Has Anyone Been Placed Through VGI Campus Recruitment? A Parent’s Honest Update + What We Learned
8 p.m. last Tuesday, I was folding my son Arjun’s mud-streaked hoodies after his weekly cricket game, and my phone wouldn’t stop buzzing. It was the VGI final year parent WhatsApp group, the same one I joined last August when Arjun started his final semester of computer science. Every other message was the same question: “Has anyone recently been placed through VGI campus recruitment?” The mom who posts twice a day about entrance exam cutoffs had already dropped three messages saying she’d heard zero offers had gone out this season, and half the group was spiraling.
I didn’t say anything that night, because Arjun had gotten his offer the previous Friday, but I wasn’t sure how to frame it—because there’s no neat, one-size-fits-all answer. People are getting placed, but it doesn’t happen all at once, and it doesn’t look the same for every kid. Let me back up.
Arjun registered for campus placement back in July, right when final year started. He’s good with coding but terrible at checking emails, so he forgot to log into the college’s placement portal for three weeks. The shortlist notification for the first drive went to his spam folder, and he missed it entirely. It was a wake-up call. On a friend’s suggestion, he started stopping by the placement office every other Wednesday after his last class, just to check the physical whiteboard by the coordinator’s desk for upcoming drives that hadn’t been posted online yet. Most weeks, it only took five minutes. A month in, the coordinator remembered him, and tipped him off about a small drive that wasn’t advertised anywhere: a local software firm that builds inventory tools for manufacturing companies, they only wanted four new grads from VGI, so they didn’t do a big public push.
Arjun went through the rounds: an online aptitude test on campus, a 20-minute technical chat with their lead developer, a 10-minute HR conversation about start dates and salary. He got the offer letter three days later, starting in June, for 4.2 LPA. After I posted his update in the parent group, three other parents piped up right away: one’s daughter got placed in an HR role at a national retail chain the week before, another’s son got a mechanical engineering role at an auto parts factory in Indore, another got a management role at a BPO in Gurugram. So the short answer to the question is yes, people are being placed through VGI campus recruitment this season. It just doesn’t make big news every time it happens, so the silence can feel scary when you’re waiting.
After months of watching this play out for Arjun and his friends, there are a few small, concrete things I’ve learned that might help other parents in the same boat.
First, don’t rely only on emails or group chat updates to stay in the loop. Coordinators at the placement cell handle hundreds of students, they can’t chase down every kid who forgets to check their inbox. Having your kid stop by the office in person once every two weeks keeps them on the coordinator’s radar, and gets them access to those small unadvertised drives that have way less competition than the big mass hiring events. Arjun wouldn’t have gotten his offer if he hadn’t shown up in person that week.
Second, if your kid doesn’t have an offer by the end of December, don’t panic and don’t pressure them to take the first low-paying offer just to “have something locked in”. From what we’ve seen, almost all the larger, higher-paying companies that recruit at VGI schedule their campus drives after the December semester exams, starting in mid-January. Instead of panicking and shelling out 15k to 20k for a private off-campus placement coaching course (I’ve seen half the group considering this), have your kid use the December break to work through the free aptitude and interview practice modules that the VGI placement cell already provides to all students. Arjun did three modules a week for a month before his drive, and he said almost half the aptitude questions were very similar to the practice ones the college put together for free.
Third, if your kid has one pending backlog that they’ll clear before graduation, don’t assume they can’t get placed through campus. A lot of entry-level manufacturing and service-based companies that recruit at VGI allow candidates with one pending backlog. Have your kid ask the placement coordinator to add them to the waiting list for these drives—we already know two kids in Arjun’s batch who got offers this way.
I get why everyone panics. We all paid for four years of college, we just want our kids to have something lined up when they walk across that stage. The group chat goes in cycles: a week of no new offer updates, everyone panics, then a handful of offers come in, everyone calms down for a few days, then it starts again. That mom who was saying no one had gotten placed all season? Her son is studying for GATE and hasn’t gone to any placement drives, so she just didn’t have any first-hand information to share.
Right now, Arjun is holding his current offer as a backup and still waiting for the January drives. He’s still doing his practice modules, still stopping by the placement office every other Wednesday. Some of his friends have offers that pay 2 LPA more than his, some still don’t have anything at all. The season is still unfolding, and there’s no tidy ending to this story. The biggest shift that’s helped the parent group lately is that people have started sharing specific small details instead of just asking for vague updates. That’s way more useful than any generic claim that placements are great or terrible this year.
If you’re sitting in that same group, scrolling late at night wondering if any offers have gone out recently, this is what I can tell you: placements are happening every week right now. It’s slow, it’s uneven, and it doesn’t work if you just wait for the college to hand you an offer. But it is working for a lot of kids, right now. That’s all we know so far.
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