IIM-B grads get picked up for leadership roles

Get chance to work directly with Mukesh Ambani, Shiv Nadar

The final placement for the Post Graduate Programme 2013 at Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore (IIM-B) for the first time witnessed a significant increase in the number of corporates offering leadership roles to students.

The students who received offers in the leadership role will work closely with senior leaders in the companies. Many corporates like HCL, Reliance Industries Ltd, Aditya Birla Group and Tata Administrative Services (TAS), Cisco, Mahindra Group, Hinduja Group, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Cipla, DTDC and Ranbaxy were among the top companies who selected students for leadership roles.

“In the final placement this year we decided to focus on leadership roles for the students. Generally, the students are selected for various operational roles and then groomed for the leadership roles. Our focus this year was to look at grooming the next generation leaders,” said Sankarshan Basu, professor, and chairperson, Career Development Services, IIM Bangalore.

Most notable this around has been Reliance Industries Ltd selecting two students for the company's Strategic Services Unit. They would work towards enabling the chairman’s office to guide and set the direction of the long term strategy for RIL.

IT company HCL Technologies also participated with an initiative –- Entrepreneur@Residence under which candidates selected will have a chance to work directly under Shiv Nadar, Founder & Chairman, HCL.

“RIL selected around six students for various roles in the company, of which two were for the Strategic Services Unit around similar number of students were selected for HCL's  Entrepreneur@Residence,” he said.

According to IIM-B, the final placement witnessed participation of around 381 eligible students. In this year's placement consulting remained the top recruiter. In the consulting domain Boston Consulting Group made 12 offers, while other majors like McKinsey, AT Kearney, Bain and Booz along with BCG saw 34 offer acceptances.

As many as 150 companies participated and made 415 offers in the final placements. While 97 students from the graduating batch received pre-placement offers, 98 offers were made to students with over 22 months of work experience during lateral placements.

Seven students opted out of placements to pursue entrepreneurial ventures, while 21 students were offered international placements from various firms for global locations.  “As an academic institution we have not seen any impact of the slowdown on the campus hiring,” said Basu.  

Global banks like the Bank of America, Citibank, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Royal Bank of Scotland, Standard Chartered, HSBC and UBS also offered students with offers in global locations.

The final placement also saw participation of Avendus Capital and New York based hedge fund, Arga Investment.  Apart from banks private equity firm, the Blackstone Group (London) and consulting firms Greenwich and Roland Berger, hired exclusively from IIM Bangalore offering international locations.

Many students also chose marketing and sales functions and were extended offers from major consumer goods and services firms. Procter & Gamble made five offers based out of Singapore and India. PepsiCo and Airtel offered international and Indian profiles to students selected. Other major recruiters who were offered marketing roles to students were HUL, Nestle, Kraft Foods, Asian Paints, GlaxoSmithKline, L’Oreal and Nokia.

Technology companies like Amazon and Microsoft made 11 and eight offers respectively. In the IT consulting domain, major recruiters who visited the campus includes Cognizant, IBM, Capgemini, Genpact and Glopore IMS among others.