With the economy recovering from pandemic gloom, the last few months have seen placements at B-schools and engineering colleges kick it up a notch by way of pay packages and the number of recruiters visiting campuses this academic season.

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At IIT Madras, arguably Chennai's most well-known engineering campus, 382 recruiters have been recruiting from a talent pool of 1,382 students as part of an ongoing campus placement drive.

Four days in, placements have taken off at a jaw-dropping pace. On Day One alone, recruiters like Ola Mobility, Microsoft, Bajaj Auto, Ernst and Young, American Express and Kotak Mahindra made 176 offers, which was 43 percent more than the 123 offers made in the entire year gone by.

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In this period, two-thirds of the total number of students attending campus interviews received offer letters, with highly lucrative salaries. While the median pay per student was Rs 14.5 lakh last year, it doubled to over Rs 28 lakh, this season.

"The top salaries would be higher because we got a good number of international profiles when compared to last year," said CS Shankar Ram, training & placement advisor at IIT Madras.

In fact, the last few months have seen big-ticket offers across engineering campuses and B-schools in Chennai that are setting new benchmarks for pay. However, these offers have been the exception and not the norm.

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While the Great Lakes Institute of Management saw its average pay package of Rs 13.5 lakh more or less unchanged for its batch of 2021, some recruiters offered select students what can only be described as a pay-day jackpot.

"Some of the premium brands, like Microsoft, who were first-time recruiters, offered salaries in the in the range of over Rs 38 lakh, which was a new opportunity for the campus," said Balaji Mani, group director of career services at the Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai.

One of Chennai's largest engineering colleges, the SRM Institute of Science and Technology saw 7,111 job offers made this year. The median pay package at SRM was between Rs 10 and 13 lakh, with the best offer of Rs 35 lakh rupees coming courtesy of a Bengaluru-based IT Services firm.

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While the average pay has may have gone up at select campuses in recent months, what hasn’t changed is the portfolio of recruiters. "We have very strong recruitment in the core engineering sector, the analytics and consulting sector, software and information technology and the R&D sector," says Shankar Ram, "These are the prominent sectors that recruit from IIT Madras, and that trend pretty much continues."

While students in last year’s batch faced on-boarding delays thanks to the pandemic, placement coordinators at universities say most companies have made necessary adjustments this year to ensure that campus recruits get to work and sign their appointment letters — another sign that the job market here is looking up.

(Edited by : Jomy Jos Pullokaran)

First Published:Dec 7, 2021 9:46 PM IST