The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh / Hyderabad News : OU job mela, a damp squib

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Sunday, Oct 12, 2008
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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh - Hyderabad

OU job mela, a damp squib

Staff Reporter

All recruitments are for BPO jobs, rue candidates

850 students register at the fair, while 190 get placements
‘Call centre jobs offer students opportunity to hone communication skills’

-Photo: Nagara Gopal

Diligently tuned: Students attending a group discussion at Osmania University job mela on Saturday.

HYDERABAD: The first-ever ‘job mela’ organised by Osmania University on Saturday turned out to be a damp squib, with neither students nor recruiters turning out in great numbers. Though the organisers sounded optimistic with hopes pegged on future fairs, the present fair failed to make an impact when compared with the earlier Career Awareness and Recruitment Drive.

“All the recruiters here are from BPO companies and I don’t want to end up in a call centre job,” said Y.Pavani, a B. Tech graduate who wanted nothing less than a software job. Similar feelings were echoed by Ramachandra Reddy, an MCA student from Kadapa.

“The job fair is a waste of time. All we are offered here are BPO jobs. Contrary to the rosy picture often painted by the media, getting a job outside campus recruitment is very difficult,” he laments.

Meagre number

Validating their dejection was the presence of a meagre 15 companies. A majority of them, including Sitel, Infosys, TATA, and Brigade were recruiting for their BPOs, while the remaining comprised insurance corporations.

Software had scant presence, with Deloitte being the only major company. In all, about 850 students registered at the fair, while 190 got placements.

Head of the Centre for Placement Services P. Maruti Mohan finds fault with the intransigence of the students towards call centre jobs.

“I have been telling them to consider these jobs as a stepping stone. It offers them a good opportunity to hone their communication skills before going for something bigger,” he says.

Monthly affair

He said that the job fair, to be repeated on every second-Saturday of the month, was chiefly meant for undergraduates and post-graduates, as the engineering colleges conducted their own drives.

Terming it as the first activity by the Centre, he said a list of placement officers would soon be put online to make it convenient for the companies to approach for recruitments. Also on cards is the proposal to upload a database of all the registered candidates.

Orientation classes

Companies which registered for the fair by paying Rs.5,000 were asked to conduct orientation classes for the students, before actually going through the recruitment procedure, he said.

He claimed that despite enquiries from about 100 recruiters, the university admitted only 15 due to lack of infrastructure to accommodate so many.

“In future, we will segregate the ‘mela’ into different sections to be conducted at different venues based on the nature of jobs,” he said.

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