The final placement season for the PGP Class of 2015-17 of the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB) saw a total of 411 students placed, while 10 graduating students opted to defer their placement to pursue entrepreneurial or other opportunities.

IIMB students received over 450 offers across 200-plus job profiles from 160-plus companies. Altogether, 162 Pre-Placement Offers (PPOs) were extended to students before the start of the Final Placements based on their performance during the Summer Internship and 133 PPOs were accepted by the students.

As many as 139 offers were made by firms in varied domains such as Consulting, Business Leadership, Product Management, Operations, Category Management and General Management during the Lateral Placement (LP) process for students with more than 22 months of work experience.

The LP process matches the recruiting company’s specific needs with the experienced students’ expertise and career interests. Altogether, 116 of these lateral offers were eventually accepted. Over 15 students were offered overseas placements.

Professor Ganesh N. Prabhu, Chairperson, Career Development Services, IIM Bangalore, said “We experienced a qualitative improvement in placements this year. Increased hiring by banks, consulting and consumer goods firms compensated for the firms that could not participate in our placements this year.”

Harsha Bhattad, Placement Representative, said: “In addition to the continued interest shown by traditional recruiters, we also saw over 25 per cent first-time recruiters who hired in good numbers. Further, the increased efforts put in by students resulted in them getting their preferred jobs.”

Global banks

IIM Bangalore played host to most leading global banks on the first day of the Final Placements. Goldman Sachs made 14 offers, including PPOs. Other offers were made by Citibank (5), HSBC (4), Morgan Stanley (2), Deutsche Bank (2), DBS (1) and Standard Chartered (1). The process also saw the participation of Visa and American Express for operations and global strategy roles. Among banks and financial firms, American Express made eight offers followed by Yes Bank (7), ICICI Bank (6), Visa (3), Axis Bank (2), JM Financial (2), Fullerton (2), Société Générale (2), Aviva (1) and CRISIL (1).

Consulting Companeis

In the strategy consulting domain, the Boston Consulting Group led with 20 offers (including PPOs), followed by Accenture Strategy (14), McKinsey & Co (13), Bain & Company (10), Deloitte (10) and AT Kearney (9). More than 30 per cent of the entire batch received offers in the broadly defined consulting sector, which included reputed names such as EXL Consulting (10), Alvarez & Marsal (5) and Roland Berger (4). Other prominent recruiters in the consulting space were KPMG (7), PricewaterhouseCoopers (5), Nomura Research Institute (2), PwC Diamond Consulting (2) and Ernst & Young (1).

Indian Conglomerates

Conglomerates recruited in large numbers for their leadership tracks and general management positions with the Aditya Birla Group leading with 10 offers, followed by Wipro Global (7), Bharti Airtel (6), Jindal (5), CK Birla Group (4), Mahindra Group (4), Tata Administrative Services (3), Reliance Industries (3) and RPG (2).