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In Conversation With Nandini Pai, EGIA | India's Top Campus Recruiters

Apr 15, 2020 | 4 minutes |

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Campus recruiters play a vital role in MBA students’ careers. They are the folks who gauge your skills and talents, and see if you are a good fit for their company. They are essentially responsible for launching several MBA students’ careers. We at InsideIIM want to recognize some of the top Campus Recruiters in the country. With this in mind, we are excited to feature Nandini Pai on our platform. Nandini Pai is the Campus Recruitment & Employer Branding Head at Edelweiss Global Investment Advisors (EGIA). She’s pursuing an MA in Industrial Psychology from IGNOU, is a Marketing graduate from N. L. Dalmia Institute of Management Studies and has completed her B.Com from Narsee Monjee College, Mumbai. She has over 12 years of multi-domain experience and has worked with the likes of YES Bank, Indus Balaji Private Equity, and Cox & Kings before taking on her role at Edelweiss GIA. We got an opportunity to speak with her regarding her experience of recruiting students, and how she views the future of Campus Recruitment in the country.

Excerpts from the interview:

Q. How has being a campus recruiter enhanced your skills and experience?

Being a marketer by background, I believe in the golden rule of ‘Customer First’. The campus recruiter role is no different. The talent here is brimming with enthusiasm, ideas and energy to make a difference. My role presents me with the opportunity to offer the right launchpad to make that happen. This means putting in tremendous thought and action in shaping their careers, and ensuring internal stakeholders’ alignment towards this objective. That’s how I achieve a balanced combination of the role, mentor, process, exposure and opportunities. 
Q. Tell us an innovation you have introduced in the campus recruitment space that you are very proud of.
The campus recruitment engagement space has become quite cluttered over the years. A different approach my team initiated was to engage with, and empower, the right group of talent consistently throughout the year.  A structured mentorship was introduced with our senior-most leaders who helped the mentees identify their strengths and counsel them to achieve their career goals. This was in addition to live projects and learning programs undertaken to make them ‘future-ready’ for their corporate stint. 
Q. What do you look for in a student when you hire from campus?
Apart from the functional skills and academic performance, I believe there is tremendous merit in considering how a candidate handles failures along with achievements. To me, that demonstrates courage, initiative and the drive to achieve. A lot of focus is on the candidate’s clarity of purpose–their ‘WHY’. Flexibility and problem solving are a must in the current context. I also seek diversity in background and therefore, applied transferable skill sets. 
 Q. What is your favourite question to ask a candidate during an interview?
Campus interviews are great learning for me. In line with my previous answer, I ask about a time in their lives where they worked really hard for something, and failed. What were their learnings from that and how would they do it differently?
Q. Tell us a memorable/funny/inspiring anecdote from your campus recruiting experience.
Our campus recruits present their ‘EdX Talk’ as part of the Edelweiss RISE Campus Program wherein they share their life learning and success stories with the others. In these sessions, I have come across several incredible stories of success of recruits overcoming obstacles related to finances, health, failed startups, heartbreaks, difficult childhoods, battling societal stigma, etc. I consider it our version of the Chicken Soup for The Soul series.
Q. Who makes an ideal campus recruiter?
An ideal campus recruiter:
 Q. What do you see as some of the emerging trends in the campus recruiting space?
The COVID scenario has been deeply concerning for all of us. However, it has brought an opportunity for out of the box thinking. From virtual onboarding, induction, to training and meetings, technology has become a critical catalyst. The collaboration mode is shifting from meeting rooms to mobile phones. Predictive analytics & AI based hiring along with diversity hiring are some other upcoming themes that I foresee in the campus recruitment space.