networking site that can help increase your contacts. Ask your colleagues to write recommendations that can serve as references.

Twitter

Create a list of companies offering work to characterize the "List". Also start following companies, which are of interest to you, so if they post a job, you know right away.

YouTube

Many companies have begun to post videos on YouTube about their internal activities and events that can help you learn more about the prospective employer.

It's been a while since I was hiring at a startup, and recruiting at a startup is very different from hiring at a big company. At Yahoo! Search, it seemed like we were constantly hiring. I did an average of 5-8 interviews a week. It was a never-ending drumbeat of resumes, interviews, and offer letters. Now, I wasn't always the hiring manager. I only hired a handful of product managers in my time there. But somebody was always hiring a product manager and I was usually on the interview team. The first thing you notice at a big company is the amount of specialization. At a startup, everyone does a little of everything, so you need strong generalists. More importantly, it's hard to predict the future, so you need people who can adapt. You might think you're hiring somebody to work on something specific, but that something might change in a few months. It doesn't work that way at big companies. Usually when you're hiring you have avery specific role in mind, and the likelihood that that responsibility will change is low. Lots of people were hired at Yahoo! that probably wouldn't have been appropriate at a startup. I recall a lot of post-interview conversations that went something like this - "well, I'm not sure they're the perfect candidate, but they do seem suited for this very specific role, so let's hire them." That may work fine at a big company, but it's deadly thinking at a startup.

I started my career as an engineer and advanced pretty quickly into engineering management. During the bubble, I probably hired over one hundred engineers. I learned a lot about hiring, mostly by making mistakes. When I transitioned to product management I was able to apply some of my experience hiring technical people, but I also learned a whole new set of lessons. Last week a friend called to say he needed to hire a product manager and wanted my advice. I realized there's not a lot of good information out there about interviewing PMs (there's not a lot of good information about product management in general). More to the point, there's not a lot about what you should look for in a product manager no matter what kind of environment you're in - startup or big company. So I thought I'd pull together some of what I learned.

Remember buddy, nobody asked you to show up

Product management may be the one job that the organization would get along fine without (at least for a good while). Without engineers, nothing would get built. Without sales people, nothing is sold. Without designers, the product looks like crap. But in a world without PMs, everyone simply fills in the gap and goes on with their lives. It's important to remember that - as a PM, you're expendable. Now, in the long run great product management usually makes the difference between winning and losing, but you have to prove it. Product management also combines elements of lots of other specialties - engineering, design, marketing, sales, business development. Product management is a weird discipline full of oddballs and rejects that never quite fit in anywhere else. For my part, I loved the technical challenges of engineering but despised the coding. I liked solving problems, but I hated having other people tell me what to do. I wanted to be a part of the strategic decisions, I wanted to own the product. Marketing appealed to my creativity, but I knew I'd dislike being too far away from the technology. Engineers respected me, but knew my heart was elsewhere and generally thought I was too "marketing-ish." People like me naturally gravitate to product management.

1. Hire all the smart people

So what do I look for in a PM? Most importantly, raw intellectual horsepower. I'll take a wickedly smart, inexperienced PM over one of average intellect and years of experience any day. Product management is fundamentally about thinking on your feet, staying one step ahead of your competitors, and being able to project yourself into the minds of your colleagues and your customers. I usually ask an interview candidate a series of logic questions to gauge intelligence. Generally I'll ask logic questions until I'm sure the candidate is smarter than me. For some reason, lots of people I know are reluctant to do that. They argue that it's insulting to the candidate. I think the right candidate will relish the challenge. In fact, that's the first test - how do they react when I say "I'd like to ask you some logic questions, is that okay?" The best of the bunch are usually bouncing out of their chairs with excitement. The super smart sometimes counter with logic questions of their own.

2. Strong technical background

Some managers I've known insist on hiring only PMs with computer science degrees. I'm not as snobby - maybe it's my own liberal arts undergraduate education - but I do tend to favor people who've been in technical roles. Having a solid engineering background gives a PM two critical tools - the ability to relate to engineers and a grasp of the technical details driving the product. It depends on the product of course - a PM working on low-level developer APIs is bound to need more technical chops than one working on the front-end of a personals web site. But the basic principle applies - product managers with technical backgrounds will have more success conveying product requirements to engineers and relaying complicated details to non-technical colleagues and customers. That said, there are pitfalls you need to avoid. Most importantly, a PM who's a former engineer needs to realize that he or she is just that - a former engineer. PMs who come from engineering and still try to take charge of technical decisions and implementation details will crash spectacularly. For that reason, I like hiring technical people who've already made the move to product management at a previous job. They've already gone through the challenging adaptation period and by checking references you can get a feel for how well they've evolved. I won't bore with you with interview questions to evaluate technical competency. They depend on the skill set and there are hundreds of web sites that give good tips for hiring engineers. Instead, here are some good questions for gauging how well a technical PM has adapted to the role and their ability to work with engineers:

• Why did you decide to move from engineering to product management?
• What is the biggest advantage of having a technical background?
• What is the biggest disadvantage?
• What was the biggest lesson you learned when you moved from engineering to product management?
• What do you wish you'd known when you were an engineer?
• How do you earn the respect of the engineering team?

