Amazon top recruiter at IIM-A as 100 firms participate

With 18 offers, ecommerce major Amazon emerged as the top recruiter for the class of 2017 at India's top business school, Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad.

Consultancies were not far behind the online retailer, with McKinsey & Co making the highest number of offers in the consulting domain, along with 15 offers.

Among global banks, Goldman Sachs was the largest recruiter, picking up nine students. In the sales and marketing domain, Hindustan Unilever Ltd extended seven offers followed by Procter & Gamble, SC Johnson and Samsung, with six offers each.

With 10 offers, TAS (Tata Administrative Service) was the largest recruiter in the general management area. Sprinklr extended nine offers in consumer tech.

More than 100 firms participated in the placement process with 40 new firms coming to the campus this year, said a press release from the B-school.

Firms from different sectors and geographies participated in the process. Recruiters in the management and niche consulting domain included Accenture Strategy, A T Kearney, Bain & Co, McKinsey & Co and Oliver Wyman.

Prominent recruiters in the investment banking and markets space include Citibank, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Kotak IB and Standard Chartered.

Among the banking, financial services & insurance recruiters, American Express, FinIQ, Fullerton and RBL were among those who extended offers.

Sales and marketing roles were offered by regular recruiters like Airtel, Asian Paints, HUL, ITC, Nestle, P&G and Reckitt Benckiser, among others.

The general management sector 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 and Rivigo, among others.

The 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. 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.

As in previous years, students were provided the flexibility of making ''dream'' applications to firms of their choice in a subsequent cluster even with an offer in hand.

There were 110 dream applications this year. This gave students the flexibility and choice to build careers in sectors of their preference. Students also had the opportunity to work under the mentorship of Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), IIM Ahmedabad on their entrepreneurial ideas.

Prof Asha Kaul, chairperson of the Placement Committee, said, ''At IIM-A, the placement process is student and company friendly. We try and provide opportunities to students to 'live their dreams' and companies to float diverse, non-traditional roles. In this mutually beneficial relationship, hinged on interaction, students get an opportunity to make educated choices and veer in areas of interest, and companies to experiment and recruit for diverse functions.''

This year, seven students opted out of the placement process to work on their own ventures, under the guidance and mentorship of CIIE.

Utsav Bhattacharjee, recruitment secretary, said, ''The cluster-cohort system is unique to IIM-A. It is meant to encourage students to consider career choices based on role and sector. The increase in the number of dream applications available per student (wherein a person could apply and sit for five more companies after securing an offer) was also a step in the same direction and it was interesting to see a substantial increase in the number of students exercising this option.

''This is in alignment with our continuous pursuit of a better candidate- recruiter fit. The cluster-cohort system has also helped us to host our recruiting partners in a fair and transparent manner leading to stronger relationships between IIM-A and the recruiter community. At the same time, it helps us to avoid the many anxieties (for both students and recruiters) inherent in the 'Day' system of placements followed by other campuses.''

Further details about the placement process will be released in an audited report, as per the Indian Placement Reporting Standards (IPRS), introduced by IIM-A in an effort to bring about greater transparency in B-school placements across the country.

The IPRS report for 'Final Placements 2017' will be released six months from the date of completion of the process, said the B-school.