GURGAON, India, Sept. 16, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Organizations that aim to hire this season are increasingly shifting to virtual campus placements as they face significant challenges with their traditional campus hiring schedules due to COVID-19, according to a recently launched report by Mercer | Mettl. With COVID-19 disrupting regular campus hiring drives this season, virtual platforms are serving as imperative solutions to conduct campus placements while maintaining social distancing protocols. The report titled ‘Campus Hiring 2020: Challenges, Trends, and Best Practices’ gauges the challenges with the traditional campus placements and the solutions organizations are employing to overcome the disruption and continue with their hiring schedules. It recorded responses from over 400 campus recruiters across sectors, including IT, BFSI & trading, manufacturing, healthcare, government, construction, entertainment & mass media and retail.

Speaking on this industry development, Siddhartha Gupta, CEO, Mercer | Mettl said, “Virtual campus hiring solutions are a great way for organizations to keep up with the hiring momentum and maintain their business sustainability in these challenging times. Campus establishments, too, are exploring ways to make the campus placements smooth for their students. These new-age solutions ensure hiring from campuses are neither delayed nor fraught with contagion risks while maintaining the credibility of the processes.” The two significant challenges that organizations face with their traditional campus drives are engaging the students before the placements and coordinating with multiple campuses, the report reveals. Engaging students by building connections and brand visibility before placements is a challenge for over 55% of organizations, as an increasing number of students today want to work with organizations that align with their visions and ambitions. Additionally, visiting multiple campuses physically and conducting screening assessments of students and interviewing them in the physical setting is another major challenge for companies. About 84% of organizations said booking interview venues and slotting a convenient time without a clash with parallel hiring drives is a major pain point for them. The report further analyzes the use of technology by companies to overcome these challenges and continue with their hiring plans and business as usual. A majority of the institutions surveyed for the report showed interest in innovative new-age virtual tools such as hackathons, ideathons, case study simulators and online contests for better pre-placement engagement with the students.

Regarding screening and assessing students, organizations are increasingly using remote proctored screening assessments that allow them to screen the candidates remotely, eliminating concerns related to malpractices. 22% of the surveyed companies point to cheating prevention and impersonation as their most pressing screening challenge in maintaining the credibility and authenticity of their campus drives. Moreover, companies are adopting virtual interviews for their campus placements this season to avoid conducting them in a physical setting. Students can appear for such virtual interviews from anywhere, anytime. Campus recruiters, too, can easily interview the candidates virtually, in an efficient and hassle-free manner. Organizations leveraging such modern-age and innovative tools enjoy an onboarding rate as high as 76%, the report states.

The report attempts to understand the workings of traditional campus hiring processes in the past, besides assessing how organizations can change their campus hiring strategy to overcome unforeseen disruptions, such as COVID-19. It further divulges how campus placements can be efficiently shifted online, using technology and virtual hiring solutions, making standard procedures resilient to future disruptions. About Mercer | Mettl: Mercer | Mettl provides an Online Assessment Platform which delivers efficient, cost-effective and technology-driven skill assessments that help organizations to build winning teams by taking credible people decisions across two key areas: Acquisition and Development.

Mercer | Mettl is currently partnering with over 4,000+ global companies, 31 sector skill councils and 150+ educational institutes across 90+ countries. Mettl has been acquired by Mercer in 2018, a global consulting leader in advancing health, wealth, and career, and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan Companies (NYSE: MMC), the leading global professional services firm in the areas of risk, strategy and people.

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A wind of change is blowing in the world of European museums.

At a time when numerous African countries are calling for the restitution of works of art that were collected or pillaged in colonial times, the British Pitt Rivers Museum has announced that it will no longer exhibit shrunken heads and other human remains included in its collection of 500,000 anthropological artifacts.

Museum director Laura Van Broekhoven has warned visitors that they will no longer be able to see certain cultural and ritual artifacts that have been exhibited in the UK since colonial times when the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford reopens to the general public on September 22.

These include shrunken heads, or tsantsas, from Ecuador and other South American countries, a child mummy from Ancient Egypt and other human remains.

Instead of these grisly exhibits, visitors to the Pitt Rivers Museum will have a chance to see a large number of installations that raise awareness of the pillage of cultural artifacts during the colonial period, along with racist stereotypes that have been encouraged by their longstanding display in European museums.

"Our audience research has shown that visitors often saw the museum's displays of human remains as a testament to other cultures being ‘savage', ‘primitive' or ‘gruesome'. Rather than enabling our visitors to reach a deeper understanding of each other's ways of being, the displays reinforced racist and stereotypical thinking that goes against the museum's core values," explains Laura Van Broekhoven in a press release.

Although the artifacts are still stored in the reserves of the British institution, Laura Van Broekhoven confirmed that the museum plans to rapidly return them to their countries of origin.

"A lot of people might think about the removal of certain objects or the idea of restitution as a loss, but what we are trying to show is that we aren't losing anything but creating space for more expansive stories. That is at the heart of decolonization. We are allowing new avenues of storytelling and ways of being to be highlighted," points out researcher Marenka Thompson-Odlum, who contributed to the development of the new installations at the Pitt Rivers.

Everywhere in Europe, museums and other cultural institutions are increasingly having to face up to ethical issues posed by the exhibition of artifacts that were pillaged or fraudulently obtained during the colonial era.

A case in point is the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, which recently announced that it plans to return the mummified bodies of two Aboriginal children as well as human bones in a wooden coffin to Australia.

In February of this year, the Australian government had requested the restitution of the mummies and other human remains, which had been in the German museum's collections since 1880.

"The return of these ancestral remains is a solemn obligation. We are pleased to be able to take this step toward righting the historical injustice that brought them to Berlin," said the museum's director Lars-Christian Koch in a statement.