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| March 13, 2000 | ||
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| CAMPUS
RECRUITMENT Sitting Pretty After a two-year lull, prowling companies are outdoing one another by lapping up the cream in record time with never-before options By Ninad D. Sheth with Sharmila Dhal
Paurush Roy, 23, a final-year business management student at the Indian Institute of Management Lucknow, is still waiting for his grade sheets. But last week, the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation came calling with an offer he could barely refuse -- a management trainee at Rs 9 lakh per annum. In Delhi, Amit Mookim, 22, had just completed his MBA from the Faculty of Management Studies last month when Arthur Andersen hired him from the campus as a manager, with a salary of Rs 6.5 lakh per annum.
Graduates from premier institutes landing plum jobs is nothing new. Neither is the practice of top-notch companies scouting for young talent and making direct recruitments from campuses. Come February-March and it's always placement time at these institutes, the students being proferred the best possible positions in the market. But never before have so many companies jumped into the fray, giving students so many options to choose from. From upstart dotcoms to banking, marketing and other MNCS, there are any number of companies in the great campus sweepstakes. And there is a frenetic pace about it all, a mad rush that has seen campuses like IIM-L display out-of-stock boards in less than two days of placement weeks. At IIM Ahmedabad the campus interviews haven't even begun. But faces glow as the 190-odd graduating students get ready to be swept away by world-class companies which appear to be competing with each other to lap up the cream. According to Leena Chatterjee, professor in charge of placements at IIM Calcutta, the boom was inevitable. More companies, many of them global, have come in than previous years, seeking recruits not only for ventures in India but also abroad. At IIM-C alone, there were 100 companies which registered themselves during the placement week. This ensured that all the 201 students graduating this session landed jobs on the campus itself. The placement rate at IIM-L too was 100 per cent. The recruitment rush has invariably pushed start-up salaries by 60-100 per cent compared to last year. Many multinationals have done away with the cap on corporate salaries to give themselves an edge. Others are offering attractive employee stock options. At IIM-l, fresher salaries offered by Infosys at Rs 3 lakh per annum may have seemed much less than the Rs 9 lakh given by HBSC but the lucrative stock options provided more than a match. Even upcoming e-commerce companies prefer to hold out the carrot of stock options, a direct fallout of the surge in the stock markets. Besides offering e-sops with the promise of quick money, dotcom companies are increasingly offering a change in job profiles. The emphasis now is on lateral entry at the managerial level, nurturing, as IIM-C student Siddarth Swaroop says, "the MBA dream of becoming a CEO within a short span". Rather than specialised positions, many companies are offering cross-functional jobs, a present-day requisite for a quicker climb on the corporate ladder. Better still, some of them are luring youngsters with "instant Nirvana" options like Hindustan Lever with its Project Millennium -- you can become a "mini" CEO when you start out -- or NIIT with its e-Maha Millionaire call -- you can launch a dotcom firm without having to finance it. Keeping with this trend, more and more students are opting for courses at management institutes. "Core specialisation with the ability to perform cross-functional tasks is what the best firms are looking for," vouches Pammi Dua, reader in charge of recruitment, Delhi School of Economics. It's true everywhere. Raja Sengupta, a BTech from IIT Kharagpur worked with Tata Steel for three years before he enrolled himself into a general management course at IIM Bangalore. Reason? "I didn't want to stick to my area of specialisation and be left behind," he says. The vision obviously paid off as he has struck a dollar deal at $120,000 (Rs 51.6 lakh) per annum with the Mitchell Madison Group of New York. This holistic perspective seems to be driving the job market today. Old-economy sectors like manufacturing and engineering are no longer the better options because they emphasise only core specialisation. "This year there has been a mushrooming of opportunity with dotcom firms such as Iris and Rediff becoming aggressive," confirms Samiran Gupta, managing director of executive-search firm Access India Associates. "This has for the moment pushed back old-style engineering firms." At IIM-l, Maruti Udyog and Hero Honda had few takers during the campus recruitment drive. The star attractions were HSBC, ICICI, IT giants like Infosys and IBM and marketing major Hindustan Lever. At IIM-B too, management consultants, it majors and dotcoms, banks, financial institutions and marketing firms stole the show. Dream companies. Bulging pay packets. Meteoric growth. It would seem that a course in a premier management institute is all that it takes. But the company-selection process is just as gruelling. "Companies check out students very carefully these days," says Mumbai head-hunter Abhay Contractor. And here too it is the survival of the fittest. "The fact that our students get such good placements speaks volumes for their calibre," says Dr Preetam Singh, director of IIM-l. A highly competitive job market is no doubt a positive index of the country's economy but invariably there is a downside to some trends accompanying it. For one, there is the obvious question of brain drain by a few companies which can pay better. There is also the impact of lateral entry, which many see as negative. "We have emerged from two very bad years," explains Arun Das Mahapatra, general manager of ABC Consultants. "There are seniors in some of these companies from IIMs at almost half the salary. This will lower their morale." But that is not the concern of the management graduates riding an all-time high. |
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Just
six months ago with the economy looking bleak, austerity was the buzzword in
India Inc. Businesses were getting rapidly downsized, jobs were on the
chopping board and salaries had hit a low. But suddenly there seems to be an
upturn, the economy largely driven by a boom in sectors like information
technology, e-commerce and finance. Corporate India is looking up again. And
with it has begun a huge scramble for talent.