Pre-placement offers at IITs set for record high this year

KOLKATA: There seems to be a rush to snap up the brightest talent much before competition heats up among recruiters during final placements, going by a spike in pre-placement offers across Indian Institutes of Technology — the offers are set to hit an all-time high this year.It’s early days yet — pre-placement offers (PPOs) continue coming in till November before the start of final placements — but IITs such as Kharagpur, Delhi, Bombay and BHU (Varanasi) have already attracted upwards of 100 job offers each, campus officials said. At other IITs, including Patna and Gandhinagar, the PPO numbers are up to 50% higher than the same time last year, they said. Pre-placement offers — given by companies to students who have completed two-month internship with them — mark a great start to the upcoming placement season, officials said.“It looks like we will have a good placement season,” said Manu Santhanam, advisor, training and placement, at IIT Madras. Amarnath Hegde, professor-incharge of training and placements at IIT Patna, said that after an “overwhelming” response from industry, “we are very optimistic about the hiring trends in 2018-19”. IIT-BHU, with113 offers so far, has already crossed last year’s total tally of 101 PPOs. IIT Gandhinagar, too, has crossed last year’s total tally with 50% jump in number of PPOs so far.IIT Kharagpur had attracted 102-plus offers till Monday while the number stands at 108-plus in the case of IIT Delhi. IIT Madras has so far bagged 91 offers, up 34% from the same time last year. Several multinationals and Indian companies, including Microsoft, Walmart, Nutanix, Tower Research, Texas Instruments, Goldman Sachs, Qualcomm, DE Shaw, Fidelity, Citi Corp, Bajaj, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Wipro, have already made pre-placement offers across institutes. Wipro made pre-placement offers to half the IIT students who did their summer internship at the company. “This is a better process of selecting the right talent,” said Ayaskant Sarangi, senior vice-president, HR at the Bengaluru-based IT services company. “Internships allow us to observe them over a 2-3 month time-frame as compared to a 30-minute campus interview,” he said.Several companies made early offers in some campuses for the first time. Walmart, Bajaj and OYO have offered PPOs for the first time at IIT-BHU, while GE Digital, NVIDIA, Salesforce, Mercari Japan and CodeNation have made their PPO debut at IIT Kharagpur. Mercari and Yes Bank made their first pre-placement offers at IIT Madras; Samsung R&D, Mathworks and Fujifilm Software did it at IIT Patna; and JSW at IIT Gandhinagar. Startups, too, are in the market. IIT Delhi, for instance, has got 14 PPOs from eight startup companies till now. CodeNation — which has offered a package of Rs 31 lakh at some campuses — said it has made offers to 15 of the 17 students who interned with it. “We wish to have 25-30 interns for the summer of 2019 and convert them into PPOs,” said a spokesperson for the company.Abhay Raj Singh Gautam, head, career development services at IIT Gandhinagar, said the institute expects “more PPOs this year than any year in the past” in a testimony to the fact that it’s not just the older IITs, but also the newer ones, that are seeing the surge. Many companies prefer PPOs to final campus placements, because in this process interns get adequate time of 6-8 weeks to work in the company offices, understanding the work environment and culture. “This means more time for the company to understand the student from a cultural compatibility and capability perspective,” said Sameer Wadhawan, head, HR, Samsung India.“It also gives time to students to understand the work environment and the people around. This leads to more successful hiring and larger offer acceptance as it is an informed decision by both stakeholders.”

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