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Slowdown, job freeze hit IIM graduates too

M D Riti, Bangalore

Recruitment freeze, economic slowdown and global recession are finally taking their toll on the young graduates of the Indian Institutes of Management who to their utter frustration found that getting the placement of their choice, this year, was one tough job.

Lucrative job offers are but very few, with most major multinational companies keeping away from visiting the campus, and even those who did, offered jobs that came without that very attractive salary.

So how harsh is reality? Have these brilliant people who invested huge funds in trying to graduate from IIM finally failed to get the dream jobs or have they, in spite of the pink-slips that's doing the rounds in most companies, managed to get those jobs which are the neighbour's envy and the owner's pride?

"I was confident that I would get a job, but I was worried that the quality of the jobs might suffer with most of the prestigious recruiters having frozen recruitment due to the depression," admits Sangeetha Rath of Mumbai, a graduate of IIM-Kozhikode who was hired by HSBC (Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation) as a trainee.

Rath may have been lucky but many found to their dismay that even when they managed to get a job they had to compromise on salary. IIM-Kozhikode, for example, says their average annual salary this time was Rs 597,000 as against Rs 614,000 last year.

IIM-Bangalore says that their average salary this time was Rs 738,000, compared to Rs 760,000 last year.

IIM-Lucknow quotes Rs 698,000 as its average salary this time, which is much lower than Rs 710,000 -- the average salary in 2000.

The students now find that because of the uncertainties of the economic downturn, summer placements are no longer just good training ground but in some cases their only chance of getting a job.

"I did my summer job with HSBC, and I got a good offer from them," says IIM-L's Dhruv Chadha, who got the highest Indian salary at Rs 1.25 million.

Another alumni of IIM-Lucknow Vipul Dujari who will join HSBC in their London office said: "It really is exciting to have gotten the highest paid foreign job this time. At the same time I now I have the responsibility to live upto everyone's expectations."

The other trend to have emerged is students' preference for pre-placement offers, i.e. if they were lucky enough to lay their hands on one.

"I was not worried about getting a job because I had a pre-placement offer in hand," admits Kapil Gupta of IIM-Kozhikode, who is joining GE Capital India Ltd as an assistant manager at the Delhi office.

At IIM-Bangalore, pre-placement offers kept coming from the end of last year. These offers, which are made on the basis of summer internships, numbered 25 this year. Out of these, six were for overseas positions. At IIM-Kozhikode, seven out of 58 students got pre-placement offers this time.

However, lateral placements viewed as most valued were harder to come by this time.

"Lateral placements are always more welcome as you start off above ground zero," says Amar Singh of IIM-Lucknow, who got one in the systems division of Torrent at a pay of over Rs 500,000. Such placements offer jobs at levels higher than entry level.

At IIM-Bangalore, nine companies visited the campus for lateral placement interviews and made 23 offers, while at IIM-Kozhikode 18 students got lateral offers.

The good news, however, is that more IIM graduates seem to be taking up the kind of jobs they were trained at, namely marketing.

In IIM-Lucknow, for example, the functional break up of jobs was as follows: marketing - 47 per cent, IT -22 per cent, finance - 21per cent, general management - 2.9 per cent and operations management - 4.1 per cent.

At IIM-Bangalore the largest recruiters this year were the IT firms and the consumer and industrial product companies with each offering 46 jobs.

Twelve banking and financial services organisations made a total of 37 offers, while top-notch consulting firms, McKinsey & Company and the Boston Consulting Group, made 17 offers.

Meanwhile, IIM-Calcutta says that eighty-eight firms recruited from the campus this year, an increase of 30 per cent over the last year. Some of the prominent firms that recruited from IIM-Calcutta this year were Barclays Capital, HSBC, Citibank, Unilever, Procter & Gamble, ICICI, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Infosys, Cognizant Technologies, IBM, NIIT, HCL Technologies, Ernst & Young, Eli Lilly, Dr Reddy's, Thyssen Krupp, British Gas, Standard Chartered Bank, Coke, Microsoft, etc.

Around 20 per cent of the companies that visited the campus were first-time recruiters.

But unlike the past years when infotech start-ups were the most favoured sector among the job seekers, students this year have shown a marked reluctance to take up jobs in software firms that are not very sound.

The old idea that you could mint money by joining a start-up and help it grow to a point where it was either bought over by an American firm, or raised a lot of money through a public offering, is long dead.

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