Bangalore: Jobs will be harder to land for students graduating from management schools in 2009. The current economic slowdown has seriously added to placement uncertainties with at least one well-known B-school chain reporting a steep fall in the number of job offers.
“I don’t know if I will be placed through campus placements... Things are not good. Numbers are down and salary packets are also down,” said Vishal Mehta, a second-year management student at Symbiosis Institute of Business Management (SIBM) in Pune.
The 24-year-old engineer is not even sure when he will get a job.
If placements at IBS—a chain of 18 B-schools run by the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India—are anything to go by, students have cause for worry. IBS, which starts placements as early as October, has said only 30% of a batch of 4,000 students have been placed, compared with 50% by this time last year.
Job prospects for B-school graduates darkened in the wake of the turmoil in global financial markets that accelerated with the mid-September collapse of Wall Street icon Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. In India, companies have slowed hiring as economic growth slows and they try to weather a credit crunch and market slump.
“The economic slowdown has affected the pace of placements at IBS as some of the recruiters have not firmed up their recruitment plans as yet and are adopting a wait-and-watch policy,” said S.K. Sharma, director at IBS’ head office in Hyderabad which monitors placements at all its campuses.
Tough times: Students at the MDI campus in Gurgaon. Its placement coordinator says there are no job offers from finance companies this year, and the institute has called companies from West Asia for placements. Ramesh Pathania / Mint
This comes in the backdrop of the premier Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) successfully concluding summer placements last month for their 2010 batches. Most of the final placements at IIMs take place in March after the final examinations.
At several B-schools getting ready for final placements this month, fewer companies are coming to campus and recruiting smaller numbers. Worse, some companies are not coming at all.
“Many of our regular recruiters in the banking and IT/ITeS (information technology and information technology enabled services) are not coming this year,” said Arunesh Kumar, a coordinator of the placement advisory team at SIBM. He declined to name the companies as “we are still after them”.
Very few companies have confirmed, Kumar said, adding that SIBM hopes to start placements next week. He said he expected January will be better when companies revise their number of hires. The mood on campuses is sombre. “People keep reading about layoffs in the newspapers and get worried,” said SIBM’s Mehta.
Brokerages such as Karvy Stock Broking Ltd and Indiabulls Securities Ltd did not recruit this year from IBS, said C. Srinivas, dean for corporate relations at IBS Hyderabad.