How to run a 90-day placement readiness sprint before season opens
A week-by-week playbook for closing readiness gaps while there's still time to act on them.
Most placement cells discover who's at risk far too late — usually when a recruiter rejects a shortlist and someone asks why. By then there's no runway left to fix anything. The 90-day sprint exists to move that discovery earlier, while a gap is still a gap and not yet a missed offer.
Weeks 1–2: Baseline every student
Run a readiness assessment across the whole batch, not just the students who show up to extra sessions. The students who skip prep are usually the ones who need it most — and they won't self-select into a voluntary workshop.
Weeks 3–8: Targeted remediation, not blanket training
Generic "soft skills workshops" for the entire batch waste time for students who are already ready and don't go deep enough for students who aren't. Split the batch by gap category — communication, aptitude, domain — and run focused sessions for each group.
- Communication gaps: mock interviews with structured feedback, twice a week.
- Aptitude gaps: timed practice sets with weekly score tracking, not one-off tests.
- Domain gaps: pair students with seniors or alumni in that specialisation for short mentoring sprints.
Weeks 9–12: Re-score and triage
Re-run the readiness assessment at week 9. Students who've closed the gap move to interview prep. Students who haven't get a final, intensive push — and your placement cell gets honest visibility into who's genuinely not ready, instead of finding out from a recruiter.
The teams that run this cleanly all do one thing in common: they track readiness as a number that updates weekly, not a one-time test result that goes stale by the time recruiters show up.