Everything one company's drive needs, sequenced backwards from the date: what to confirm before you say yes, when to freeze eligibility, what to rehearse, who owns which room on the day, and the contingency plan for each thing that reliably goes wrong.
A drive is a one-day event with a two-week tail on either side, and nearly every visible failure on the day was actually a decision not taken earlier. This checklist is written as a countdown so you can lift it into your own calendar. It assumes the surrounding structure — registers, coordinators, published eligibility policy — is already in place; if it is not, start with the placement cell guide. What each round is for, and how modes and offer policies differ, is covered separately in the campus recruitment process guide.
Confirming a date before the Job Announcement Form is complete is the most common self-inflicted wound in campus recruitment. Every field left blank becomes a question asked by two hundred students at once, usually on the day. Treat the JAF as a contract: if a field is missing, ask for it in writing before the date goes on your calendar. Do not paraphrase it for students — publish the recruiter's own wording alongside your notes.
Generate the eligible list by query, not by asking departments to nominate. A query is reproducible and can be re-run if the recruiter changes a criterion; a nomination list cannot be defended.
Students must be able to see the rule that excluded them, not only the outcome. Publish the exact JAF wording next to your list.
Give a fixed period — a working day or two — for students to raise a data error, with a named person and a single channel to raise it to. Most objections are genuine data problems in the register, and this window is how you find them before the recruiter does.
Registration is a commitment to attend, and should say so. Publish the deadline, the consequence of registering and not appearing, and the process for a genuine emergency.
Check the list against students who already hold offers under whatever slotting or one-offer rule your institution has published, and resolve it before notification rather than in the queue on drive day.
After the objection window closes, the list is final and is archived with the drive record. Late additions are the origin of most drive-day chaos.
Convert the registered count into a physical plan. Size rooms to the registered number with a buffer, not to the eligible number, and assume some walk-in pressure from students who believe they should be eligible.
| Item | Detail to confirm | Owner |
|---|---|---|
| Rooms | One room per round type: assessment hall or lab, discussion rooms, panel rooms, a waiting hall, and a separate room for the recruiter team | Coordinator |
| Machines and network | Machine count with a buffer, browser and platform compatibility tested, bandwidth, and a backup connection on a different provider | IT / lab in-charge |
| Power | Backup power for the assessment window specifically, and confirmation that the backup actually carries the lab load | Estate / IT |
| Invigilation | Named invigilator per room with a written brief on what to do about phones, latecomers and technical failures | TPO |
| Documents | Attendance sheets by round, ID verification list, printed eligible list, consent and declaration forms if used | Data owner |
| Recruiter hosting | Arrival and parking, a named host, refreshments, a quiet room with power and network, and campus access passes | SPC lead |
| Signage and comms | Directions from the gate, room-wise lists posted outside each room, and a single announcement channel for the day | SPC team |
The dry run is the step that separates cells that have drive-day incidents from cells that do not, and it is skipped more often than any other. Rehearse on the same machines, in the same room, at the same time of day as the real assessment — laboratory networks behave differently when the rest of the campus is online.
Two briefings, both short, both recorded so absentees get the same information. The student briefing should be about behaviour and logistics; anything about the role itself belongs in the pre-placement talk, which has its own guide.
Build the day as a sequence of owned blocks. The exact timings come from the recruiter's process, but the skeleton below holds for most on-campus drives and gives you something to hand to twenty coordinators.
| Block | What happens | Watch for |
|---|---|---|
| Setup | Rooms opened and checked, machines logged in, signage up, attendance sheets distributed, host in position at the gate | Machines that failed overnight; rooms reallocated by someone else |
| Reporting and ID check | Students checked against the frozen list, seated by roll number, phones collected if the recruiter requires it | Ineligible students at the door — have the criteria printed and one person authorised to say no |
| Pre-placement talk | Recruiter presents; questions moderated by the cell | Over-running into the assessment slot; compensation-only questions |
| Assessment | Invigilated test; failures escalated to a single technical owner | Individual machine failures — have spare seats and a documented restart rule |
| Shortlist announcement | Results collected from the recruiter, recorded, then announced once through the official channel | Unofficial lists circulating before the announcement |
| Interviews | Panel rooms run in parallel; a queue manager keeps the next candidate ready outside each room | Idle panels — the most visible way to waste a recruiter's day |
| Close | Recruiter debrief, results handover, thank-you, departure | Letting the recruiter leave without agreeing when and how results will arrive |
Silence after a drive generates rumour and a hundred individual messages. If results are delayed by the recruiter, publish that fact and a date by which you will chase.
Counts at every stage: eligible, registered, appeared, cleared per round, offered. Reconstructing these a month later is guesswork, and these are the numbers your placement report is built from.
An offer is not in the offer register until the document is. Set a follow-up date for every selected student and hold the file centrally.
Ask three things: candidate quality against expectation, anything about the campus experience you should fix, and their intent for the next cycle. Record the answers in the employer master. This one email is the highest-return activity in the whole drive.
Collect what actually appeared — round types, question areas, interview themes — from the students who attended, while they remember. This feeds your preparation programme and is far more accurate than anything published online.
JAF, criteria applied, frozen eligible list, attendance, round-wise results, offer letters and the debrief note, in one folder named by drive ID. Accreditation submissions are assembled from these folders.
| Failure | Prepared response |
|---|---|
| Assessment platform or internet fails mid-test | One named technical owner contacts the recruiter's platform support immediately; students stay seated; the cell does not announce a decision until the recruiter confirms whether to resume, restart or reschedule. |
| Power outage | Backup tested in the dry run; if the backup does not carry the load, the assessment moves to a pre-identified second venue and the recruiter is told at once. |
| Recruiter team arrives late or short-staffed | Compress the pre-placement talk rather than the interviews, and re-cut the panel schedule with the recruiter before announcing any change to students. |
| Attendance far below the registered count | Have the absentee list ready with reasons, apologise directly rather than letting the recruiter discover it, and apply your published non-attendance rule consistently afterwards. |
| Recruiter changes eligibility on the day | Accept only in writing, re-run the query on the spot, and announce the revised list through the official channel — never let a recruiter's verbal remark become an unrecorded exception. |
| Results never arrive | A documented follow-up ladder: the drive-day contact, then the HR contact in the employer master, at fixed intervals, with the students told what stage you are at. |
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These guides describe process and judgement, not recruiter-specific criteria. Eligibility rules, test patterns, compensation and hiring dates change every cycle and differ between campuses — always work from the Job Announcement Form and test invite you actually receive, and from the current official framework documents for any ranking or accreditation submission.