This year’s edition of Vantage, the annual recruitements program at Vinod Gupta School of Management (VGSoM), IIT Kharagpur has concluded with 65 companies recruiting 110 students from the institute. The highest annual domestic salary secured was Rs 14.7 lakhs and the average annual domestic salary was Rs 8.93 lakhs, a drop of 22 percent from last yearas placements. The number of first time recruiters on campus was 32. Approximately 20 percent of the students accepted Pre Placement Offers (PPOs) from companies.

Consulting was the most preferred career with 24 percent of the students opting to job offers from this field. Regular recruiters at VGSOM, IIT Kharagpur such as Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Ernst & Young, KPMG and Deloitte participated in this yearas placements. Some new consulting companies like Wipro Consulting Services (WCS), Deloitte US (Hyderabad), Emergent Ventures, Renoir Consulting and Frost & Sullivan participated in recruitments. These companies offered profiles such as Government Reforms and Infrastructure Advisory, Carbon Trading Advisory, Process Innovation, Risk Advisory, Enterprise Applications and SAP Consulting.

21 percent of the students decided to accept finance job offers. The banking and finance sector companies which participated in the final placement process and recruited for the various profiles were Citibank, Deutche Bank, SBI Caps, Irevna, Union Bank of India, Bank of Baroda, SIDBI, Andhra Bank, Care Ratings and Vistasoft. Union Bank of India was the largest recruiter on campus. It made ten offers to students and all these students were offered various grades in middle management. The profiles that were offered by these companies included Corporate Finance, Treasury, Project Finance, Risk Management, Sales and Marketing, Process Improvement and Banking Operations.

Louis Dreyfus Commodities Middle East Ltd. offered international postings to the students interested in the field of finance. The initial training for the selected candidates will be in Europe.

The IT and analytics sector also proved to be popular with 21 percent of the students accepting job offers from this sector. Some of the regular recruiters on campus were IBM, Infosys BPO and the first time recruiters included HP, TCS, Iviz, Metalogic Systems, Couth IT, Kalinga Soft and Pagalguy.com.

This year saw prominent analytics companies like HSBC Analytics, Market Rx, Genpact, First Source, Latent View Analytics and Decidyn Systems recruiting VGSoM students. The profiles that were on offer included financial analytics, marketing analytics, IT analytics
and the niche pharmaceutical market analytics.

The marketing sector was well represented and 20 percent of the students chose to take up job offers from this field. This year also saw the participation by the leading marketing companies like Cadburys, CavinKare, Vodafone, Tata Communications, IMRB International, Dabur Pharma and Novartis. The profiles that were on offer ranged from Sales and Marketing, Market Research, Branding, Marketing & Business Development and Business Analytics.

Nine percent of the students chose to take up operations related profiles offered by companies The companies which participated and recruited from VGSoM include companies like RPG
Group, Maersk Logistics, Vedanta, Tata Telcon, Tata Steel, Bajaj Auto, Voltas, Schindler India, LMJ Group, M N Dastur and Visa Steel.

Another important trend that was noted this year was the
participation of the navaratna Public Sector Units (PSUs) like BHEL and other major PSUs
such as Andrew Yule. The profiles offered by these PSUs were Sales and Marketing, International Marketing, Operations, Business Development and HR.