Guest Post by – Niranjan Yadav, Co-Founder & CEO of Switch Idea
The web has changed everything about how businesses and people work. In our opinion, it has made it much better. No business can now truthfully say that they don’t depend on the internet for anything. The internet is now part and parcel of the professional experience. We believe in the positive way in which the web can make business processes simpler and people more accountable.
Switch Idea is a website that focuses on connecting students to companies so that they can discover the best internships and entry-level jobs in a hassle-free manner. We have said earlier how the internet has transformed business but we still feel that there is a lot of work to be done yet. We have chosen to focus on a small aspect of the recruiting industry i.e internships and entry-level jobs. There is a reason for that. As students and fresh graduates, we felt that there were not enough opportunities for students to connect with companies. Jobs depended more on which college you graduated from rather than how good you were at your particular field. We started thinking about how could we best use technology to solve this problem? The result was Switch Idea and we have been building it for 6 months now. We recently revamped the whole website and made it much easier to use.
As we progressed with Switch Idea, we had an insight. Students on our website apply to the various internship opening posted there. Companies have to view each student’s profile separately and judge whether the student is a match for their opening. If the number of applicants increases as we reach more students, then it will be a very tedious task for HR departments to sort out the various applications. How could we make this easier for companies and HR managers?
We struck upon the idea of a general aptitude test, which pre-screens promising students even before their applications are viewed by an employer. We spoke to a couple of companies and realized that this was a bonafide need. We decided to call this aptitude test, the National Talent Acquisition Test, primarily because we are looking to roll it out across the nation in the near future. This test gets an understanding of a student with regards to their logical reasoning, communication abilities, workplace process understanding, and other employability parameters.
The test currently has nothing to do with core subject matter but is general enough to give an employer an understanding of a student’s capabilities as an intern/employee. Once a student gives the test, their scores are automatically uploaded to their Switch Idea profile. The next time a student applies to an internship or an entry-level job, then the employer gets to view their score and thus it makes selection easier for them. Another benefit that arose from this test was the verification of students on our platform. Every student who gives the test has to be verified in order to give it. Since Switch Idea can confirm details in their profile, companies can also take advantage of this.
NTAT is currently an offline test and we have partnered with Instamojo to get online registrations set up for it. Our experience with Instamojo has been stellar especially because it is a simple product with a simple process. Painless payments with one click. They have also helped us customize their product to suit our needs, which is pretty awesome. We didn’t experience any disruption during the last registration run for this test and we are working with them again for the next one. We would happily recommend it to anyone who would like to collect online payments for their projects/goods/events etc. We look forward to a long relationship with them.
