Every March, a familiar ritual plays out across thousands of Indian colleges. Students polish resumes, borrow formal clothes, and wait outside placement cells hoping one interview will decide their career.
For nearly three decades, this system worked. It helped millions of graduates land their first jobs and gave employers an efficient way to hire at scale.
I don't believe it will survive another decade.
Let me be clear about what I mean. India's top institutes will keep attracting recruiters. IIT-BHU, for instance, reported more than 1,100 placement offers, including PPOs, during its 2024-25 placement season, with an average package of ₹22 lakh as of January 2025. Great institutions reduce hiring risk. But they are the exception. My prediction is about the vast majority of India's colleges, where the campus placement model, as we've known it since the 1990s, is heading towards irrelevance.
Not because companies will stop hiring fresh graduates. Because they'll no longer need campuses to find them — and increasingly, because AI is shrinking how many freshers they need at all.
The numbers here are stark. According to talent-analytics firm Xpheno, fresher hiring in India's IT sector fell from a peak of roughly 600,000 in FY22 to about 120,000 in FY25 — an 80% decline in three years. Even as several large firms simultaneously trimmed headcount and redirected the fresher budgets that remained toward AI, cloud and cybersecurity specialists at meaningfully higher pay. TCS, for instance, has expanded skill-based hiring tracks in AI, data, cloud and cybersecurity, while industry data shows that specialised technology roles can command salary premiums of 20–40% over conventional roles. When India's largest private-sector employer signals that demonstrated skill commands a premium while bulk hiring shrinks, the rest of the market pays attention.
{{/usCountry}}The numbers here are stark. According to talent-analytics firm Xpheno, fresher hiring in India's IT sector fell from a peak of roughly 600,000 in FY22 to about 120,000 in FY25 — an 80% decline in three years. Even as several large firms simultaneously trimmed headcount and redirected the fresher budgets that remained toward AI, cloud and cybersecurity specialists at meaningfully higher pay. TCS, for instance, has expanded skill-based hiring tracks in AI, data, cloud and cybersecurity, while industry data shows that specialised technology roles can command salary premiums of 20–40% over conventional roles. When India's largest private-sector employer signals that demonstrated skill commands a premium while bulk hiring shrinks, the rest of the market pays attention.
{{/usCountry}}I've spent almost two decades building a company in the skills ecosystem and hiring talent. The question employers ask has changed. It isn't "Which college did this student graduate from?" It's "What can this person do from day one, and can AI already do the rest?" That's not a subtle shift — it changes the entire economics of graduate hiring.
The traditional model was built for a different India, when large IT services firms hired tens of thousands of graduates annually, degrees served as a proxy for capability, and colleges were the only marketplace connecting employers and students.
That marketplace no longer belongs to colleges alone. Recruiters today discover a developer through GitHub, a designer through Behance, a data analyst through Kaggle. AI-powered assessments let employers evaluate thousands of candidates remotely. And AI itself is now absorbing much of the routine, entry-level work in terms of testing, documentation, basic coding etc. that once gave freshers their first rung on the ladder. The debate shouldn't only be about AI replacing jobs; it's about AI changing how employers identify and even need talent in the first place.
The process itself is evolving too. Deloitte's Campus Workforce Trends 2025 study recorded a 38% uptick in GenAI adoption across recruitment and a 24% increase in pre-placement-offer conversions. Employers are increasingly judging candidates on months of project work rather than a single interview. If I were hiring someone to build an AI product, I'd weigh six months of demonstrated work over 45 minutes in an interview room.
The broader data confirms the divide. India's overall employability rose to 56.35% this year, per the latest India Skills Report. But look closer: MBA employability actually fell, from 78% to 72.76%, even as commerce, science and arts graduates saw gains, reaching 62.81%, 61% and 55.55%, respectively. The market is no longer rewarding education alone; it's rewarding education that translates into demonstrable capability.
It's worth looking abroad, too. It's a common misconception that America's top universities have no campus placement system. They do, just not India's model. There's no single high-stakes exam funnelling hundreds of students into one placement week. Instead, university career-services offices run a continuous cycle of employer info sessions, and students are recruited for both internships and full-time roles throughout the academic year. At many universities, internships can also lead directly to full-time offers. It's slower, individualised, and evidence based. It’s closer to what I'm describing for India than to what we currently run.
Three structural reasons underpin this shift. First, technology moves faster than curricula. A four-year engineering programme approved today can't keep pace with AI models or threats that evolve every few months. Second, hiring itself has changed: the best employers now discover talent through internships and project work year-round, not a January–April window. Third, the internet has democratised visibility. A student from a tier-3 town can showcase work to employers anywhere, without a campus visit as intermediary.
This isn't a temporary slowdown. It's a permanent change in how talent markets function. Once companies realise they can identify capable graduates all year round, with AI screening out most of the routine work freshers used to do, it's hard to imagine them reverting.
This doesn't mean placements vanish overnight, or that degrees become irrelevant. But outside India's small set of elite institutions, placement cells will increasingly become career support offices rather than the primary gateway to employment.
For students, the biggest mistake is treating final year as the start of career preparation. If this prediction holds, every semester is placement season. The better question isn't which companies will visit campus — it's: if a recruiter found my profile today, what proof would I have that I'm ready, and that AI hasn't already made my starting task obsolete?
A certification, a portfolio of projects, an internship, an open-source contribution. These aren't resume fillers anymore. They are the resumes. Colleges need a new success metric too: Not how many recruiters visit once a year, but how many students graduate with skills that hold up against automation and enough practical experience to compete anywhere.
I built my own career earning trust one project at a time. Capability has always mattered more than credentials. Technology has simply made it possible for employers to identify capability at scale and made it possible to need far fewer freshers to begin with.
Ten years from now, I think students will wonder why we ever let one interview, on one day, in one semester, determine an entire career. The future of graduate hiring won't revolve around placement week. It will belong to students whose skills make companies seek them out and who can prove, from day one, that they do work AI can't.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Krishna Kumar, founder & CEO, Simplilearn.