The Hindu Business Line : IT cos go cautious on B-school hiring

Chennai, Jan. 20 IT companies may be gearing up for lower business in the coming fiscal, if their B-school hiring is any indication. Most companies have reduced the number of offers they have made to B-school candidates.

“Last year, 45 per cent of our placements were in the IT sector. But this year they are significantly lesser,” said Mr S. Sriram, Executive Director, Great Lakes Institute of Management. The average salary package offered by IT companies last year was about Rs 11 lakh a year. Though this compensation has not reduced, it has also not increased in line with expected annual wage hikes, he told Business Line without sharing a number.

IIT Madras too saw reduced hiring this year from IT companies with IBM making “single digit” offers to students as compared to the 21 offers it made last year.

The average salary offered to students is “mildly higher” than last year’s average of Rs 8 lakh, said Prof Dr L.S. Ganesh, Head of Department, Faculty of Management Studies, IIT Madras.

“However, the job roles and responsibility for the positions sought for has increased and we value this,” he said.

Prof Ganesh attributes this reduced hiring to the slowdown in the IT industry and the rupee-dollar movement.

Also, the client base of IT companies has not grown so large in the last year that they would need to significantly step up hiring in B-schools, he added.

However, B-schools are not worried by this scenario as they see it as an opportunity for students to enter other industries. “We always wanted our dependence on IT placements to come down to a third of our total placements. This is beginning to happen now,” says Mr Sriram of Great Lakes.

Pre-placement talks at the Indian School of Business, though currently indicating “no discernable downtrend” in IT hiring, have seen increased interest from real estate, media and consulting companies, said an official spokesperson.

A delegation of manufacturing companies made presentations at IIT Madras recently and many students expressed interest in joining these companies, Prof Ganesh said.

“Though salaries may not be comparable to those made by IT companies, we are glad that students are positive about moving to other organisations,” he said. When contacted, IT companies such as Satyam Computer and Infosys said they had not reduced their hiring but were in fact “actively hiring as in previous years.”

However, they did not share any numbers substantiating this. Mr Bhaskar Das, Vice-President, Human Resources, Cognizant, said the company was in the process of drawing up hiring plans for 2008 and that recruitment would depend on client demand and not on factors like rupee appreciation.

Cognizant has one MBA professional for every 30 software professionals.

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