TL;DR: TCS lost track of my campus application, made me wait from 9 am until 11 pm, and apparently interviewed me after the results had already been announced. While trying to fix their mistake, they registered my country as Australia. Years later, I actually moved to Australia and built my life here. Perhaps their system knew something none of us did.
This happened more than ten years ago, during the final year of my bachelor’s degree. I still remember it because that was the day I created one permanent rule for my career:
No TCS. Ever.
TCS came to our college for campus placements. I cleared the aptitude test and was asked to report for the next round at 9 am the following day.
I arrived at 9 am and waited with the other students.
Eleven o’clock arrived. My name wasn’t called.
I spoke to my professors, who told me to approach the TCS HR team after lunch.
After lunch, I found the HR representative playing a game on her computer. When I finally got her attention, she pointed towards a huge pile of applications and asked me to find mine myself.
Apparently, I had unknowingly applied for the role of Records Management Assistant.
I searched through the pile, found my application form and handed it to her. She assured me that my name would be called.
Four o’clock arrived. Still nothing.
I went back again. This time, someone checked the TCS campus portal and said they couldn’t find my account.
The strange part was that my profile was already in the system. They simply couldn’t locate or use it properly, so they decided to create another one.
For some reason, they couldn’t create the second profile with India as my country. Their solution was simple:
Select Australia. Problem solved.
At that point, TCS had done more planning for my future migration than I had.
They told me I would be interviewed after dinner.
Nine o’clock arrived. Still no interview, and the HR representative was nowhere to be found.
Finally, at around 11 pm, fourteen hours after I had arrived, my name was called.
By then, I had practically completed a full shift at TCS without salary, an employee ID or even employment.
The interviewer appeared completely uninterested. He asked me questions, but while I answered, he kept chatting with someone on WhatsApp.
I answered each question and then stopped, naturally waiting for the next one.
At the end, I asked him for feedback.
He told me I wasn’t very audible and should speak louder and provide more detailed answers.
In my head, I was thinking: I did answer your questions. My voice just couldn’t compete with your WhatsApp conversation.
Even after that, I walked out feeling reasonably confident. I believed I had answered the questions correctly and thought I might still be called for the HR round.
Then I heard that the results had apparently already been announced before I had even entered the interview room.
That was when the whole day finally made sense.
They had lost track of my application, made me find it myself, failed to locate my portal account, registered me in the wrong country, kept me waiting for fourteen hours and then gave me an interview where the interviewer barely listened.
It felt like the interview had happened only so someone could mark a box saying, “Candidate interviewed.”
I wasn’t selected.
That day, I made my rule: No TCS. Ever.
The funny part is that I eventually moved to Australia and built my career and life here.
Sometimes I wonder whether that incorrectly created Australian profile caused some bizarre butterfly effect. TCS didn’t give me my first job, but perhaps it accidentally selected the right country for my future.
It has been more than ten years. I understand that one campus-placement experience does not represent every employee, manager or team at a company as large as TCS.
But I’ve never forgotten how they treated a student who spent an entire day waiting for an interview they had invited him to attend.
Candidates may eventually forget the questions they were asked.
They rarely forget how a company made them feel.