3. "Spidey-sense" product instincts and creativity

This next category is highly subjective, difficult to evaluate, and extraordinarily important. I am a strong believer that certain people are born with innate product instincts. These people just know what makes a great product. They're not always right, but their instincts usually point in the right direction. They tend to be passionate advocates of a point of view, sometimes to the chagrin of their colleagues. I've had the good fortune to work with a good number of these people, and it's an essential trait in product managers. And it can be tuned, but it can't be learned. Product management, especially in highly dynamic environments like the web, involves lots of small decisions. Sure, there's a lot of big thinking and strategy. But it's the little decisions where a great PM distances him or herself from a decent one. You know they've got the "spidey-sense" product instinct when they suggest approaches that nobody on the team has thought of, but immediately strike everyone as obvious when they hear them. Evaluating product instinct in an interview is challenging at best. But it can be done. One thing I always do is check to see if the candidate has accomplished the following tasks during a one-hour interview:

• Independently echoed some of my own concerns about my product - if you're a good PM, you've got a bunch of things that worry you about your own product. Maybe they're UI shortcomings, missing features, or architecture flaws that need to be addressed. They're things you know need to be fixed. At least some of these should be obvious to an intelligent outsider with strong product instincts. I look for that moment in the interview when I smile, nod, and say "yeah, I know - that's been driving us crazy too."
• Taught me something new about my product - it could be an obvious improvement that I'd never considered, a new idea for positioning against a competitor, or a problem they encountered that needs to be addressed. When I learn something from a candidate, I know two things: (1) they're not afraid to speak critically, and (2) they're probably smarter than me. I want both in a product manager.
• Turned me on to something new and interesting - people with great product instincts tend to notice great products before everyone else. If I'm interviewing a top-notch candidate, I usually walk away having discovered something new and innovative.

• Tell me about a great product you've encountered recently. Why do you like it? [By the way, it drives me crazy when candidates name one of my products in an interview. I had a hard time hiring anybody at Yahoo! who told me the coolest product they'd come across recently was Yahoo! Good grief.]
• What's made [insert product here] successful? [I usually pick a popular product, like the iPod or eBay, that's won over consumers handily in a crowded market.]
• What do you dislike about my product? How would you improve it?
• What problems are we going to encounter in a year? Two years? Ten years?
• How do you know a product is well designed?
• What's one of the best ideas you've ever had?
• What is one of the worst?
• How do you know when to cut corners to get a product out the door?
• What lessons have you learned about user interface design?
• How do you decide what not to build?
• What was your biggest product mistake?
• What aspects of product management do you find the least interesting and why?
• Do you consider yourself creative?

4. Leadership that's earned

Product managers are usually leaders in their organizations. But they typically don't have direct line authority over others. That means they earn their authority and lead by influence. Leadership and interpersonal skills are critical for product management. There are a thousand books about leadership, so I won't turn this post into a treatise on the subject (most of the books are crap anyway). I find reference checks to be the most effective way to measure leadership skills, especially references that involve peers and individual contributors who worked with - but did not report to - the candidate. But here are a few questions I've used in the past:

• Is consensus always a good thing?
• What's the difference between management and leadership?
• What kinds of people do you like to work with?
• What types of people have you found it difficult to work with?
• Tell me about a time when a team didn't gel. Why do you think that happened, and what have you learned?
• How do you get a team to commit to a schedule?
• What would somebody do to lose your confidence?
• Do you manage people from different functions differently? If so, how?
• What have you learned about saying no?
• Who has the ultimate accountability for shipping a product?
• Have you ever been in a situation where your team has let you down and you've had to take the blame?
• How has your tolerance for mistakes changed over the years?
• Which do you like first, the good news or the bad news?
• What's your approach to hiring?

5. Ability to channel multiple points-of-view

Being a product manager requires wearing multiple hats. I often joke that much of the time your job is to be the advocate for whoever isn't currently in the room - the customer, engineering, sales, executives, marketing. That means you need to be capable of doing other people's jobs, but smart enough to know not to. Great PMs know how to channel different points-of-view. They play devil's advocate a lot. They tend to be unsatisfied with simple answers. In one conversation they might tell you the requirements don't seem technically feasible and in the next breath ask how any of this will make sense to the salespeople. There's one obvious way to evaluate a candidate's ability to think through a problem from multiple angles - gets lots of people in the interview process. I always insist that at a minimum, representatives from engineering, design, and marketing meet a potential PM candidate. Depending on the specific role, this list can grow - pre-sales engineering, support, developer relations, business development, legal, or customers themselves. Ultimately anyone who will be working with this person should meet them. Note that I didn't say everyone needs to meet them. One carefully selected representative of each key function will suffice. And it also doesn't mean everybody has to give a thumbs-up - it's hard to build consensus in an interview process as the list of interviewers grows, so consider the feedback appropriately. But nobody will be able to judge how well a product manager understands the sales process like a salesperson. I also strongly recommend that you give specific instructions to the interviewers, like "I'd like you to see how well this person would understand the issues you face in channel development, and how we'll they'd support you in the field. "Here are some specific questions that I use (these are just examples, feel free to replace the functional names):

• How have you learned to work with sales?
• What is the best way to interface with customers?
• What makes marketing tick?
• How do you know when design is on the right track?
• How should a product manager support business development?
• What have you learned about managing up?
• What's the best way to work with the executives?

