New IITs are Facing Trouble to Get Attention from Recruiters

This placement season, many of the new Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), are facing a stiff competition in getting enough attention from recruiters. They are playing hard to have their students get picked for a well-settled career.

Most institutes are letting the recruiters take their as much time as they need to select the desired students, despite having little space, insufficient resources and low scope of negotiations to make.

Though this ongoing third edition witnessed better placement scenario than previous ones, yet young IITs are struggling to attract firms to offer job prospects to them.

A placement officer from a newer IIT told that those companies who earlier have already come for placement but did not select any student have not looked back this season. All the while, the students who rejected companies offers in the earlier batch, refused to register again. Besides, the gloomy economy can also add up to the bleak job offer factors.

Faculty of IIT Patna told about the companies taking tests of students and most of them not turning up for the second interview round.

Placement in IIT-Jodhpur commenced on December 1 in sync with others, observing 5 companies - Morgan Stanley, Cognizant, Cisco, Samsung and Oracle offering jobs at their Indian offices. However, these many recruiters are still insufficient and students from mechanical engineering department still need to be picked. To accommodate recruiters the IIT-Jodhpur had to rent 3 blocks of the Jodhpur University.

Up till now Cognizant has selected 7 students from IIT-Jodhpur which makes it the largest recruiter and Morgan Stanley offered the highest salary of Rs 13 lakh per annum.

IIT-Gandhinagar with 44 M.Tech students in addition to 120 final year graduates is expecting 21 registered companies to arrive on its campus for placements, most of which were IT firms. Of the 21, 19 companies have visited and made 39 offers. The maximum students were picked by E-clerx i.e. 12 students.

No slowdown at placements, IIT-K students bag $210,000 pay package

No slowdown at placements, IIT-K students bag $210,000 pay package

Engineering graduates from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) have been getting extremely lucrative job offers from MNCs as well as Indian companies despite the poor state of the economy. The number of companies visiting IIT campuses has gone up this year and several graduates have landed jobs with pay packages of several lakh rupees.

The highest pay package is as high as $210,000 per annum, which has been offered to three students of IIT-Kanpur by Oracle US, confirmed sources in the placement team.

Earlier, there were reports that two of them had declined the offer given by the Oracle US and instead took the Job at Google, but sources confirm that none of the students declined any such offer.

  

The highest domestic package at IIT-Kanpur is Rs 40 lakh per annum, which has been offered to three Computer Science graduates, according to sources. However, they declined to divulge any information about the company's name.

Meanwhile, amidst the good news a few students have been left disappointed as they were eyeing Facebook. However, the social networking firm is not visiting the campuses this year, placement co-ordinators said. Facebook had offered lucrative packages to students in the last few years.

Though, a student of IIT-Bombay managed to get a pre-placements offer (PPO) from Facebook.

Flipkart has picked 36 students while EXL Services has offered jobs to 34 students. At least 250 IIT-K students had accepted the job offers till now.

Google USA, Orcale USA, Linkedin USA, InMobi, EXL Services, Flipkart, Mitsubishi Japan and Sony Japan are some of the companies amongst others which are participating in the placement drive at IIT-Kanpur.

Over 80 companies have visited IIT-Kanpur till day 5th of the placements and a total of 250 domestic and international companies will participate while in IIT-Bombay 230 companies will visit the college.

The number of startups participating in the placement drive has also increased. "Many startups have requested to participate in the placement drive and students are also willing to join them. The packages they are offering are competitive and even some start-ups are paying higher than many big companies," said IIT-Bombay Assistant Placement officer SK Mehta.

To meet the demand of companies and with the large number of participants, IIT-Bombay college is conducting the interview at a separate 10 storey building for the first time. "We are using 10 storey building for conducting placement drive. More than 170 rooms are being used for the interviews," said Mehta. The placement interview generally goes on till 2 am in the initial days.

In four days, 123 domestic and international companies have participated and made 495 job offers. Samsung has picked 42 students, Goldman Sachs 16 students, Microsoft offered jobs to 9 students, ITC to 7 students, Microsoft Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Conductor to 18 students, US-based Epic to 18 students.

