A campus drive looks like a hiring exercise. Operationally it is closer to running a small examination centre with a hiring decision bolted to the end, and it fails in the ways examination centres fail.
The single most common failure is network. A platform tested on an office connection meets a campus switch serving four hundred simultaneous assessment sessions, and starts dropping requests somewhere around candidate two hundred. Candidates lose attempts. Some are re-tested, some are not, and the results are no longer comparable.
The second is the rubric. Panels frequently begin interviewing against criteria agreed verbally that morning, which means four interviewers are applying four different standards. Nobody notices until someone asks, weeks later, why candidate 412 was rejected — and there is no answer on record.
The third is the report. It arrives as a spreadsheet, two to three weeks after the drive, by which point the strongest candidates have accepted offers elsewhere. Speed of decision is one of the highest-leverage variables in campus hiring and it is routinely surrendered to reporting lag.
All three are operations problems with software answers. Buffer locally and sync on reconnect. Force the rubric to be entered before the panel can score. Structure the data during the drive so the report is a query rather than an archaeology project.
The fourth failure has no software answer: nobody rehearsed. We now run a dress rehearsal on the actual venue hardware the day before every large drive. It is the highest-return hour in the entire operation.
LARE Editorial · 28 Jun 2026