At 18 offers, Amazon emerged as the top recruiter at the recently concluded final placements process for the 2017 post graduate programme in management batch at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A).
While an audited report will be released later on, as per the Indian Placement Reporting Standards (IPRS) which IIM-A introduced to bring about greater transparency in B-school placements, the institute shared an unaudited preliminary report on the final placements.
With more than 100 firms participating for the final placements at IIM-A, sectorally consulting firms ended up making some of the highest number of offers, including firms like Accenture Strategy, Amazon, Bain & Co., McKinsey & Co. and The Boston Consulting Group. Following Amazon was McKinsey & Company which made the highest number of offers in the consulting domain, with 15 offers. Among global banks, Goldman Sachs was the largest recruiter, having picked 9 students. In the sales and marketing domain, HUL extended 7 offers followed by Procter & Gamble, SC Johnson and Samsung, with 6 offers each. With 10 offers, TAS was the largest recruiter in the General Management cohort. Sprinklr extended 9 offers in the Consumer Tech cohort.
On the other hand, IIM-A's Post-Graduate Programme in Food and Agribusiness Management (PGP – FABM) batch for 2017 saw a total of 25 firms from varying sectors like FMCG, Agri inputs, BFSI, Consulting, Food Production and Plantation extending 50 offers. Among these, Godrej Group of companies and TGI were the top recruiters, recruiting eight and four students, respectively. The process saw participation from a number of first time recruiters like Pioneering Ventures, PepsiCo, Flourish Foods and Tilvila. Regular recruiters like Yes Bank, ADM, Reckitt Benckiser (RB) and Amazon – Cloudtail reaffirmed their confidence in the Programme and Placement process by extending multiple offers.
The final placement process was conducted in two stages. The first was the laterals process where firms interviewed students with prior work experience and offered them mid-level managerial positions. In this, more than 30 firms hired from diverse sectors such as technology, consulting, pharmaceuticals and analytics.
In the second stage of the Final placement process, firms were grouped into cohorts based on the profile offered, and groups of cohorts were invited to campus across different clusters. Firms from multiple domains participated across the three clusters in Final placements, with students being placed across more than 10 cohorts.
Offering students flexibility and choice to build careers in sectors of their preference, IIM-A continued to provide this year the facility of making 'dream' applications to firms of their choice in a subsequent cluster even with an offer in hand. This year, the institute saw 110 dream applications being made in this way.
According to Asha Kaul, Chairperson of the Placement Committee at IIM-A, there were more than 40 new recruiters this year who offered diverse roles.
Apart from consulting, sectors like investment banking and markets space saw the likes of Citibank, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Kotak IB and Standard Chartered participating in the IIM-A placements.
Among the Banking, Financial Services & Insurance recruiters, American Express, FinIQ, Fullerton and RBL were some of the recruiters who extended offers. Sales and marketing roles were offered by the regular recruiters like Airtel, Asian Paints, HUL, ITC, Nestle, P&G, and Reckitt Benckiser among others. The general management cohort saw participation from Aditya Birla Group, Tata Administrative Services, C.K. Birla and Mahindra & Mahindra. The Enterprise Tech and Consumer Tech cohorts saw participation from firms like MobiKwik, Rivigo and Sprinklr among others.
Meanwhile, this year, seven students opted out of the placement process to work on their own ventures, under the guidance and mentorship of Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE).