Young talent, insane hiring and a marketing dream
Recently we started on the Placement Challenge 2009 – this was a program that was designed by the marketing gang at PG HQ who decided to tackle a whole host of issues and challenges at a single go. For those who know us – nothing makes us happier than hiring that one special person after another, although eating tasty grub comes a very close second or err first (depends on who you talk to!). We had just launched PG Apply – Our online application platform for business schools and were wondering how to get across to engineering college students across the nation.
Now we are this small(?) but efficient company who thinks capital efficiency rocks and the marketing team went onto thinking how it could make all of the above things possible and still end up not spending any money. Ok, so that meant we were going to do a placement drive, market PG Apply, travel across to 7 or 8 cities, administer tests, reach out to around 4000 students and do all of that without spending money from our accounts. Never to shy away from a challenge, the team came up with a solution that was brilliant, extremely well executed and gives further credence to the fact that by hiring the way we do – magic happens.
We were looking to hire for marketing and technical positions – so the team ended up creating a marketing case study that they expected the students to solve. The marketing team found sponsors for the case study booklet and incorporated their names into the case study – the sponsors loved the fact that we were reaching out in a targetted manner to final year engineering students in such a targetted manner across multiple cities. So while we created a case study that would filter for us who to hire, we found sponsors who could fund the operations and we had our marketing team on a roll. The travelling was tiring, challenging and a logistical challenge – but all is well that went well 
At Bangalore the crowds were phenomenal as you will see in the pics below. The two folks on the stage heading the event had joined us around a month before the event and are 23 or younger years of age. I told you we have an insane hiring process didn’t I?
PS: We actually came out of the event profitable. So let us recap – one marketing event + one placement drive + 6/7 cities + 4000+ resumes during selection and recruiting the very best of them and we actually turned that event into a profitable event. I can’t wait for next years placement challenge 
PPS: We thank all the participating institutes for being so helpful and resourceful all throughout to help us manage an event of this scale
PPPS: As of this stage, we’ve shortlisted 36 people (26 tech & 10 marketing) from the event for final round of interviews and hoping that some of them would qualify for a final offer.
Kudos to PG team for growth:mg: at the speed of insanity:p am just going to be a graduate only as f now..so i am looking forward to do summers here:mg:
i am one of the mktg finalist company selected but i am wondering how far has d pagalguy reached vd d placement drive we have submitted our projects and waitin fr reults
it was all a marketting strategy ….none of the 36 finalists were hired by pagalguy….!!!!
how do i know …well i was one of them ….for the developers post….all the candidates had contact wid each other via emails….and none got selected
i know sanyukta personnaly(the one above my post)…even she has not been selected…
@sanyukta, not sure if we made any offers to anyone for the marketing position.
@vaibhav, we have made offers for dev positions and the offers were accepted as well. Sorry you did not make it.
lousy procedure still on ..is pg hirin or not??
@sanyukta – after that comment, I doubt it. ATB
@Vaibhav : As mentioned, offer was made to the best solution to the technical problem given to everyone. All the best.
@Sanyukta : We have all the rights to pass the judgements on our final selection and all the prerogative to be 200% sure before taking anyone.
I was just scanning through the comments and I see some of them need some clarification.
@Vaibhav I personally got hired as a developer. And yes, I did not reply to any of you because I don’t want my inbox spammed with random forwards from people I don’t know (sorry about that).
Guys, they had a pretty high standards for evaluating candidates. Tell me how many of you have indexed your text matter before searching? (for developers) The answer to this question will probably tell you why didn’t get selected.
When you are building something as complex as a search engine think of things in a scalable way. the regular expression approach cannot sustain you in the long run.
@sanyukta you should have been a little more patient!
All the best everyone
@PG-aspirants: Guys, I agree PG is more of an informal setup, but it’s almost hilarious to see candidates getting this casual
Would you guys try this with IBM or Google?
@PG-folk: I was checking your jobs page after a really long time (CAT season). The journo-blogger is still required, after all! Do we get second chances?
Anyway, I’ll probably send you guys “the mail” again in Dec, after giving CAT, just in case.
@Aswin, you can always reapply.