Rise in pre-placement offers this year brings early cheer for IITians

Delhi, one of the premier older IITs, had 164 PPOs at the start of this week, as against 162 for the entire placement process last year

Going by pre-placement offer (PPO) trends so far at the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), campus job hiring this year is a substantial improvement over the past two years.

In some cases, these offers — made by the recruiter after a student completes a summer internship project with a firm and returns to the campus — have nearly doubled. Some IIT campuses have also seen the share of student batches getting placed via PPOs having risen over the past year or two.

For instance, as on October 30, IIT-Hyderabad (IIT-H) has seen the number of PPOs nearly double from last year’s 19, to 37 so far. With two international offers, most of the PPOs have come from the information technology and information technology-enabled services (IT/ITeS) sector, taking largely undergraduate students. In all, 476 students registered for campus placement 2019-20 at IIT-H.

Delhi, one of the premier older IITs, had 164 PPOs at the start of this week, as against 162 for the entire placement process last year. Likely to grow further, as the campus nears the start of the final placement process on December 1.

According to the placement office at IIT-Guwahati, there have been 119 PPOs, a rise from last year. All PPOs are domestic, with the largest number from core engineering, IT, finance, and analyst firms.

Also, the IITs are increasingly banking on summer internships to ease their final placement process.

“The process at IIT-H is a student-led activity, and thanks to their efforts in the last six months, the institute is gaining in strength each year in terms of quantity and quality of placements. As our institute is more than a decade old, we have built a reasonable alumni base, who are supporting the Institute. The fact that we have almost doubled the number of PPOs this year shows an encouraging outlook for the coming placement season,” said Pradeep Kumar Yemula, the faculty member in charge.

IIT-Guwahati’s placement office attributes the rise in PPOs to factors such as an increase in student
skills and growth of number of recruitments per company. Given the current rate of offers, it estimates the percentage of the batch likely to be placed through PPOs at 15 per cent this year.

There is also the standing of companies making the PPOs this year. At IIT-Guwahati, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Uber, DE Shaw, Walmart Labs, Samsung Bangalore, NVidia, Texas Instruments, Deutsche Bank, Flipkart, Cisco, IBM, and Morgan Stanley are among these.

IIT-Delhi has attracted PPOs from Yahoo! Japan, Samsung South Korea, Samsung Bangalore, Samsung Noida and Samsung Delhi, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Goldman Sachs, Procter & Gamble, and Micron Technology, among others. IIT-H students have PPOs from Microsoft, DE Shaw, Goldman Sachs, Amazon, Arcesium, and Arista Networks, among others.