Placements encouraging at B-schools

The final campus placements at some of the leading city-based B-schools have started on an encouraging note this year despite the prevailing economic recession which had sparked off fears of a possible slump in placements.

About 20 companies have visited the campus of Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar (XIMB) so far in the final campus recruitment process which kicked off on January 15 this year. The management institute has so far been able to secure placements for 80-90 students of its current batch of Post Graduate Programme (PGP) in courses other than rural management, consisting 120 students. "There are companies who are keeping their fingers crossed over the impending third quarter results of 2008-09. These companies are expected to visit the XIMB campus later this month as the process of campus recruitment is set to continue till the end of January ", said an official of XIMB's placements committee.

"14 companies have visited our campus and 29 students have already been recruited in this year's placements. However, the placement process has been slow this year as nearly 65-70 per cent of our regular MBA students were placed by the end of January last year", Prabir Pal, director, Regional College of Management (RCM) told Business Standard.

LK Vaswani, director, KIIT School of Management, said, Around 20 companies have visited our campus till now in this year's placements but the intake by these companies has been less this year compared to the previous year. The campus placement for KIIT School of Rural Management is scheduled to begin on February 2 this year.

The final campus placement programme has also started at the Asian School of Business Management (ASBM) and 15 companies have visited the B-school campus so far for recruiting students of the conventional MBA programme. "All the students of ASBM's logistics and supply chain management programme have already been recruited by Gati Limited. Moreover, the 60 students of our other sector specific management programme are set to be absorbed in Pantaloon Retail with whom we have a tie-up", said Biswajeet Pattanayak, director, ASBM.

Institute of Management and Information Science (IMIS) has so far witnessed the participation of 15 companies in its final campus placements this year. The companies which have visited the IMIS campus this year include SBI, ICICI Prudential, Axis bank, HDFC bank and Asian Paints to name a few. Around 52 full-time MBA students of IMIS have been placed till now in this year's placements and SBI has offered the highest package at Rs 6.5 lakh per annum, said a placement official of the institute.