Average CTC up 8% as consulting firms lead placement offers at ISB

Following consulting were recruiters from banking, financial services & insurance (BFSI), pharma and other sectors.

The Indian School of Business (ISB) has belied fears in a pandemic year to post an 8.32 per cent rise in the annual salaries on offer for its Post Graduate Programme (PGP) students, with one in three jobs coming from consulting firms.

The average cost-to-company (CTC) package rose to Rs 28.29 lakh per annum after the recently concluded final round of placement for the 2021 PGP batch. Last year, the average CTC was Rs 26.12 lakh.

A total of 1,145 offers were made this year, of which consulting firms made up 34 per cent or 388 offers across strategy, technology, transactional and operational consulting space. The top consulting firms included McKinsey & Company, Deloitte India, Deloitte USI, Accenture Solutions, Bain & Company, Kearney, PwC, ZS Associates, KPMG, GEP Solutions, Alvarez and Marsal India, L.E.K Consulting, Arthur D. Little, Ernst & Young, EVERSANA, Dalberg and Intueri Consulting.

Consulting was followed by recruiters from banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), pharma/healthcare, IT/ITeS and FMCG/retail, among others.

With 9.5 per cent of the total offers, the BFSI segment featured leading private and multinational banks such as ICICI, Axis, Yes Bank, Citibank, Credit Suisse, Barclays and Wells Fargo.

In investment banking, Capitel Partners and venture capital firm Matrix Partners continued hiring from ISB. With non-BFSI firms hiring for finance roles, ISB saw offers for roles such as corporate finance, treasury, private banking, investment management, investment banking and fintech.

Start-ups in areas such as payment solutions, analytics, healthtech, education, agritech and retail also hired students for technology and product management.

Almost a quarter of the offers came from IT/ITeS/technology and e-commerce, with prominent recruiters like Microsoft, Flipkart, Uber, Cisco, Atlassian, RazorPay, Myntra, Ola Electric, Zynga, Electronic Arts, Nykaa, HiLabs and BeatO hiring for product, sales, project management, strategy and operations within the tech space.

Conglomerates such as Reliance and Adani also continued to engage with ISB to fulfil their leadership/management trainee programmes. On the other hand, five per cent of the offers came from pharma/healthcare, while sales and marketing and FMCG multinationals offered jobs in supply chain, operations, strategy and finance. Marquee recruiters in the domain included HUL, Procter and Gamble, Col­gate, ITC, AB InBev, L’Oreal and Samsung.

Also, the urban mobility industry extended 35 offers, apart from companies from fintech, edtech, agritech and gaming also showing interest.

Organised virtually, the placements saw an average offer per company of 6.18. Acco­rding to ISB Dean Rajendra Srivastava, the unprecedented global crisis gave ISB an opportunity to reinvent and reorient teaching modules and learning approaches.

“The right calibration and future-ready focus on technology and analytics enabled our students to find their place in key leadership and management positions in various organisations. ISB has always been a repository for the finest aptitude and new skill sets, and this year’s placement reiterates this fact,” he added.

ISB, which had 40 per cent women in the 2021 cohort, saw women-focused hiring programmes such as Citibank’s Catalyst and Axis Bank’s WE Lead that picked candidates for senior and mid-level leadership positions. Women candidates bagged 24 leadership roles from leading companies.