Every year, HR campus teams across India spring into a frenzy of action. They have a single critical objective: to find and recruit the best and the brightest of the students who are just completing their studies and preparing to graduate. Talent acquisition teams have to make hundreds and thousands of assessments, send out hundreds and thousands of invitations, arrange hundreds and thousands of interviews that might involve almost every department in their company.

How could this yearly chaos be made easier and more efficient? That was the question Naman Agrawal (right) and Pranjal Goswami (left), both alumni of IIT Kharagpur, set out to solve in 2016. They built a software tool to automate the process, and launched it in 2017 under the brand Superset. Their aim was to streamline the immense amount of work that college placement cells and HR teams otherwise have to struggle through, by automating all tasks in the campus recruitment process and making it easily manageable from a single platform.

“Automation lets companies skip the weeks and months that they would usually spend gathering and sorting through thousands of profiles,” Agrawal said. “They can also access colleges in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, to greatly increase their ability to find the candidates they most need. And meanwhile, the students can also see and take advantage of many more opportunities via a great UX.”

The most simple and authentic approach for recruiters and students alike

Superset's platform harnesses the power of technology to make the entire complicated, tedious process as easy as possible. When a university or college implements the platform, all their students are onboarded onto it and have the ability to create resumes using a step by step tool.

There are over 1,800 institutes and 8.4 lakh students as of 2020 (over 18 lakh students since the company was founded), and recruiters have access to all of these through that single platform. This includes top engineering colleges such as BITS Pilani University, which has onboarded all its campuses to the platform, and IIT Ropar, IIIT Delhi, IIIT Bangalore, NIT Kurukshetra,SRM University, Manipal University Jaipur, KL University and many more. Prestigious business schools including IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Calcutta, IIM Bangalore, and IIM Lucknow are on Superset's platform as well.

Reaching out to the students of these top institutes has never been made easier. All the recruiters need to do is post a job onto the platform, targeting specific universities or colleges if they wish. Students from Superset’s 750-odd partner colleges are notified instantly, in addition the platform has a directory of 24,000 colleges across the country mapped for easy communication with just a few clicks. Once published, Superset's automated tools will match the job to the most suitable candidates in its huge database. 8.4 lakh students is a mind-boggling number to sift through using old methods – but Superset will identify and invite the right candidates in just a few seconds.

Students too have a great plethora of choices and opportunities opened to them. Once a job is matched to their course, they can apply with a single click, and the recruiters will receive their details and already-prepared resumes. Everything that follows, from emails inviting the candidates for interviews, to the scheduling of the interviews, to the actual video interviews themselves, is done on the platform with just a few clicks. In 2020 alone 48,500 job profiles were placed on the platform by over 3,400 companies, and 1.56 lakh job offers were rolled out.

“Superset is the place where the finest set of college facilitators empower their best set of talent to meet the right set of opportunities. Superset is the platform where the best of three communities come together and interact,” Goswami said proudly of the platform's mission and vision.

To make things even simpler, Superset's platform is wholly online. It is a URL-based SaaS, so neither recruiters nor students need to install new software. It stores data on the cloud, so companies need not manage large volumes of records or struggle with broken lines of communication if recruiters leave or move to a different function.

A great tool for today's disrupted world

In the virtual environment forced upon millions of people today, Superset is not only a source of efficiency and convenience, but a full substitute for the whirl of activities that recruiters and candidates alike would otherwise go through. And even when the world goes back to normal and campus recruitment can be held physically once more, Superset's platform will continue to make the process swift and efficient, to match companies and students with the opportunities that are the best fit for everyone.

Most importantly, data remains in one place on the Superset platform and does not reside in disconnected vendor dashboards or email accounts of employees, which is lost if an employee resigns. Companies have the power to use this data, year-on-year, refine and enhance their own campus hiring strategy using facts and numbers, and get a louder bang for their buck in terms of operational effort and overall better talent for the growth of the business.

In 2020, massive campus hiring organisations such as Capgemini, HDFC Bank, and RPG Group had already led the way in signing up to Superset's platform, and found it better than satisfactory.

Parul Sharma, former Senior Talent Acquisition Consultant at Capgemini, described Superset's platform as exactly a replica of the weekend walk-in recruitment drives that companies would have conducted in previous years. Parul shared earlier this year after using the platform: “This is reducing a lot of paperwork and increasing the automation. Candidates sitting in Coimbatore can attend the interview organised for Chennai or Bengaluru without any travel. While going live on Weekend drives online you are getting a snapshot of the progress of interviews, selections, footfall and the entire summary by the end of the day.”

Also this year, Superset was awarded a place on the Forbes 2021 30-Under-30 Asia: Enterprise Technology list.

Sajith Pai, Director of venture advisory firm Blume Ventures, which has invested a sizeable amount in Superset, says that Superset’s platform is one that tackles a uniquely Indian and hard, non-trivial opportunity.

“Naman and Pranjal are young founders targeting a large prevalent problem in the Indian hiring ecosystem,” he says. “They noticed clear and big problems in the Campus Recruitment process and saw bigger opportunities to solve it using New-Age Tech. The platform they’ve created is robust, full of features and scalable. Getting listed on Forbes 30-Under-30 Asia List is a certificate for the results they have achieved in the past 3 years. Blume Ventures sees true potential in the ambitious team at Superset and will continue to help them scale faster and higher”.