The recently concluded placement season was significant in a number of ways. Foreign offers were made for the first time on campus. Bloomberg made 4 offers for their New York and Princeton offices, while Indigo Futures, a proprietary trading firm based in Gibraltar, made another 4 offers in the area of options modeling and futures trading for its Gibraltar, Singapore and Dubai offices. The average foreign salary offered on campus this year was USD 66,000 with Bloomberg topping the charts with USD 90,000.

On the domestic front, Goldman Sachs, Caterpillar, Schlumberger, Accenture, and KPMG were the big names added to the recruiter list this year. Other first time recruiters included Kotak Mahindra Bank, SBI Caps, ICRA Consulting, and HP, to name a few. Citibank, Caterpillar and IBM Business Consulting made the highest number of offers.

Finance, Operations and Consulting were the most preferred choices on campus this year.
The banking sector was represented by Citibank, Kotak Mahindra and SBI Capital Markets. Citibank recruited for both its Corporate Banking and Global Consumer Group divisions. Kotak offered profiles in private banking. SBI Capital Markets made attractive offers in the fields of investment banking while IBM and Caterpillar offered profiles in corporate finance.

Avalon Consulting, KPMG, IBM, Accenture and McKinsey KC offered consulting profiles. ICRA’s management consulting division, iMacs, recruited exclusively through PPOs. Caterpillar recruited heavily for their operations profiles including their famed Six Sigma programme. Exciting roles in Analytics were made by McKinsey KC, Grail Research and Hewlett Packard. Infosys and Wipro offered business analyst profiles across various verticals like retail, human capital management, pre-sales etc. Infosys BPO recruited for its Fixed Income Analytics Division.

Bajaj Auto, Henkel and Sterlite Optronics recruited for marketing profiles and HR profiles were offered by IBM, Bajaj, Caterpillar and Infosys.

The exciting lateral offers made on campus were another significant barometer of the success of this year’s placements. The marquis investment bank Goldman Sachs offered 3 profiles in Investment Banking and Global Investment Research including a lateral offer. Schlumberger offered operations profile for lateral hires. Grail Research (part of the Monitor Group), Accenture, IBM Consulting and Kotak Mahindra also made lateral offers. The average domestic salary offered was Rs. 7.8 lpa, a considerable jump compared to Rs. 6.2 lpa last year. The median salary this year was Rs. 7 lpa.

With a total of 90 offers being made, each student had 1.45 offers on hand. The placement team put in a tremendous amount of effort to ensure smooth running of the process, a fact which was well appreciated by all the participating companies. The Faculty Coordinator – Placements, DoMS IIT Madras, Dr. Sanghamitra Bhattacharya says, “The manner in which the placement process is handled at our department by the team of student coordinators is a shining example of what teamwork, dedication, intelligent and sensitive planning, coupled with sheer hard work – can achieve. In fact, our students are our best ambassadors in the industry, which is reinforced every year by the high profile companies which have been regularly participating in our placement process.”

The visiting companies were highly impressed with the process, the hospitality and the quality of students. Their fulsome praises and comments, some of which are highlighted below, reaffirm the impressions carried back by the companies at the conclusion of the process:

“[With so many good choices] I felt like a child in a candy shop” – Dr.Tarsem S.Jutla, Managing Director, Caterpillar India Ltd.
“Very bright and enthusiastic students… [had] an excellent experience and would love to recruit again” – Ms. Sandra Hutchins, Bloomberg LP.
“Quality of students is good. The process was well coordinated” – Apreeta Singh, Goldman Sachs.

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