Depinder Deep,a final year student of Engineering in the Baba Banda Singh Bahadur College of Engineering in a Tier III town--Fatehgarh Sahib, Punjab, had never imagined that he would be spotted by a tech firm located in Mumbai and be hired on campus! This could never have happened if it were not for the innovative digital bridge of communication created by CoCubes.com, a portal (www.CoCubes.com), which enables colleges and their students, hidden in the interiors of India, to be visible to companies, located anywhere in the country. The platform also allows large companies to easily manage their nationwide campus recruitment process, at a much lower cost, resulting in cost saving and higher conversion ratios.

A solution for greater reach

There are 17,000 colleges scattered across India and most of them are in Tier II-III cities. The CoCubes team believes that this is where the manpower for India's growth is going to come from.

Harpreet S. Grover, founder, CoCubes, says, "Since recruiting companies are mostly located in the metros, there is a need for an online and SMS-enabled interactive platform to connect colleges and companies."

To this, Vibhore Goyal, also a founder of CoCubes, adds, "I see a lot of growth in SMS-enabled platforms both because of the wider reach mobile phones enjoy among the general public, plus the way they can replace computers in small towns, because maintenance is hard."

He cites a scenario to explain the key advantage of the 'SMS' feature that the portal offers: "For instance, a B.Sc student in a city 50 km from Jaipur may not have an Internet connection, but he can type 'Yes' or 'No' on his mobile to confirm his interest in a job posted by some company. And the company can also communicate to this student, on the go."

Campus recruitments: issues galore

Grover shares a few concerns that have so far plagued the corporate recruitment process and by coming on board, how CoCubes can help resolve those:

• A failed campus visit by a company costs upward of Rs 100,000. CoCubes helps prevent this by providing upfront information on the exact number of candidates interested in the company, thus saving a lot of effort and cost.
• Even the biggest firms in India have only a hazy idea of how the initial 10,000 candidates they started off with, got reduced to the 500 that they eventually hired, and which 100 among these 500 are the best ones.
• Finally, the time lag of up to a year--between candidates' getting a job offer and their finally joining the company, leads to declining conversion ratios. CoCubes helps companies by providing tools to remain in touch with recruited candidates, thus keeping them warm.

Campus recruitment agencies traditionally have been operating through an offline model. Grover reveals that the entire industry is a closed one, where consultants have been charging colleges/companies a humongous sum for each company they bring to campus. This premium is because of the existing information asymmetry where companies have little clue about which colleges to go to, whether students are available or not, how good or bad they are, what is the salary being offered, etc.

This is where an open model like CoCubes fits perfectly, because it brings the entire process online. The information that would have taken a company a couple of weeks to acquire, is now available in seconds.

A college also has the option of either making itself visible to every company or only to companies that it invites using CoCube's login/password tool.