Offers they couldn't refuse

B-SCHOOL BEAT

Placement season was exceptionally good at B-schools across the country this year. As has become the practice, the management schools of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) in Delhi and Mumbai saw their entire batches receiving job offers on Day One of placement week.

The Department of Management Studies at IIT, Delhi, closed its placements in just 10 hours. More than 64 offers were made by 34 companies for the 54-student batch.

Companies that visited the campus included McKinsey KC, General Electric, Accenture, Wipro, Infosys, Maruti Udyog and Ashok Leyland.

The average annual salary offered was Rs 5.81 lakh, which is over 9 per cent higher than last year "" the highest salary offered was Rs 8.5 lakh.

At IIT Mumbai's Shailesh J Mehta School of Management, 71 job offers were made by the 62 participating companies to the batch of 48 students "" that's roughly 1.5 job offers per student.

This included the pre-placement offers to students, following their summer internship with companies. Nearly 10 per cent of the batch received offers to work outside India.

Companies that participated in the placements included Hindustan Lever Ltd, Marico, Accenture, Wipro, eClerx, Philips, Bharti, Nicholas Piramal, CGEY, IDBI, Tata Motors, Mahindra Consulting and Bennett, Coleman & Co. The highest salary offered was Rs 11 lakh a year, while the average offer was Rs 6.14 lakh.

The jobs offered were across all functional areas such as consultancy, general management, finance, marketing, systems and IT, supply chain management and operations. At IIT Mumbai, though, IT, consultancy and marketing held sway.

At Mumbai's S P Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR), 34 preplacement offers (PPOs) from 16 companies after the autumn projects ending in November 2003 kickstarted the placement process.

For the 2004 placement process, nine companies that had already made PPOs, returned for the final placement and made 30 more offers. Another 28 companies gave 64 offers, of which 54 were accepted.

The last offer was made at 1:15 p m on Day One. Some of the largest recruiters were the Wipro group (14), I2 Technologies (12), GE group (nine), IBM (eight) and HCL (seven). On average, the salaries offered are 10 to 15 per cent higher than last year.

The Indian Institute of Foreign Trade in Delhi also had 100 per cent placement on Day One. Once again, the maximum job offers came from the IT industry.

At Mumbai's Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies, 117 job offers were made on Day One for the 115-strong batch. The average salary offered was Rs 6 lakh a year.

As expected, the IT sector was a major recruiter, but offers from the banking and financial services sector also saw a sharp increase.

Another feather in S P Jain's cap

SPJIMR last month won the "Tata Business Leadership Awards - 2004", one of the best-known events in business competition and strategy.

The other shortlisted institutes for the competition were the Indian Institutes of Management at Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Kolkata and Lucknow, Jamshedpur's Xavier Labour Relations Institute, and the Faculty of Management Studies and the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade of Delhi.

The Tata Business Leadership Awards (TBLA) competition involves drawing up a strategy for any of the Tata group's enterprises, based on an underlying theme.

This year's theme was globalisation. SPJIMR's winning team "Team Mannan" "" comprising Ravi Kumar, Nilesh Kumar, Anahita Ichaporia and Asif Shamin "" made a presentation on "Tata Tea: a leap toward global leadership", which presented a strategy for marketing and forging strategic alliances for the world's largest integrated tea company.

The TBLA is organised by the Tata Administrative Service. The event is restricted to the top eight b-schools; a winner is selected from each campus by a visiting jury from the Tata group.

These campus winners then present their final presentations to a jury. This year the jury consisted of leading academicians, including three faculty members from the Harvard Business School: Krishna G Palepu, senior associate dean and director of research; Nitin Nohria, the Richard P Chapman Professor of business administration and director of research; and Das Narayandas, associate professor of business marketing.

The TBLA is one in a long list of laurels SPJIMR has won recently. Its team was declared the winner at Khoj, the annual equity research report competition hosted by SPJIMR and also took top honours at the summer project competition hosted by the Institute of Management Consultants of India.