New Delhi: Recruiters had predicted that job placements would be difficult for the class of 2009 at India’s B-schools, which used to brag in previous years about how quickly their students found jobs, the number of offers they received and at what salaries.
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But no one had quite known how underwhelming the 2009 placements season would turn out to be. MBA community portal Coolavenues.com, which provides placements data exclusively to
Mint, said not only was information about placements difficult to access, it was as if B-schools just want to forget about the class of 2009.
Also See MBA Placements 2009: an overview (Graphics)
“It was the class of 2009 itself which just disappeared from the websites of lots of B-schools,” Coolavenues.com said in an analysis of the 2009 data. For instance, the websites of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Ahmedabad, or IIM-A, Faculty of Management Studies (FMS) in Delhi and Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad still list 2008 placement statistics. The link to the placement statistics of the IIM Bangalore, or IIM-B, does not even work.
Also Read Last year’s scorecard
Top management institutes such as FMS and Management Development Institute in Gurgaon, on Delhi’s outskirts, did not participate in this year’s survey by Coolavenues.com while ISB said it would get back, but did not do so. So the Coolavenues.com survey on Page 8 features 13 colleges instead of 19 last year.
Recession-hit: Students at the Indian Institute of Management campus in Bangalore. Management institutes took double the time to place students. Placements are still not over in many institutes. Manjunath Kiran / Mint
This year’s placements season followed the turmoil in the US financial industry that deepened with the mid-September collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., a top recruiter in previous years, the onset of a global recession and a slowdown in the Indian economy. Wall Street firms stayed away from campus hirings.
The CoolAvenues survey produced some interesting findings about the effects on Indian B-schools.
Management institutes took double the time to place students or had rolling placements (when placements season gets extended to provide flexibility to recruiters) in many schools placements are still not complete. Pre-placement offers, or PPOs, declined drastically.
Last year, nearly 30% of graduating students in top business schools were assured of a PPO. Such offers, which allow candidates to sit out the final process, declined 37% at IIM Calcutta, by more than half in Xavier Labour Relations Institute in Jamshedpur and 72% at IIM Lucknow.
IIM-A and IIM-B did not disclose their PPO data.
A number of first-time recruiters and the public sector used the opportunity presented by the absence of Wall Street firms to hire.
At IIM-B, first-time recruiter Jaypee Capital Services Ltd made 10 offers, emerging as the top recruiter along with Boston Consulting Group Inc.International Business Machines Corp. (seven offers), Bosch Ltd (six offers) and Tata Administrative Service (six) followed.
The top recruiters at the same school last year were McKinsey & Co. (15), Lehman Brothers (11), Boston Consulting (11), Deutsche Bank AG (seven) and Bain and Co. Inc. (eight). The public sector recruited in a big way, with the Union Bank of India making 18 offers at IIM-A and 12 at IIM Kozhikode. The other top recruiters at IIM Kozhikode were Steel Authority of India Ltd (12), and Singapore-based Tolaram Group (nine).
Last year, the big recruiters at the same school included Reliance-Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (34), Reliance Industries Ltd (23), Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (13) and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Graphics by Sandeep Bhatnagar / Mint