PPOs are made by companies to candidates who intern with them for around two months during the summers. Early offers indicate employers want to retain talent ahead of the final placements in January next year. Better corporate earnings over the last one year has boosted job prospects in the country as companies are looking to expand operations after going slow on recruitment with bare minimum increments till last year.
Companies across sectors are looking to hire and they would surely use PPO as a medium to lap up good talent from across IIMs as there is a sense of familiarity on both sides, said a senior human resource executive who recently moved from a pharma company to one of the country’s biggest conglomerates. “The war for talent is definitely going to be more intensive this year,” he said requesting anonymity.
Picture this: IIM Calcutta has reported 37 PPOs, more than twice compared to 15 such job offers received by its students in the same period last year. This means that nearly 10% of the batch already have a job offer, a mark they could achieve only around October last year.
“Last year nobody was sure how placements were going to shape up since companies came out with fewer PPOs. This year, early offers have given us much more confidence and placement prospects for our batch are already looking brighter,” said Paromita Chakravarty, a student from IIM-C, who recently received an offer from an FMCG giant.
This year, PPOs at IIM-C include those from consulting firms McKinsey & Co, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Co and AT Kearney besides international banks such as UBS, Nomura and Morgan Stanley. Majority of the offers from these banks are for international positions like Singapore, London and New York. Apart from MNCs, Tata Administrative Services and Hindustan Unilever have also offered jobs to students at IIM-C. About 18 students are also going through pre-placement interviews at the campus, most of which are likely to get converted into PPOs in the coming days.
IIM Lucknow has reported 22 PPOs so far, from recruiters such as McKinsey & Co, BCG, Hindustan Unilever, Aditya Birla Group, Essar Group and L&T. Although, a number of companies have give PPOs already, the real rush of PPOs would be felt only by October, said IIM-L recruitment coordinator Rahul Tom Joseph.
Both IIM-A and IIM-B did not disclose the numbers but said that PPOs have primarily come from consulting firms and a few investment banks.
At IIM-B, PPOs started coming from July and the institute says the numbers are at par with last year. “The trend looks healthy,” says IIM-B placement head Sapna Agarwal. “If we go by the sentiments during final placements for students passing out early this year and the PPOs being offered now, the scenario looks quite bright. But we need to be cautious and invite more companies, since our batch size is larger this year,” she added.
IIM Kozhikode has received one PPO while 15 of its students are in the process of pre placement interviews by companies including Tata Motors, HSBC, Deloitte, Escorts, Citibank and J P Morgan.
IIM-C placement chairman Prof Amit Dhiman is hopeful that the institute would attract more PPOs than last year. “PPOs are usually seen as a reflection of how the coming placement season is going to be. So far, placements 2011 look more promising than 2010,” he said.
Those involved with placement coordination cells of the IIMs say while PPOs this year has been much better, they are yet to see the good old days of 2006 and 2007. The economic slowdown in 2008, however, made companies cautious, a trend that changed only marginally last year.
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