The BIG 2-OH.

We just launched CampusChai 2.0 . This release brings a slew of features that should change the college placement/recruitment landscape in India. Some of the features include

1. Colleges will be able to use our end-to-end placement web service to manage all their placement activities. This includes features like inviting employers, generating placement stats etc.

2. Companies will have the ability to co-ordinate placements with multiple colleges and look at college/student profiles.

3. Companies can drill down colleges by location and placement data.

4. College Alumni will be able to network with other alumni and current students.Alumni can also share information on what it takes to work in their company.

5. Students can gain insight into the companies that the alumni are currently working in.

We are inching closer

Commiting to deadlines is a bad thing. atleast in public. Once you commit to a deadline you have two options,

a. Ship your product no matter how sucky it is.

b. Add x days and proclaim new deadline. repeat n times. (Vista release schedule perfected this technique)

At CampusChai we are working on some really cool stuff. So we are not going to commit to any deadlines, it will be ready when its ready.

What do you folks think is the best code release technique?

a. Users love broken code and sites that don’t work.

b. Code it and throw it out there and let your users figure it out.

c. Make incremental improvements. Make sure it works 80%.

d. Develop an n-tier architecture and put it through a unit, functional,UAT, pre-alpha,pre-beta… testing.

btw, Here is a sneak preview of what’s coming your way.

One big feature coming right up!

A common paradigm across new startup’s seem’s to be the fact that they are actually listening to their users. At CampusChai, we have been fortunate enough to get lots of user feedback and feature requests(we have had more than 150 feedback suggestions/feature requests). While it may not be prudent or possible to implement all of them, we have decided to take on the ones that make the most sense and start making them available. We have a pretty big feature release coming up and we like what we see. We are hoping to release the feature in a week if we think it’s ready.

Anybody want to guess on what the new feature is? (Hint: How do more than 60% of the people find jobs?? )

Intermittent service

We made some changes to our server infrastructure and some of you may have had trouble reaching CampusChai this morning. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Prashanth Singh is a feedback rockstar!

We receive feedback in many ways. A lot of it from our feedback link at the footer, some of it via emails and then you have the ‘prashanth singh ‘ feedback level. We love feedback in all shapes,sizes and forms as any company should. But Prashanth poked around our site from a user experience perspective and put together a set of images with embedded comments.

We wanted to give a shout out to prashanth and thank him for his extra effort. So, if you are a user and you come across anything you want to share, please do so. If you are feeling lazy about using the feedback form, feel free to leave us a comment on this blog.

PS2 sweepstakes

We are giving away a playstation 2 and the FIFA soccer game here at CampusChai. The contest is extremely simple and straightforward. Everybody that signs up at CampusChai gets their own unique url. So for ex: if your login was asha , your url would be www.campuschai.com/asha . You can now publish this url to

1. Your blog sidebar.

2. Your orkut homepage.

3. Your ryze homepage

4. Any other creative ways to use your url

We track your url and everytime someone clicks on your url, you will get points. The user with the most points wins. We have had some great response to our contest. So far, here are the top three publishers

• Kamlesh Bharti

• Sathya Narayan Puja Panda (trailing by 26 points)

• Divyesh Gaind (trailing by 49 points)

So what are you waiting for, signup at http://www.campuschai.com and get in on the action!

Keep that feedback coming!

We have had lots of feedback since our launch(especially in terms of college coverage etc). We have been SLAMMED with stuff to change and work upon. Its amazing that you could have alpha tested your app over and over but your users will find unique ways to break the site. Thats cool and we are not holding it against them. An interesting one was where a user would apply for a job and the auto-reply would end up in our admin mailbox. We have since made the from a no-reply field with the reply-to pointing back to the user. Thanks for all the feedback and keep them coming!!

The Big Picture

Update

Sorry some of you may have received multiple emails. We are extremely sorry about this.

Thanks to all those users who provided us their email at our splash page. Your launch email is being sent out as I type this and fear not , we dont have any devious plans to spam or sell your email address. A lot of you (especially students) emailed us from the splash page wanting to know more about the service and what it would offer, We hope to make some your questions clear in this post

Objective

CampusChai was started with the goal of providing a simple web based service for all campus recruitment related activities in India. We plan to do this by:

Providing colleges with tools to manage their placement strategy.

Enabling employers to collaborate better with Universities/Colleges and Students.

Helping students experience a streamlined recruiting process when launching their career.

We are planning to launch the site in stages. Currently the site covers Jobs, Events(Walkin’s/Campus hiring) , Student Profiles and job interview tips/suggestions. Eventually the site will provide an end-to-end solution to the Campus Recruitment domain. Of course the soon to be released features will stay focussed on the core aspects of our site.

Features:

Create your career profile in minutes. We wanted to provide an easy, simple way to add your details with the minimum amount of fuss and clicks.

We have also tried to make it easy to find Jobs. Instead of a confusing array of search options and checkboxes and the like. We have one search box. You can enter specific keywords,tags,locations or a combination of keyword and locations. So if you are looking for a BPO job in Noida with fresher qualifications, you would type bpo,fresher,noida .

You can also apply for jobs with a single click with no page refresh. Your profile and files will be added to the employer’s applicant folder and the employer will be notified(depending on their settings)

Campus recruitment events are core to the recruitment process and we didnt want you to miss out on them. Employers can schedule events by city or college. If an event is scheduled in your college or city, you will see it on your events page with the upcoming ones at the top. You can then choose to add/remove yourself from the event on the same page.

We also included a goldmine’ section on tips and suggestions on how to tackle interviews etc. The area also covers interview questions and provides students with abilities to comment on questions.

We hope that this gives you an idea of what CampusChai offers from a student perspective. We will cover the employer aspects of the site in our next post. If you are in a hurry, you can learn more <a href=”www.campuschai.com/learn”>here</a>. Do let us know what you think.