Chennai: The annual recruitment drive at IIT Madras is set to begin on Thursday with more than 300 companies expressing their interest to recruit the students from the premier institute.
This year core engineering, research and development companies set to dominate the day one of the placement season. “We have 308 companies registered for the placement interviews and they are coming for more than 420 job profiles. We expect at least 300 companies to participate in the recruitment as we have given them dates over next two weeks,” said Professor Manu Santhanam, advisor, Training and Placement, IIT Madras.
This year 1,350 students have registered for the placement interviews.
Last year overall 400 companies have registered for placements. “Although we had a lot of companies registered last year, only 216 companies have offered jobs. Because of the floods last year, several companies scheduled to come in December came only in January and some of them didn’t come,” he explained.
Nearly 25 companies are slotted for the day one of the placement season. The bigger names which come every year like Microsoft, Oracle and Samsung R and D are slotted for the day one of the placement.
After the withdrawal of offers by start-ups last year, there is generally a lack of interest among the students to join the start-up companies. No start-up company was listed on day one.
“We have more than 70 start-up companies registered this year for the placements. All of them have confirmed their participation in the placement drive,” Professor Manu Santhanam said.
Last year 129 start-ups have registered to participate in the recruitment process at IIT Madras. The All IIT Placement Committee (AIPC) had blacklisted 31 start-ups who had withdrawn their offers to the selected IIT students last year. It also banned them from participating in the recruitment process.
IIT Madras is keen to have public sector undertakings (PSU) for recruitment this year. At least seven public sector undertakings (PSUs) companies are expected to recruit the IIT Madras students.
“Already three companies have recruited our students. Some four companies including HPCL, BPCL are scheduled for next two weeks. We expect some more in the next semester,” he added. When asked about the interest of academic institutes to recruit the IIT students he said, “Academic institutes would come all over the year to recruit the students and not specifically during this placement season.”
