Off-campus drives for freshers: how to apply and get shortlisted

An off-campus drive is a company's hiring round open to students and graduates from any college, not only the colleges it visits. For freshers whose college has few placements, it is the main way into large IT companies and startups.

How a drive usually works

1. Registration on the company's careers page or its national hiring test (for example TCS runs the NQT).
2. Online test: aptitude, logical reasoning, verbal ability, and often coding or technical questions.
3. Technical interview: your projects, one programming language in depth, basic data structures, databases and operating systems.
4. HR interview: communication, relocation, shifts, and the service agreement if there is one.
5. Offer letter by email from the company's own domain, followed by onboarding.

Where to find genuine drives

• The company's own careers page, which is always the final source.
• The company's official LinkedIn page.
• Our IT company jobs and Fresher jobs pages, where every post links to the company's own site.

Read the eligibility carefully: batch year (for example 2025 or 2026 pass-outs), degree and branch, and minimum marks. Companies filter on these automatically.

Make your resume pass the first filter

• One page, in simple formatting, saved as a PDF with your name in the file name.
• Education with batch year and marks, as asked in the drive.
• Two or three projects, each in one line of what it does and one line of what you built, with a GitHub link.
• Skills that you can answer questions on. An interviewer will pick any skill you list.

Prepare for the test

• Aptitude: percentages, ratios, time and work, probability. Practise timed sets.
• Coding: arrays, strings and basic problems in one language you know well.
• Technical basics: object-oriented programming, SQL queries, and how the internet works.

Things to check before you accept

• The offer comes from the company's official email domain, not a free email address.
• Nobody asks you to pay for training, a laptop, a "security deposit" or background verification.
• The service agreement (bond) period and conditions, if any, are written in the offer.

Any request for money is the clearest sign of a fake offer. Read How to spot a fake job offer.