Finance, consulting firm jobs make up for the loss in IT sector placements

This placement season, non-IT firms are filling in the gap resulting from a dip in offers in engineering campuses from the traditional number one recruiter among sectors. Among the busiest headhunters now are finance, consulting and core engineering as information technology takes a back seat and is wary of a looming recession.

At Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology (VNIT), IT has been overtaken by the likes of finance and consulting.

“Although none of the job offers have been revoked, IT sector participation has fallen from the lead spot of almost one-third offers to 15-20 per cent. On the other hand, finance and consulting firms are now leading the way so far. However, the placement season is still ongoing so only time will tell the final verdict,” said Kishor Bhurchandi, associate dean of training and placement at VNIT.

Similarly, Amity University, too, has seen consulting, e-commerce and payment gateway firms along with manufacturing and automobile extend offers amid the dip in IT hiring.

“Beyond IT services, we have observed strong demands in consulting companies. Students with similar education backgrounds are hired at good packages for the profiles of business analysts, data scientists, consultants, etc. In addition to this participation of IT product-based firms, e-commerce and payment gateway firms, and manufacturing and automobile companies have increased in-campus placements,” said Anjani Kumar Bhatnagar, deputy director at Amity University’s Technical Placement Centre.

According to Bhatnagar, the low attendance of top IT companies in campus placements will push students to explore start-ups as well as inspire them to pursue higher education in India and overseas. “On the other hand, companies from finance and banking, automobile, e-commerce, electronics, robotics, telecom (with a strong push for 5G in India), artificial intelligence and machine learning will emerge as major recruitment drivers.”

However, IT companies have also been strategic in the extent of hiring cuts that have varied from campus to campus.

For instance, top-rung colleges like Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) and Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE) have not seen a major impact, whereas institutes in tier-II and tier-III cities have borne the brunt of the hiring dip.

According to the placement office of BITS, the institute’s campuses in Pilani, Hyderabad and Goa “haven’t noticed any fall in demand in IT” in the first placement cycle that began in August.

“Some IT majors have verbally conveyed a dip in hiring from tier-II and tier-III colleges. They have given the assurance that the numbers for BITS would not be affected, and have demonstrated this in the first season of hiring,” the office said. It added: “The reason that they have cited for keeping BITS numbers intact is that its talent has been instrumental in helping companies pull through difficult times, because of their superior techno-managerial skills and command over cutting-edge technologies.”

Similarly, MAHE has not seen a significant dip in participation from the IT sector.

“We have not seen such a fall in participation so far from the core IT sector. However, a few of the global players have reduced their intake. The reasons given are global reduction of recruitment numbers due to the onset of recession in the US. Another reason is that these companies have recruited more numbers last year and are balancing them by a reduced intake this year,” its placement office told Business Standard.

It added that the feedback from IT companies, especially global players, suggested the reduced intake will continue till the end of 2023. “The sector is waiting and watching the impact of recession in the US. We are seeing a trend of non-IT companies coming to campus much earlier compared to previous years. This is a good trend and gives us confidence that these sectors will compensate for the reduction in numbers from IT companies.”

A look at the previous year’s sectoral break-up at MAHE shows a slight dip in the share of the core IT sector, from 53 per cent in 2020-21 to 51 per cent in the 2021-22 placement season. So has the IT-enabled services sector, which dipped from five per cent in 2020-21 to three per cent in 2021-22.

On the other hand, sectors like core engineering and consulting/analytics have shown a marginal rise from 23 per cent and 13 per cent to 25 per cent and 15 per cent in this period.

Meanwhile, the placement season has so far looked promising at BITS campuses with marquee recruiters like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Visa, Adobe, Cisco, Uber, Sprinklr and Indeed hiring aggressively with D.E. Shaw picking students at Rs 60 lakh per annum. Some of the new recruiters who visited for full-time hiring in the IT sector were Palo Alto Networks, Komprise, Hilti, Tvarit and Arista Networks, with CTCs reaching as high as Rs 54 lakh per annum.