Robust final placements at top B-schools allay fears of slowdown in hiring

Amid reports of massive layoffs in the IT industry, the robust final placements at top B-schools including the IIMs (Indian Institute of Management) seems to have allayed fears of a large scale slowdown in hiring. According to industry experts, there has been a rise in the number of offers doled out and average pay package offered to candidates from top business schools and this is likely to have a trickle-down effect on the overall market.

There is also likely to be a strong demand for fresh graduates as employers realise that hiring lateral talents at a premium is not helping them achieve the intended RoI (return on investment).

“The IIM graduates are a small cohort…..obviously these are elitist set of students. Even if job markets are bad, they still have 100 per cent placement. But what is coming out definitely what I can measure from them is the number of offers that they get, which shows that how many employers are bullish about picking – is there five or 50 and that talks about sentiments and second is that if the package rates are going up, it shows the bullishness amongst employers. So of the 50 who have gone to IIMs possibly ten of them will pick candidates from there and the remaining will go to the next institution because that demand is still there so there will be a waterfall effect on other institutions too,” Shantanu Rooj, Founder and CEO, TeamLease Edtech, told BusinessLine.

Robust placements

IIM Calcutta, which recently completed the final placement process for the 58^th batch of its flagship 2-year MBA programme, saw a three per cent rise in average yearly salary and close to nine per cent rise in median salary offered to the candidates this year. The institute secured close to 573 offers for the entire batch of 2021-23. Students received average yearly compensation of ₹35.07 lakh this year as against ₹34.20 lakh last year.

The lateral and final placements for the PGP and PGP-BA Class of 2021-23 of IIM Bangalore saw 606 offers, leading to all 512 students who appeared for placements being placed over two interview days.

According to Professor Debolina Dutta, Chairperson, Career Development Services, IIMB, students received offers from reputed companies despite a slowdown in the market. The institute also witnessed the participation of companies from overseas locations like Europe, Dubai and Singapore.

IIM Ahmedabad, which completed its final placement process 2023, saw firms from multiple domains participating across the three clusters. The second cluster comprised of five cohorts including conglomerates, consumer goods & durables, consumer services, pharma & healthcare and retail B2B & B2C while third cluster included 8 cohorts- analytics & IT consulting, BFSI, consumer tech, core manufacturing & infrastructure, enterprise tech, education tech, logistics, and government enterprises. The institute is yet to release its final placement report.

Consulting, finance and product management were some of the key sectors hiring in big numbers across most of the institutes.

Pay package

IIM Udaipur registered 14 per cent rise in the average CTC and 16 per cent increase in the Median. The highest CTC stood at ₹36 lakh per annum and the top 25 per cent of the batch got an average CTC of ₹28 lakh and the top 50 per cent bagged an average of ₹24 lakh. The average CTC of the whole batch stood at ₹20.3 lakh.

The PGP Class of 2023 at the Indian School of Business (ISB) saw recruiters across sectors hiring in large numbers. Despite the global economic uncertainty and the predicted slowdown, 222 recruiting companies made 1,578 offers to students, according to information available on the institute’s website. The average annual accepted CTC stood at ₹34.21 lakh – a 2.5 times increase from the average pre-ISB CTC of Rs 13.39 lakhs.

“The Indian market is steadily improving across the board and the non-IT sectors are hiring and that is a good sign. We are insulated to an extent possible,” Nirupama VG, Founder & MD, AdAstra, said.

Bullish on hiring freshers

Hiring intent for freshers has marginally improved to 62 per cent for the current half year (January–June, 2023) – a three per cent increase over the July–December 2022 half year. The hiring intent across all categories of jobseekers in India – fresh or with experience – has risen to 68 per cent from 61 per cent over the same duration. This steady growth in the job market will create enormous opportunities for freshers, said the TeamLease EdTech Career Outlook Report released recently.         

“We have seen that companies want to go back to basics and hire freshers and train them on jobs as that gives better return on investment to them and it is sustainable in the long term. And hence even though amidst all the news of layoffs that we have been hearing, we still have 67 per cent of the employers who say they want to hire freshers. So the hiring sentiments for freshers are still bullish,” Rooj said.

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