Consulting firms rule the roost in hiring from top B-schools

Consulting firms continue to soak up talent in big numbers in the top B-schools, pipping other sectors in the war for talent.

Numbers across B-schools show companies in the strategy consulting domain recruiting a large number of B-schoolers.

At IIM Bangalore, the Boston Consulting Group led with 20 offers followed by Accenture Strategy (14), McKinsey & Co (13), Bain & Company (10), Deloitte (10) and AT Kearney (9). Thirty per cent of the entire batch received offers in the broadly defined consulting sector.

Apart from the well-known names, other reputed consultancies such as EXL Consulting (10), Alvarez & Marsal (5), Roland Berger (4) and Strategy& (3) picked up candidates from IIMB.

Other prominent recruiters in the consulting space were KPMG (7), PricewaterhouseCoopers (5), Nomura Research Institute (2), PwC Diamond Consulting (2) and Ernst & Young (1).

A total of 411 students at IIMB participated in the placement process this year, while 10 graduating students opted to defer their placement to pursue entrepreneurial or other opportunities. Altogether, this year consultancies recruited 88 students from IIMB compared with 86 last year.

Ganesh Prabhu, Chairperson, Career Development Services, IIM Bangalore, says that in general, consulting companies are aggressive recruiters on campus and offer competitive salaries to get the best students in the batch.

“Their recruitment is not matched to the current demand for consulting, so if they hire less in campus recruitments and skip good candidates, it is very difficult for them to find equally good people in the market later when demand picks up. So they typically hire as many as they find at IIMs who meet their hiring standards every year,” explains Prabhu.

At India’s premier B-school, IIM-A, while e-commerce major Amazon was the top recruiter with 18 offers, McKinsey & Co was not far behind, making the highest number of offers in the consulting domain, — 15. Also in the fray at IIM-A were Accenture Strategy, Bain & Co. and BCG.

At Mumbai-based SPJIMR, among India’s top 10 B-schools, known for large-scale hiring from the FMCG sector, this year was no different. The campus maintained its niche in FMCG hiring, with 30 per cent of the batch of 229 students recruited by FMCG firms, which is a 38 per cent increase from last year.

But, consulting was not far behind as 27 per cent of the class of 2017 secured offers from top consulting firms, similar to the last year. The recruiters included Accenture Strategy, GEP, Deloitte, IMS, PwC, KPMG, Avalon Consulting, among others. The profiles offered were strategic consulting, operations consulting, financial advisory and IT consulting. There were also five international consulting offers.

At IIM Trichy, one of the newer IIMs, the scene is no different.

Of a batch of 104 students, consulting and analytics firms picked up 29 per cent of the students, with BFSI second at 22 per cent. The highest salary offered for a consulting job was ₹19 lakh and the recruiters were Cognizant, Deloitte and Publicis Sapient, among others.

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