VFRESHERS

Every year at the end of a gruelsome academic year what students look forward to is the recruitments that take place at their campuses. what better way to showcase your skills and intellectual capability then to work for a prestigiuos company.
 
However, the annual placement at the Mumbai and other IITs is not going to be an affair that it usually is. the five prestigious Indian IITs, Kanpur, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kharagpur, that churn out the best of students that are industry ready will have to battle with fewer companies knocking at their doorsteps this year.
 
60% less IITians have been recrutied this year than in 2007. In 2007 the first 5 days and most of the students had been placed. However, this year it is a different thing altogether. Some of the prestigious companies who had commited to being their were absent. And mind you they were real big names like Dell, RIL, Credit Suisse, Hull and Transocean. 
 
Let’s compare this to last year. Schumberger which supplies technology, project management and ionformation solutions to the oil and gas industry recruited only one student from each of the IITs that is a total of 5 students in all compared to 50 recrutied last year. Last year the highest pay offered was 24 lakhs per annum and this year no one is telling.
 
The recruitments made by other companies also look dismal. FMCG major ITC has hired two students whereas last year it was 15.
 
If one were to compare all the five IITs then Mumbai has had the best response so far. 32 of its students were offered jobs on the very first day and  28 on day 2. But that doesn’t mean a 100% placement. There is a drop of about 68% compared to last year. In 2007, 95 students were placed on the first day itself.
 
The companies who are registering themselves for campus recruitments have decreased drastically. Last year the minimum salary offered was about 4 lakhs and the maximum offered was 22 lakhs. However, this doesn’t seem to be the case in 2008.
 
Major banks like Deutsche, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and HSBC ahve come but are recruiting a selected number of only 1 or 2 students. Most of the other banks or companies are keeping away. Tata Steel so far is the only company whose hiring pattern has remained the same for this year as well as last year.
 
Last year Intel hired around nine students from the Kharagpur campus, Microsoft too hired a few. This year the average salary offered by software companies hovers at around 12 lakhs approximately.
 
Hence the trends for 2008 don’t seem encouraging so far where recruitments from the IITs are concerned. Every year the recruitment drive was the most highlighted event ot the busy year that had gone by and lots of people heard about how someone had broken the glass ceiling where salary offered was concerned. Many a times students got to pick and choose from the offers made to them. They were at times inundated with offers and they surely were the kings! Not so this year. They are forced to hang on really tight once an offer is made to them. Because if they let it go there are many of their IItians hankering for the very same offer.

Via ET