B SCHOOLS PLACEMENT WOES THIS YEAR (2009)

A year ago, as the India story peaked with the economy racing at more than 9% for the third year on the trot, the elite Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIM-A) took just six days to place all its 270 graduates from its 2008 batch. Hyderabad-based Indian School of Business (ISB) took a day more to hand over its 440-odd wards to blue-chip Indian and global firms.
But that was then. As a decade of exponential job growth drowned under a rising tide of pink slips in 2009, faculty at IIMs and other top Indian business schools realised early on that placements in 2009 was going to be a long haul.The reasons were obvious. Very few are left standing in the world of investment banking, the traditional favourite at B-schools.
Much of the Western world is in the grip of a severe recession, pushing multinational firms based there into layoff mode. The dearth of credit and its knock-on effects on demand have made marketing-intensive sectors like FMCG and durables freeze expansion plans.
Cut to the first week of March. More than a week into placements, IIM-A has just managed to place 200 of its 259 students. IIM-Calcutta (IIM-C), which placed all its 290 students in four days flat last year, has managed jobs for its 265 students after 10 days of a placement session conducted in two parts.
This year, ISB - rated by the Financial Times as one among the Top 20 B-schools in the world - started its campus recruitment season in January. But as of last week, only 250 of its batch of 440 have got offers. Placement officials at IIM-A, IIM-Kozhikode and ISB say the process would spill over into more weeks in the hope that more companies will visit their campuses.
With companies becoming increasingly choosy, B-school managements have also done away with traditional eligibility thresholds. The upshot: Even a firm with a Rs 3-crore turnover managed to grab an IIM-A graduate in 2009. “This year, since the number of visiting companies has come down, we are inviting a lot of firms. We obviously cannot issue them any deadline,” says IIM-Bangalore’s placements chairperson Sourav Mukherjee.
IIM-B saw a lukewarm turnout on Day Zero, and faculty members say salaries being offered are 40% lower than in 2008. However, one student at IIM-B was offered Rs 1 crore salary from an investment bank for an overseas position, said a faculty member who didn’t want to be identified. Reports also abound of students from flagship PGP and PGPX (executive) programmes of IIMs opting out of the recruitment drive to pursue independent ventures. Eleven IIM-A students had opted out of the PGP placement last year, and that number may go up this year, say institute officials.
The slowdown will affect IIMs far less than other institutes, simply because of our brand equity, but nonetheless, they will get affected all the same,” said a senior faculty member at one of the IIMs, summing up the mood.
That sentiment echoes in Tier II business schools where faculty members describe the situation as “precarious”. Many top companies have given them the slip and the placement process in these institutes has been extended indefinitely.
At the Jamanlal Bajaj Institute of Management, officials who didn’t want to be named reported a 30% drop in the number of recruiters. Replying to an email from ET, a spokesperson of the Wellingkar Institute of Management said.