Finance continues to drop at IIM-A summer placements 2012, BCG and Amazon top recruiters

As has been the trend over the last 3 years (See Table 1), hiring for finance function during summer internships at Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, has taken a dip this year as well. This year, 25.72% of the batch was hired for roles in the finance function as opposed to 28.38% hires last year, down south by 2.66 percentage points. The other top functions, Marketing/Sales (which was separated from Business Development this year) and Consulting have also seen a slight dip in numbers. If you add the numbers for Marketing/Sales and Business Development, it totals to 23.87%, a drop of 1.33 percentage points from the corresponding figure last year (25.2%). 22.04% of the batch was hired for Consulting roles, down from 22.28 last year. The functions which have seen an upswing are General Management (7.34% hires) and Operations (6.03% hires). The functions have seen an increase of 0.44 and 1.79 percentage points respectively.

Function	2009	2010	2011	2012
Finance	44%	39%	28.38%	25.72%

(Table 1: Numers indicate percentage of the batch interning in the Finance function)

According to the institute’s summer placement report, which was released after being audited by CRISIL and conforming to the Indian Placement Reporting Standards, a total of 120 companies recruited 381 students of the PGP batch of 2014. Of the total batch strength of 388, 7 students decided to drop out of the summer placement process.

Since all companies had not announced their posting locations at the time of release for the summer placement report (according to IIM-A officials), according to the available data of 222 offers, 199 offers were made from India. This was followed by 16 offers from other Asian countries and 7 offers from the Americas/Europe. In India, like last year, the maximum offers were in Mumbai (77 offers) followed by the National Capital Region (NCR) (37 offers) and Bangalore (25 offers).

The summer placements are done in two clusters at the b-school. According to the institute, BCG (14 offers) was the top recruiter in Cluster I, followed by Accenture and Mckinsey. The institute added that Amazon (11 offers) was the top recruiter in Cluster II, followed by Aditya Birla and Reliance Group.

BFSI sector hired the maximum number of students this year. However, BFSI hired 29.71% of the batch last year, as opposed to 24.40% this year. Corresponding gains were made by conglomerates, who hired 9.7% of the batch, up from 5.57% last year. Some other sectors which saw gains as compared to last year were Consulting (21.49 to 22.57%), Media/Communication (0.53 to 2.62%), and IT (8.22 to 9.1%).

According to the report, major recruiters in the BFSI sector include Baclays, CitiGroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Royal Bank of Scotland. The Boston COnsulting Group was the top recruiter in the consulting sector. It was followed by Accenture, AT Kearney, Bain & company, Booze & company, Alvarez & Marsal and The Parthenon Group.

In the Conglomerates sector, Aditya Birla Group, TAS, Mahindra and Reliance recruited students for their flagship management leadership programs. General Electric recruited students for the Finance and Information Technology Leadership programs. The FMCG sector saw a number of recruiters coming to the campus including Hindustan Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Kraft, Cocal Cola, Pepsi, ITC, Nokia and Airtel.

Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo were among the top recruiters from the Technology sector. Abbott, GSK and Johnson & Johnson were among the major recruiters from the Pharma/Healthcare sector.

Function wise drill down:

Function	% hired
Business Development	4.19
Consulting	22.04
Finance	25.72
General management	7.34
Marketing/Sales	19.68
Operations	6.03
Systems/IT	4.98
Others	4.72
To be decided	5.24

(The article has been updated on February 25, 2013.)