Good start for IIM pre-placement season as job market improves

McKinsey, The Boston Consulting Group, Bain, AT Kearney, Tata Administrative Services, Aditya Birla Group, PepsiCo are among top recruiters

Pre-placement job offers at the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) are climbing. At IIM Calcutta, these offers have increased 34 per cent from last year, while the number has doubled at IIM Raipur. Other IIMs also claim to have seen a substantial rise in pre-placement offers received by their students.

As of the first week of August, 58 students at IIM Calcutta received pre-placement offers and 20 others were called for pre-placement interviews. The total offers in August last year were 58. With 454 students in the batch, the institute said, this year's figure was a healthy start.

Consulting firms again led in offers to students at the institute. McKinsey, The Boston Consulting Group, Bain and AT Kearney made 24 offers in all. McKinsey and The Boston Consulting Group led with eight and seven, respectively. AT Kearney made pre-placement job offers to all the institute's students who interned with it.

Tata Administrative Services, the Aditya Birla Group, Philips and Pepsico also made offers. Alshaya, a retail franchise operator in West Asia offered eight jobs to its interns. Others include Bosch, Nestle, Shell, Vodafone and iNautix.

IIM Calcutta said Deutsche Bank was the first bank to make a pre-placement offer this year. More are expected from investment banks in the following months. Pre-placement interview calls came from Mondelez, KPMG, L'Oreal, Medtronics and HCL.

"Companies seem to be realising the importance of summer internships and are hiring more through this route. The figures show an improvement in the economic situation, as well as the profiles of the students at IIM Calcutta," said Rajiv Kumar, placement chairperson of the institute. Last year, students at IIM Calcutta received 112 pre-placement job offers by the end of the year.

IIM Raipur is receiving pre-placement job offers this year from a wider set of companies in information technology, e-commerce, consumer goods, and consulting. Last year, there were five such offers at the institute, this has doubled.

Pushpendra Priyadarshi, chairperson of placements at IIM Lucknow, said the trend was encouraging. "We have seen a rise in pre-placement job offers in the past two years. However, many companies are yet to announce their pre-placement offers and we are waiting," he added.

The leading sectors making pre-placement job offers to summer interns from IIM Lucknow are consulting, consumer goods and banking. The institute had 470 students interning this summer.

IIM Indore, too, has had a good season of pre-placement offers from consulting, finance, infotech and general management companies. The institute expects better numbers than last year.

Some of the newer IIMs are seeing increased interest. At IIM Shillong, the number of pre-placement job offers and pre-placement interview calls were nine till Thursday. Officials said companies had shown interest in hiring more from the newer IIMs.

Since companies are still in the process of finalising their decisions, definite numbers for other old and new IIMs will be known after a few weeks, but placement officials said companies had expressed their intent to hire more from the newer ones as well. Also, with better prospects for the hiring market after a new and stable government in place, IIM placement official said, there could be at least a 20-25 per cent increase in the number of offers and 10-15 per cent rise in salary packages.