Recruitment Strategy for Hiring Business Analyst's from Campus

This post should help  the organizations who are planning for their next campus recruitment's

 
Being in the Business Analyst role and have groomed and seen many BA's, following are the  five traits which a ideal candidate should have.

• Listener
• Team Work
• Out of the box thinking
• Interpersonal skills
• Adaptable
• Hardworking  (Of course with smartness )

I wouldn't use this post to explain each of these traits, as we all are aware of what they mean.  However i would like to emphasize on the techniques to identify whether each of the candidate you select possesses those skills or not.

Usually in India during campus recruitment's, some aptitude test followed by a group discussion is used to filter the students. I totally believe in this model, where in you can filter out the people by finding the best out of the all.

Having said that, i believe its not easy to judge someone in a 30/45 mins interview and say that he/she is the ideal candidate.

Here are few techniques which should help the  Employers.

Management games - I have gone through one such game during my campus recruitment (don't remember what the game was called)where there were some 10 people with some assignment and the idea behind the games was to see few things,  like how well you are recognized in the team,  whether you are a follower or a leader ? and the most imp thing is how well you understand the situation (of the game) and identify the strengths of every one at that moment and delegate things.

I believe minimum of 2 such games with the candidate being in 2 different teams with all different people would help the employer to identify  who is more flexible and adaptable with others and most important is problem solving skills.

Functional Discussion - This interview should be more of a discussion where the interviewer should act as Business sponsor, who wants to build an application. He should  ask the candidate on any one real time application (eg: Railway Reservation, ATM machine, Internet banking) which most of us are  familiar with and talk about it. Interviewer should pose questions in a manner where the candidate's real strength comes in to picture.

Example, you would get to know whether the candidate has such IT mindset or not, whether he can think or not. Does he has problem solving ability or not. Is he asking enough questions? or he is just assuming ?


Extra Curricular Activities - This is one more important attribute which should help the employer in identifying how the candidate is. No matter what that is, the focus should be on how sincere is he towards that. How much knowledge the candidate has and how much of time/effort he puts on that extra curricular activity.


Dinner - After filtering candidates based on such criteria, I think its a good idea to take them out for Dinner, here again i believe its a good medium to see how the candidate is in person, how much ambitious is he ?. Is he a nice guy ?  How well he behaves or would say the Rapport he builds, not just with the employers but also with the other candidates who are out for dinner.

Sun Sign -  Well i wouldn't be shocked if after reading this his you don't believe with me on this, but i have seen people with different persona's who justify this role, they are smart , they are vocal , they  are good team worker, they are favourites of their colleagues.

Here are the list of sun signs who i believe justify to this role - Virgo, Aries, Capricorn, Scorpio & Libra.


Now you may think that if these are the people who have all this qualities, then the biggest task for the employer is to sell themselves to the candidates and make them believe why they should join them. They should be open to talk about how the role will shape and whats their career path in the organizations. This  would help the ideal candidate  in making the career decisions.

I hope this post again helps my readers and the prospective employers in finding the right candidate.