6. Give me someone who's shipped something

This last characteristic may be the easiest to evaluate. Unless the position is very junior, I'll usually hire product managers who've actually shipped a product. I mean from start to finish, concept to launch. Nothing is a better indication of someone's ability to ship great products than having done it before. Past performance is an indication of future success. Even better, it gives something tangible to evaluate in a sea of intangibles. When checking references, I always make sure to talk to important colleagues from a previous project, especially the PM's manager and their engineering and sales or marketing counterparts. (Incidentally, these rules are ordered for a reason, and as I mentioned under #1 I'll still take a brilliantly smart PM over a dimmer experienced one even if the former hasn't shipped before).

Surprised to find that high / equal searches were done for freshers interested in Automotive Engineering, Horticulture and Marketing on campusrecruit.

We are pleased to share the search details executed by various employers on campusrecruit.

As it is visible from the above graph, top search parameters are :

1) Accounts / Finance / Tax / CS / Audit            18.5%

2) HR / Administration / IR                                13.9%

3) Ahmedabad                                                12.4%

/source - Namrata Dadwal (ToI)

Whether you've snagged your first job or shifted to a new one recently, you need to follow work etiquette. For, a wrong word or a shoddy presentation may be akin to committing a career hara-kiri. Here are the habits and attitudes that are a strict no-no.

1  I don’t need to be punctual: Timing is essential. You're a professional now and a 'sorry, my brother spilt milk over my homework' excuse isn't going to work. Your assignment should be finished before the deadline, with enough time to spare, so that you can polish it. Unlike college, a 'C' grade-even once-does matter. If you disappoint your seniors, getting another chance is tough. If your office doesn't run on a 9-to-5 schedule, ensure that you have a fixed time for coming in and leaving, so you can be available during those hours.

2  I want everything, now: Instant gratification may be your buzzword, but it's not going to work at office. You cannot accumulate five years worth of experience in one year, nor can you get the hefty salaries your senior colleagues do. You will only get what your employers believe you're worth. "In the initial stages, don't mix career and money. Your priority should be the job profile based on your capabilities, which will help you hone your skills and grow. Once you're established, the money will come," says Nidhi Gaur, head, HR, Wiley India. Just putting in your best may not be enough. Your efforts will also have to be fruitful. "If you expect more compensation, the worth of the individual should increase along with the cost," says Sunil Goel, CEO, GlobalHunt, an HR firm.

3 This is all I’m going to do: If you stick rigidly to your job description, you may miss out on opportunities to be noticed. Take up tasks beyond the routine ones, especially those that can demonstrate your untapped talents. This also proves that you're willing to take initiative. If you are new, you may get saddled with jobs that others don't want or hours nobody else is willing to put in. If you grumble at being given extra work, it may put off your superiors.

4  I’m the only one who made it a success: No man is an island, especially not in crowded cubicles. In an office, you need to work as a team. If you do well, give credit where it's due, especially to your juniors. Even if you don't get along with someone, be polite. There's no place for anger or tantrums at the workplace. Remember, your electronic mails are being sent through your employer's server, so badmouthing someone on mail or chats in the office could lead to an embarrassing fiasco.

5  What’s a network? Even a genius could hit a roadblock. This is when your network of peers will come to your rescue as you can take their advice. It also helps you stay abreast of the latest issues in your field. Keep in touch with college mates, mingle during conferences and functions, and join a professional networking site.

6  I know everything there is to know: No job is secure forever. The business landscape is changing constantly and if you don't want to be a dinosaur, you'll have to upgrade your skills regularly. You need to stay on a par with colleagues and others vying for your job. Don't expect past accomplishments to suffice. Learn constantly, especially from your mistakes. If a senior corrects you, don't sulk or complain. You'll not only exasperate your boss, but end up repeating your mistake.

7  I’m irreplaceable, I deserve that promotion: If you believe you are the only one who can do the job right, back your conviction with accomplishments. Before you jump at the chance to be promoted, ask yourself: am I prepared for it? A promotion not only means more professional responsibilities, but also changes in personal life. Make sure you are ready to shoulder these. If you aren't, the step may backfire and destroy chances of future promotions. Don't promise to get something done without ensuring that it is achievable.

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