E-commerce and retail firms are bringing cheer in the pre-placement offer season in top B-schools even as institutes grapple to beat slowdown blues. Pre-placement offers are jobs offered to students by companies they had interned with over the summer. Premier B-schools are expecting a positive hiring trend this year, going by the initial encouraging rounds of such offers that are trickling in.

While sectors such as finance, consulting, marketing, manufacturing and IT are usually the top recruiters, e-commerce and retail companies are the new sectors that are recruiting aggressively.

Among the new recruiters, M. H. Alshaya, a top retail franchise operator in West Asia , offered pre-placement jobs at Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Lucknow. The retail company also made offers (posting in Kuwait) to all its six interns from IIM Calcutta.

Piramal has offered a job to a doctor pursuing his MBA at IIM-C, while Facebook has invited all its interns from the institute for interviews. First-time recruiters during the summer placement season include Sutherland Global and Basix, a livelihood promotion institution. So far, students at MDI- Gurgaon have received offers from e-commerce companies such as Flipkart and Naukri.com and retail companies such as Raymond and Madura Garments.

A report by industry body Assocham highlighted that the online retail segment is likely to be worth Rs 7,000 crore by 2015 due to increasing Internet penetration. According to industry estimates, more than one lakh jobs will be generated in this sector by 2015.

“While the slowdown cannot be ignored, new sectors are getting added to our list of recruiters. So in a way, the effect is balanced out and our number of job offers continue to be the same,” said Sapna Agrawal, Head – Career Development Services, IIM-Bangalore. The institute has already received 45 pre-placement offers so far. Last year, IIM-Bangalore saw 97 such offers and it is expecting a similar trend this year.

The pre-placement offer season usually runs throughout the year and sometimes extends till the beginning of the final placements season. But this year, institutes have started receiving these offers just a week after the students finished their summer jobs.

IIM-Lucknow has received more than 25 offers so far. These offers started coming in from June. Last year, the institute got 72 such offers and expects it to match last year’s figures, according to Prof. Pushpendra Priyadarshi, Chairman - Placements, IIM-L.

Some of the companies that have made such offers in IIM – L so far are McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Aditya Birla Group, Hindustan Unilever and Accenture.

MDI Gurgaon is expecting a 20 per cent increase in the number of such offers this year. So far, the institute has already received 24. “Companies want to retain talent and also, it is easier to integrate the candidates in the company after the internship period,” said Kanwal Kapil, Associate Professor, Chairperson – Placements, MDI Gurgaon.

nivedita.ganguly@thehindu.co.in

deepa.nair@thehindu.co.in

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