Has Anyone Recently Been Placed Through VGI Campus Recruitment? A Parent’s Real Look At What To Expect
Last month, I found my 22-year-old son Arjun slouched over our kitchen table at 9pm, stirring cold maggi and refreshing the VGI placement portal for the third time in 10 minutes. “All three of my roommates have posted offer letters on Instagram already,” he said, not looking up. “Has anyone even heard of new placements happening this week?” I’d seen the same question pop up dozens of times over the previous two months in the private Facebook group for parents of VGI’s 2024 graduating batch: Has Anyone Recently Been Placed Through VGI Campus Recruitment? It felt like every other day someone new was asking, nervous that their kid had missed the boat, or that the recruitment numbers the college advertised back in 2020 were just empty talk.
I arranged to meet three other parents from the group for coffee at the city center mall the following weekend. We got a corner table by the window, shared a leftover vanilla birthday cake one mom brought, and compared notes on what our kids were going through.
Rina, whose daughter is a BBA graduate, said her daughter got her offer letter three weeks prior. She’d been placed as a junior HR executive at a large FMCG company that came for the on-campus drive in mid-November. Rina said her daughter started going to the placement cell’s free resume and interview prep workshops the first week of August, before any drives were even scheduled. She went to two separate mock interviews, and the placement coordinator helped her rewrite her resume twice to highlight her internships instead of her college festival volunteer work, which was taking up half the page. “She didn’t wait for the college to call her,” Rina said. “She emailed the coordinator every two weeks to ask if there were new openings she could sign up for.”
Ajay, whose son is a civil engineering graduate, said his son got placed in a mid-sized IT services firm in early December. VGI opened up all the IT recruitment drives to non-IT branches this year, something the college didn’t do when my older cousin went there 10 years ago. Ajay’s son had done a 6-week coding certification on his own over the summer, so he was eligible. The catch? The package was 3.6 LPA, almost 1 LPA lower than the average package the college listed on its website for 2023. But it’s a full-time role with health insurance, and his son took it because he wanted to start working right after graduation instead of waiting for a core civil role.
Meera, whose son is also mechanical engineering like Arjun, said he still hasn’t gotten an offer. He skipped the first two months of prep workshops because he was busy wrapping up his final year project, which required extra lab time. By the time he was free to start preparing, all the core mechanical companies that come to campus early in the season had already finished their hiring. There are still a few smaller companies coming in February and March, but most of the big names have already come and gone.
After that coffee, I sat down with Arjun that night and we went through a few things we hadn’t bothered with before. First, I made him sign up for the make-up resume workshop the placement cell was holding that Saturday. He’d put off going because he thought his resume, copied from a template he found online, was fine. The coordinator cut out two full pages of irrelevant stuff and helped him lead with his summer internship at a local manufacturing workshop, which is what hiring managers for mechanical roles actually care about. Within a week, he got his first shortlist for an interview.
Second, we emailed the placement cell to ask for a branch-wise list of companies that had visited that year, with the average package each company offered. The college’s website only posts the overall average, which pulls up the higher packages from IT and management roles and makes it look like everyone gets that much. Seeing the numbers broken down for mechanical helped Arjun decide to sit for cross-branch IT drives as a backup, even though he really wants a core role. He’s been doing 30 minutes of basic aptitude practice every night after dinner to prepare for those tests, which he wouldn’t have started if we hadn’t asked for that list.
Third, he set a daily reminder on his phone for 8pm every night to check the placement cell’s student WhatsApp group. A lot of last-minute interview spots are posted there with less than 48 hours notice, and kids who don’t check it regularly miss out. He missed one opening for a trainee role two months ago because he didn’t see the message until three days later, so that reminder keeps that from happening again.
Right now, Arjun is preparing for his interview with that auto parts manufacturing company next week. We don’t know if he’ll get the offer. Some of the kids I’ve talked to got placed within the first month of recruitment season, some are still waiting, and a few have already started looking off-campus because they didn’t get anything that matched what they wanted.
The short answer to the question everyone is asking is yes, people are still getting placed through VGI campus recruitment every year. It’s not the automatic, guaranteed job the college ads sometimes make it sound like, though. You don’t just get handed a job for paying four years of tuition. Your kid has to show up for the prep, keep checking for openings, and be willing to adjust their expectations if the role they want doesn’t come available right away. That’s the part no one tells you when you’re touring the college as a nervous 12th grade parent, and it’s the part that makes all the difference right now.
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