First phase of placements at IITs have started on December 1 and will continue till December last second week. The number of companies visiting the campuses is between 200 and 250 in the top IITs.

Education companies: long road to recovery

Shares of education services companies Career Point Ltd, Educomp Solutions Ltd and Everonn Education Ltd are pale shadows of their former selves. While the Career Point stock halved, the latter gave up three-fourths of their value in the past one year.

Unbridled expansion in their heyday and a sudden change in the business environment have hit the companies hard. Educomp Solutions and EveronnEducation are losing money. Profits at Career Point fell sharply, as its bread-and-butter tutorial business was hit by changes in the engineering entrance examinations.

Still, the stocks continue to see lots of action. All three breached their upper circuit limits at least once in the past week and rallied over 10% each. The spurt in the share prices is perplexing as fundamentally no significant development happened during the week.

That said, the companies are moving in the right direction to set their houses in order. Beleaguered Everonn Education has received the approval of the Madras high court to restructure its business. In line with its new promoters’ core expertise in school management, the company has decided to focus on K12 schools (kindergarten to Class 12) and technology-based education services. To reduce losses, Everonn will slowly exit the higher education and capital intensive businesses, the company’s managing director A. Srinivasan told The Times of India. With debt restructuring in process, interest costs are coming down.

Educomp Solutions has also applied for debt restructuring. The company is curbing capital intensive businesses, optimizing the existing school capacities, increasing the focus on collections and it has outsourced the logistical and hardware responsibilities to another firm. Career Point, on the other hand, is ramping up the formal education business, which is more stable in nature. The company expects the contribution of the formal education business to overall revenue to reach 50% in four years, from less than a quarter now.

Investor interest continues to remain poor in most of the education stocks. The sharp fall in share prices has battered investor confidence. As Daljeet S. Kohli, head of research at IndiaNivesh Securities Pvt. Ltd, points out, for investor interest to revive two things have to happen. One is consistency. The operational performance of education companies has been volatile. Enrolments, schools and classroom additions are prone to sudden spikes and slumps. Innovative and intelligent planning of courses can reduce the impact of seasonality on revenues.

The second requirement is pruning debt. Despite being in restructuring mode for some time, companies (except Career Point) are not able to bring debt levels to sustainable levels. Sure, they are refocusing and taking steps to improve profitability. But with no signs of stability emerging, investors would do well to remain cautious about the stocks despite their low valuations.

Crore-plus packages back at IIT-M but Google not offering the highest

After a gap of three years, crore-plus salaries are once again back at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M). Two B.Tech (final year-computer science engineering) students at the premier institute got offers of $210,000 (Rs 1.31 crore) each for international roles at a US-based company. 

The dollar package has risen 40 percent from $150,000, while domestic offer this year increased by nearly 70 percent to Rs 48.6 lakh a year against Rs 28.8 lakh last year, according to Lt Col (Retd.) Jayakumar, Deputy Registrar (Students and Placement), IIT-M. 

While Google offered packages of Rs 92 lakh to three students, a report in The Times of India said Oracle topped the list with the crore-plus packages. AFP Samsung Electronics, Epic, Microsoft India R&D, Oracle, LinkedIn, Deutsche Bank, ITC, and Google were some of the companies that visited the campus. 

About 100 students got placed in 25 multinational companies on day one of this year’s placement season which began Sunday. Last year, 22 companies recruited 95 students on Day One. As many as 1,366 students had registered for placement this year whereas it was 1,282 last year. According to a report in The Times of India Microsoft and Google are likely to unveil compensation packages of around $110,000 (Rs 68 lakh) to shortlisted candidates at IIT-Bombay. Google has offered $120,000 (Rs 74.8 lakh) at IIT-Guwahati. 

Google US also offered the highest pay of around Rs 93 lakh at IIT Kharagpur. Across IITs, the top offers have come in from the likes of Schlumberger, Mitsubishi, Apple and Oracle, and Indian start-ups such as Zomato.