Great News For Engineering Grads As Over A Lakh Offer Letters Have Been Lined Up

Hiring of freshers through campus placement has picked up in the current season. All indications coming from engineering colleges show that on this count 2024 will be better than last year. More importantly, the recruitment momentum as regards freshers is gathering steam after nearly two years of hiatus. Prominent institutes, including IITs and NITs, are being zeroed in by large IT firms for their placement activities. In hindsight, it seems like the average salary offered to fresh graduates is not increasing proportionately; in fact they are touching multi-year lows. Recent data emerging from IIT Bombay’s placement records showed that some candidates were offered a minimum salary of Rs, four lakh. Things are not very different for tier-II engineering colleges. However, one silver lining in the whole episode is that hiring is happening through campus placement.

The country’s top four IT services firms have indicated that they plan to hire around 70,000 fresh engineering graduates in the current financial year. “We have already onboarded around 11,000 freshers in the first quarter. While it is difficult to say how many freshers will be hired, it should be around 40,000 like in the previous years,” Milind Lakkad, chief HR officer of TCS has said. Apart from TCS, Infosys is also planning to hire 15,000-20,000 freshers in the ongoing financial year. Importantly, its recruitment route will be both campus and off-campus. Similarly, Wipro is planning to hire around 10,000-12,000 fresh graduates this year, while HCLTech has plans to recruit up to 10,000 freshers. If we count the hiring proposals of mid-tier IT firms, more than one lakh fresh graduates will get placed in 2024. Apart from IT and engineering services firms, GCCs (Global Capability Centres) are also on a hiring spree. Interestingly, hiring of freshers by GCCs is a new phenomenon if one goes by its trends in recent years.

As GCCs are the new growth spots in the country’s IT industry, placement of passing out graduates is definitely a welcome sign. Additionally, IT professionals are getting recruited by non-IT sectors, who are hiring freshers as interns and who would be absorbed at a later date.

This brings good news for both students and engineering colleges. Unlike in previous years, sources in the know said that not only are offer letters getting issued, even the joining dates are being indicated to avoid any sort of confusion.

In the last two years, many graduates had to go through a painful delay in joining their respective companies, which tended to defer their joining dates.

A sorry picture was that some did not even intimate the joining dates after doling out the offers. In this context, the new developments make for a welcome change as students will have clarity about their joining dates. Given the high employee utilisation level and a likely uptick in the demand environment, the IT industry is keen to have optimum bench strength. These factors are supplementing the optimistic hiring outlook at this juncture.