A training institute, coaching centre or online academy promises placement — on a banner, in a brochure, or in a counsellor's phone call. The wording is confident and the evidence is atmospheric: a wall of student photographs, a strip of company logos, a percentage with no denominator, a "highest package" figure with no name attached. A fee is requested, often before any document is shown. Families borrow money against this promise every year.
A student or parent is deciding where to spend 40,000 to 3,00,000 rupees on training. The claim is made verbally or on marketing material; the written agreement, if one exists, is produced only after payment. The same pattern appears in "AI course with job guarantee" adverts and in some paid internship-to-hire schemes. Linked module: 6.1 (How Indian companies actually hire).
Separate the claim from its decoration. Company logos prove a logo was pasted into a design file, not that any student was hired there. Photographs prove photographs exist. A percentage with no denominator is unreadable: 94% of whom — everyone enrolled, everyone who finished, everyone who chose to report, or everyone the institute decided to count?
Five questions turn the claim into something checkable, and they are the whole diagnosis:
Then read the written agreement, if there is one, for the escape clauses. Common ones: the guarantee applies only after attending every session, only above a marks cutoff, only if you accept any offer anywhere in India at any salary, or it converts to a "placement assistance" service — which means emailing you job links. A guarantee that no student can breach is a refund promise; a guarantee with five conditions is an advertisement.
Pay nothing until the five questions are answered in writing. Ask for two or three past students' contact details and speak to them yourself, chosen by you from a list rather than handed to you. Read the refund clause aloud and ask for an example of a refund actually paid, with a date.
Verify independently using the four sources that cannot be dressed up: the company's own careers page, its annual report, its quarterly results page, and dated news reporting that names its own source. If the institute claims students were placed at a named firm, that firm's own hiring pages and results commentary are where you look. If nothing can be verified anywhere, treat the claim as marketing and price the course on its teaching alone — which may still be worth paying for, but on different grounds.
If money is already paid, keep every document, screenshot the advert before it changes, and get the promise restated in writing over email. Written marketing claims are what a consumer complaint can act on later; a counsellor's verbal promise is not.
Apply the same test to every hiring claim you meet, including claims made by your own college, by a senior, by a recruiter, and by this programme. Ask for the company name, the year, and the document. Keep a personal rule: a number without a source does not enter your notes file. When a claim does survive, record its limits alongside it — one company, one year, one batch — because a verified fact repeated without its limits becomes a false claim in one retelling.
Q: "Where did you hear that?" Interviewers ask this when a candidate quotes a market figure — hiring volumes, salary bands, growth percentages. A weak candidate says "everyone knows" or names a coaching class. A strong candidate names the source type, the period and the limits: for example, one large IT-services firm's own quarterly results for one financial year, which describes that firm and not the market. Source discipline reads as engineering judgement, because it is the same habit that stops you trusting an unverified metric in production.