IIM Lucknow students get 100% final placements in three days; IT sector recruitment likely to surge this year

All the 460 students of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Lucknow got final placements in record three days. A total of 147 domestic and international companies including e-commerce majors such as Amazon and Flipkart thronged the campus to hire talents, said media reports. The students were reportedly offered jobs in the top four segments namely consulting, finance, sales and marketing and business development including some extremely sought after and niche profiles in the finance domain, said a report in the Hindustan Times. IIM-Lucknow, however, did not divulge the pay packages of the students, the report said. [caption id=“attachment_4247633” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] File image of IIM Lucknow. News 18.[/caption] The top segments based on roles offered were consulting (32 percent), general management (14 percent), finance (16 percent), sales and marketing (16 percent), e-Commerce (15 percent) and systems/IT (10 percent), said a report in the Business Standard. Firms including Alvarez & Marsal, Aditya Birla Group (ABG), Bain & Co, Hindustan Unilever, JP Morgan Chase, MasterCard Advisors, McKinsey and Company and Boston Consulting Group (BCG, besides top recruiters across different sectors like Accenture, Amazon, Deloitte and Flipkart took part in the placement drive, said the report. Tech majors Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Wipro have been planning to increase their campus hiring figures this year, reports earlier said. TCS made offers to 30,000 campus recruits this fiscal from its previous number of 28,000, according to The Economic Times. The IT major made a net addition of 27,049 employees in the last four quarters (calendar year 2018) compared with 7,000 in 2017. It has 4.2 lakh employees now, said the report. Wipro is reportedly planning to double campus hiring, along with salary hikes for graduates with digital expertise such as in big data and analytics, said Business Insider, an American financial and business news website, citing a report by The Economic Times. The IT major decided to hike recruitment plans to meet the shortage of digital professionals for managing client orders efficiently. The high attrition rate in the company has reportedly disrupted its performance largely, said the report. Last week, TCS had ruled out chances of any layoffs at the company and exuded confidence about a strong growth this year especially when predictions paint a rosy picture for IT firms in 2019. On 26 January, Tech Mahindra’s managing director and CEO CP Gurnani said that the Indian IT sector faced global headwinds like Brexit but developments around Globalisation 4.0 and 5G technology would bring growth for the industry this year, reported PTI. “Uncertainty and lack of clarity around the US shutdown and Brexit are risks for the IT industry. However, the IT sector is poised for future growth, with technology being the key enabler for Globalization 4.0,” Gurnani said. In December 2018, TV Mohandas Pai, former chief financial officer of IT major Infosys, had said that India’s IT services sector and startups together were expected to hire up to five lakh people in 2019 as demand for freshers was on the upswing. Pai said that entry-level packages in the industry went up by as much as 20 percent in 2018, after stagnation in salaries for the past seven years. “Growth is coming back to the Indian IT services industry,” he said, talking about industry highlights in 2018 and prospects in the coming calendar year. — With PTI inputs