Look past the demo dashboard
Most placement software demos open with a colourful dashboard and a job board. Those matter, but they are rarely what goes wrong in October. What goes wrong is a student record that changed without anyone noticing, a subscription that ran out mid-drive, or an audit question nobody can answer because the history lives in someone’s inbox.
This checklist covers the three areas we think placement cells should examine most carefully: quota, verification, and audit trails. Use it with any vendor, including us.
Quota: know what you are paying for
Most platforms charge per student in some form. The details decide whether you end up paying for students who never used the system.
Questions to ask:
- When is quota consumed? On import, on invitation, or when a student actually completes onboarding? Consuming on import means every stale row in your roster costs money. In EzUnihire quota is consumed only when a student completes self-onboarding; importing and inviting are free.
- Can you validate an import before it counts? A CSV with duplicate roll numbers or missing departments should be caught and fixed first, not discovered after it has used up seats.
- What happens at the limit? Does registration fail silently, or do students see a clear message while your admins are told how close you are? Onboarding should pause cleanly, never lose data.
- Can admins see purchased, consumed, and pending at any time? If answering “how many seats do we have left” requires emailing the vendor, the renewal conversation will be guesswork.
Verification: decide who may change what
The value of a placement platform to recruiters rests on one promise: the academic data is correct. That promise needs a process behind it.
Questions to ask:
- Can you choose which fields students may edit? Phone number and skills, yes. CGPA, backlogs, 10th and 12th marks, probably not without review. You should be able to set this per field, not accept a vendor default.
- What happens when a student edits a verified field? The change should go into a queue for your team. Until it is approved, the previously verified value should remain the one recruiters see. A system that shows the new value straight away, with a small “unverified” tag, puts the burden on recruiters to notice.
- Can you approve in bulk? At the start of a season, after semester results, you may have hundreds of legitimate CGPA updates. Approving them one by one is not realistic.
- Can you delegate verification by department? The CSE coordinator should be able to clear CSE changes without seeing, or being able to approve, mechanical engineering records.
A recruiter who finds one wrong CGPA on your list starts doubting every other row. Verification is how you protect your institute’s credibility with hiring partners.
Audit trails: be able to answer “who changed this, and when”
Questions will come from students, from recruiters, from your own management, and at accreditation time. You want the answers in a log, not in memory.
Demand a trail for:
- Every change to a verified field: old value, new value, who requested it, who approved it, and when
- Every stage move in a hiring pipeline: who moved a student from Interview to Offer, or to Rejected, and when
- Every interview schedule change: original slot, reschedules, cancellations
- Every admin permission change: who granted a sub-admin access to which departments
Ask the vendor to show you the log for a single student during the demo. If it takes more than a couple of clicks, it will not be used when you need it.
Delegation: scoped access, not shared passwords
Placement cells are small teams with large rosters, so work gets delegated to department coordinators and faculty. The common workaround is a single admin login shared across the team, which makes any audit trail meaningless.
Look for scoped sub-admins: a coordinator is granted specific departments or the whole university, and can never see or do more than was granted. Every action they take is logged under their own name.
Reporting: segment the way you are asked
Finally, check that reports can be cut the way you are actually asked for them: by department, course, company, job, and date range, including median package and offers per student. You will need this for internal reviews, for NIRF graduation outcome data, and for accreditation documentation. If reports come from the same verified record as the drives, the numbers will match what recruiters saw.
A short scorecard
When you compare vendors, score each one from 1 to 5 on:
- Quota is consumed on completed onboarding, with validation before import
- Per-field edit control and an approval queue for verified data
- Bulk approval and department-scoped verifiers
- A complete, easy-to-read audit trail per student
- Scoped sub-admins with individual logins
- Live, segmentable placement reports
If you would like to run EzUnihire through this scorecard, book a demo and ask us to show each item on screen. For more detail on how each feature works, see the features page.
