Placements are no less than a report card in today's rat race for grabbing the best job. But a placement session where the students and the recruiter are both satisfied is rare. Firms are dissatisfied because they did not get the best and students crib that they could not bag the best offer. But Superset is here to bring order to the chaotic world of recruitment.
At its core, the Superset platform is a B2B enterprise placement automation software for universities — for an end-to-end on-campus placements process. The services they provide range from collecting student database, tracking corporate outreach, creating jobs profiles, automating student communication, collecting job applications, publishing shortlists, scheduling interviews, enforcing policies to generating reports.
So in effect, a university subscribes to the platform and then provides credentials to all of its students to sign up on the platform, through the course of their degree.
With over 100 institutions and all their students on a single platform, employers get single window access to on-campus placement cells across these colleges at the click of a mouse. "Employers not only save cost and time on their current campus recruitment process but can most importantly access latent, untapped talent," adds Pranjal Goswami CTO and co-founder of Superset. "Superset also doubles up as a personal assistant to the recruitment office, since the entire data management becomes seamless and remotely available. The customisable interface removes the errors in data, improves transparency of process and makes information flow reliable."
To start with, the college registers all its students on the platform. Students can create a comprehensive profile for themselves, and then auto-generates their resume from the profile. This eliminates the need for maintaining data in multiple online documentation sheets. "The college then asks its existing employers to sign up on Superset and post a job via the platform. After employers submit the job post, the college reviews it and communicate it to students via the platform," adds Naman. "The necessary eligibility criteria and placement rules are immediately enforced, as screening is automated — the process ensures transparency, eliminates errors, and sends reliable SMS, mobile and email notifications to all students," says Naman, who grew up in a business-family and being an entrepreneur was all he thought about.
"The institution then passes this on to the employer on Superset. So, what used to be a multi-documentation based process, is now simplified through a single-step process for the respective stakeholders, the students, the graduate cell and the employers. Hence, the process becomes fully organised, error-free and transparent," says Pranjal.
Student profiles can be accessed by employers only through the consent and facilitation of the on-campus placement cell of the respective college. Employers can roll out a job opening to a college, which goes to college placement cell for review online. After they review and accept it, then the interested students can apply to the job opening, and the employer can see profiles of all students in this applicants list. The employer can communicate information, shortlists, etc via campus placement cell to students.
While in their pre-final year at IIT Kharagpur, Naman and Pranjal were colleagues at the Quantum Molecular Engineering Laboratory, IIT Kharagpur. "We used to have a static online notice board. Any new announcements or circulars would get published online, however without any active notifications. Users would need to refresh the notice board page manually to check for any new announcements. There was no active intimation or reminder system in place," says Naman." The system had huge limitations. Eventually, Pranjal once missed his Pre-Placement Talk by a global FMCG major. The notification had come at very short notice, and was consequently missed by a lot of students," he adds.
This led to a simple idea of creating a tool “TnP Alerts” for all fellow batchmates, to help them “never miss a deadline again”. "TnP Alerts used to read notices from IIT Kharagpur static placements notice board, and create structured events based on the notice information — which in turn used to push active notifications to students, and reminders 30 minutes before each deadline, all in the form of SMS," recounts Pranjal. "Since SMSs incurred a cost, we rolled out TnP Alerts subscription to all final-year students at IIT Kharagpur at a nominal cost of a cup of coffee, Rs 60. Out of 1400 students, 1200 ended up buying the paid subscription. After students landed a job, and hence with no further need to receive notifications, they used to post #unsubscribe_tnpalerts on social media — which became a popular hashtag on campus," Naman adds.
They believe that rather than waiting for the ‘Eureka!’ moment, one should start with whatever they have, big or small. "We were entrepreneurs first, the idea came in later," says Naman. "As you progress through, more opportunities come your way, and the larger picture eventually presents itself — the small becomes big. The moment we saw an opportunity to solve a small problem, we decided to pursue it, all guns blazing. We just had the urge to build something that is functional and addresses an existing problem."
On the short term horizon, Superset is keen on consolidating and simplifying the entire graduate recruitment market in India by bringing all stakeholders on one single platform. "While we are growing very fast with university signups, we are now also focusing on signing up more employers on the platform. Over the next 2 years, we are targeting a partnership with top 500 colleges in India, and 5,000 employers on the platform," Pranjal adds.
With the mission to make people aware of the plethora of opportunities that exist, helping them prepare better and by streamlining the flow of information, they aim to help each individual embark on a better and strong career trajectory.
