Global consulting companies including McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Accenture dominated this year’s campus hiring at business schools and increased job offers by about 7 percent, data from management institutes showed.
Business school placements are an indicator of the corporate employment situation in the country. The economic downturn after the Coronavirus outbreak had sparked fears that job placements at these institutes would be impacted.
However, the main difference that placement officials noticed was the drop in multiple job offers for individual students.
“Across all the IIMs and even the other business schools in the top 10 list in India, top performing students would typically receive 3-4 job offers. But this year it has mostly been one or maximum two offers. Because while companies are visiting as usual, there is cautious optimism,” said the head of placement at an IIM.
However, despite the economic slowdown the average salaries across the business schools continued to rise 10-15 percent. The average salary across MBA schools was Rs 19 lakh per annum for domestic offers and Rs 55 lakh for international offers.
IIM Ahmedabad
The country’s top business school completed its final placements under three clusters. BCG made the highest number of offers (including pre-placement offers) at 32, closely followed by McKinsey with 30 offers in Cluster 1 of the final placements at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A). Last year, BCG and McKinsey made 23 and 27 job offers respectively.
IIM-A does not disclose salary offers till the placement report is audited by an external agency. However, sources said offers were better than last year, when the maximum salary was Rs 55.8 lakh for jobs in India and $180,645 abroad.
In Cluster 2, Samsung Electronics and CK Birla Group led the hiring with six offers each, followed by Lenovo with five.
Several new recruiters participated this year, including Sachin Bansal’s Navi, Eversana, and Indxx Capital.
IIM Nagpur
The institute said in a statement that the average pay package for its 121 students was Rs 13.21 lakh per annum, slightly more than last year’s Rs 13.06 lakh. consulting & IT were the most sought-after sectors, followed by banking/financial services and fast-moving consumer goods and consumer durables with more than 60 percent of the batch opting for these sectors.
Prominent recruiters include Bain & Co., BNY Mellon, Accenture, Arcelor Mittal, DHL, Deloitte, Dalmia Bharat, Tata Power, TVS, ZS Associates, L&T InfoTech, Crompton Greaves, IQVIA, HCL, Magicbricks, TresVista and Urban Company.
The first-time recruiters included Bain & Co, Xiaomi, Sula Vineyards, NCR Corporation, Salesforce, Utkarsh Bank, Collegedunia, and Zypp Electric.
IIM Bangalore
At IIM Bangalore, consulting firms made 165 of the total of 481 offers. Accenture made 45 offers, followed by 24 from Bain & Company. Last year, offers from consultancies included 18 from Accenture, 23 from BCG and 20 from Bain.
IIM Bangalore also does not disclose salaries till the audited report is out but sources said the offers are higher than last year’s average of Rs 26.18 lakh.
This year e-commerce firms made 55 offers including 34 from, 11 from Paytm, six from Flipkart, three from Myntra and one from Cloudtail.
Sixty-seven offers were made in the finance domain. Among the banks, Goldman Sachs made the maximum of 22 offers, followed by Avendus Capital, 5; Citibank, 5; Blackstone, 2; Deutsche Bank, 2; and JP Morgan, 1. Other recruiters in this domain included Kotak Mahindra, 6; Wells Fargo, 4; Axis Bank, 2); Bank of America, 2; and Barclays, 2.
IIM Calcutta
At IIM Calcutta, 172 companies participated in the final placement process for 467 students.
The average salary rose to Rs 29 lakh per annum from Rs 27.8 lakh last year. The consulting Sector was the top recruiter with 149 students (32 percent) opting for them. Accenture Strategy and The Boston Consulting Group were the top recruiters though the exact number of job offers were not disclosed.
Kepler-Cannon and Arthur D. Little were amongst the prominent first-time recruiters from this cohort.
The institute said in a statement that there were some signs of the pandemic visible in areas like general management where there was some reduction in job roles.
"General Management and Marketing roles came down from 30 percent last year (2020) to 15 percent in 2021. Big names including Hindustan Unilever, Procter & Gamble, ITC, Vedanta and Adani Group continued to hire from the campus in smaller numbers though," said the institute.
Sachin Bansal's Navi was a first-time recruiter from the IIM Calcutta campus in the final placements.
IIM Kozhikode
IIM Kozhikode saw a 4.6 percent increase in job offers in 2021 for its batch of 459 students. It completed its placements with consulting offering the maximum job roles.
The average salary stood at Rs 22.5 lakh per annum which is similar to last year. However, the institute said in a statement that top 50 percent of the students bagged an average cost-to-company (CTC) of Rs 28.9 lakh per annum, an 8.1 percent increase from last year.
Accenture Strategy, Amazon, American Express, Asian Paints, Bain & Co., Bajaj Auto, Boston Consulting Group, Capgemini, Flipkart, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Microsoft, PwC, RIL, RPG and Samsung were amongst the major recruiters.
Bajaj Finserv, BlackRock, Equirus Capital, Franklin Templeton, GoIndigo, L'Oreal, Marsh India, Michael Page and Paytm were among the 51 new recruiters who participated in the process this year.
XLRI- Xavier School of Management
XLRI- Xavier School of Management completed its final placement process for the batch of 2019-21 for its two-year postgraduate Diploma in Management (PGDM) in Human Resource Management and PGDM in Business Management.
The business school said in a statement said that all 358 candidates secured job offers in two days of the final placements.
The institute said 108 recruiters made 370 domestic and international offers. About one-third of the students received pre-placement offers.
The average salary rose to Rs 25.08 lakh per annum from Rs 24.30 lakh per annum in 2020. The top domains based on the roles offered were consulting, sales & marketing and BFSI.
Among companies, Boston Consulting Group, Bain and Co., PwC, Accenture Strategy, Amazon, ITC and Paytm made the highest number of offers.
New recruiters included Mastercard, DE Shaw, Airbnb, DBS Bank, Nykaa, Freshworks, ZS Associates, Tata Electronics, Rebel Foods and IDFC Bank, amongst others.
