Campus hiring drops by 20 per cent; IT firms await US Prez polls outcome

Hyderabad: Well-known IT companies have cut campus hiring by at least 20 percent in private engineering colleges this year. Also, these recruitment drives are now limited to a few top colleges unlike in the past when they visited more colleges.

Companies like Wipro, Accenture and Cognizant have cut down on recruiting fresh engineering graduates. A company that offered job letters to 260 plus students in 2015-16 recruited only 220 plus students this year.

The reasons given by HR teams of various companies were the impending US Presidential election, increased automation etc., CBIT chief placement officer N.L.N. Reddy said.

OU Engineering College placement officer Prof. V. Uma Maheshwar echoed Mr Reddy’s views. Companies have given enough hints to colleges that they are keenly watching the outcome of the US Presidential election and its impact on the software industry.

However, NASSCOM former chairman B.V.R. Mohan Reddy has a different take. He believes that there will not be any impact even if Donald Trump becomes the next President of the US since 60 percent of the software orders for India comes from the US.

“The slowdown in IT sector is due to some verticals (Energy, Gas and Oil as well as banking, finance and insurance sectors not doing well. Also, the technology is now being driven by automation. The type of requirements has changed and so is the requirement for fresh graduates. Hence a drop in recruitment of freshers,” Mr Mohan Reddy, who is also the founder of Cyient Limited, a well known IT firm, said. He said that earlier they used to conduct placement drives in nearly 50 colleges, but now the list has been chopped to 19.

Meanwhile, T. Satish Babu, who is the CEO of TSB Corporation, a Hyderabad-based software firm in Hitech City, attributed the dip in job offers to support and maintenance projects coming down.

“Now the demand is for tech graduates with skills in Big Data Analytics, Mobile Application etc. However, not many colleges offer these specialised courses in addition to regular curriculum. One can be rest assured that IT firms will hire freshers with such sets of skills,” he said.

Firms prefer freshers over M.Tech graduates 
M.Tech grad.uates from private engineering colleges are being shunned by a majority of the software companies in campus recruitment drives this year. Mostly, B.Tech final year students are being interviewed and the meritorious ones are offered job letters, but there are no takers for PG engineering students.

The feedback from recruiters was that M.Tech students of private engineering colleges were not living up to expectations when assigned projects. This was observed over a period of time and hence a few companies decided not to recruit post-graduate engineers from private colleges.

According to an engineering expert, students joining M.Tech courses in private colleges are of the average mark and definitely not the brilliant ones.
Most of these students were either not selected in campus drives during their B.Tech study or pursued graduation in second-rung or third-rung colleges.