The US-software major Cognizant Technology Solutions today offered job offers for 700 students from Anna University. Last year the company offered 1,000 jobs and 500 a year before.
Cognizant will be the first large recruiter this year in the university that includes the College of Engineering, Guindy, Madras Institute of Technology, Chrompet and Alagappa College of Technology, said P Mannar Jawahar, vice chancellor, Anna University.
He added, Tata Consulting Services is planning to visit the campus on Tuesday and over 55 more companies across various sectors plan to visit in the next few days.
“Cognizant recruit numbers may be less, but still we are happy, they came and recruited despite there is a downturn in the software industry,” said Jawahar.
The starting salary offered by Cognizant remained Rs 3 lakh a year, compared to last year. Around 1,640 students took the test, of which 1,345 were shortlisted and finally 700 were offered jobs he added. The candidates were recruited through two-day long campus recruitment process covering students from almost all branches of the UG and PG programs.
Before Cognizant, companies such as Caterpillar and Larsen & Toubro that offer starting salary of over Rs 4 lakh have given job offers to around 300 students, he said.
R Ramkumar, Vice President, Corporate Marketing and Research noted that Anna University, along with its constituent colleges, is the largest contributor to Cognizant’s talent pool of fresh graduates in each of the last several years across India.
In the last four quarter the company added the most number of candidates, through organic, in the last four quarters. Between October and September 2009 Cognizant added 8135 professionals.
“One critical aspect of our recruiting is the fact that we are branchôdiscipline agnostic. This helps us substantially today in solving the business problems of customers across industries by leveraging technology. With structural changes happening across industries and sub-industries, there is an increasing need for much deeper domain specialization. For example, in the past, companies used to focus on Manufacturing as an industry segment. Today, the need is to specialize at a much granular level such as discrete manufacturing (automotive and industrial manufacturing companies), process manufacturing (chemical, construction material and related companies), transportation and logistics (rail, ships, road), and so on,” added Ramkumar.
Noting that in addition to students from core circuit branches (computing, electronic, electrical and instrumentation), he said the students from different disciplines of study added immense value to Cognizant.
