It's that time of the year again when students shed their old blue jeans for blazers and ties and the company HR teams are in a frenzy to harvest the best talent from colleges.

“This year was especially good, as we have achieved almost 98 per cent placement, our best year to date in campus hiring,” says Prof K.S. Sridhar, Dean, Training and Placement, PESIT, a Bangalore-based engineering college.

Mr Priti Rajora, Global Head, Talent Acquisition, Wipro, says it has been an extremely hectic season for most campus recruiters. Also, IT sector continues to be the top career preference and is considered as an industry with a ‘bright future'.

While students and placement officers at tech colleges are sighing with relief at the fag end of the campus hiring process, companies too are happy with the talent booty that they have garnered. IT companies were the largest hirers with the top ones already reaching the target hiring numbers.

The acceptance rate of offers this year ranged between 70 per cent and 75 per cent, a notch below last year when the economy was still shaky, said placement sources.

TCS has already made 35,000 offers from visits to 310 colleges so far, Infosys extending 25,000 offers so far. Wipro visits the top 100 engineering colleges in the country every year.

The number of fresher hiring this year has jumped 50-75 per cent, while the salary range has remained unchanged: between Rs 3 lakh and Rs 3.5 lakh, across all companies.

Day Zero slot

Mr Amit Bansal, Co-Founder and CEO, Purple Leap, a company involved in building workplace ready professionals, says that the top ten companies would hire one lakh students from 1,100 campuses.

“I think most of these companies would also do about 30 per cent just-in-time hiring later this year.” According to industry estimates, around 600,000 engineers are expected to graduate from about 3,000 campuses this year.

The trend this year is of multiple companies vying for the Day Zero slot in all the top colleges. Infosys has also clarified that it has turned down visits to several colleges where it has been denied the Day Zero slot.

“We do not want to visit colleges where we do not get the Day Zero slot,” Mr Mohandas Pai, Member of the Board and Director, HR, Education, Research and Administration, had said during the Q3 results last month.

Quality of students

Mr Ajoy Mukherjee, Global HR Head, Tata Consultancy Services, said that the interaction the company has been having with the academia has yielded some visible results in the quality of students that graduate, but ‘communication skills is still not up to the mark.'

“There are some exceptional students, but we need to do some handholding in our training programmes,” he said.

Infosys too has been keenly studying the performance parameters and quality of students over the years.

“We focus on those colleges that provide us with better quality students to meet the growing competitive needs of the market and industry. The corporate-academia relationship is one of the contributing factors for this,” said an Infosys spokesperson.

Wipro has actively been taking part in curriculum development where it uses its technology expertise to shape future technology professional, says Ms Rajora.

“We have seen a noticeable enhancement in students who get covered in some of our drives to be very well prepared to face the campus-to-career transition.”

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