Internet and e-commerce companies were the flavour of the season at the country’s top B-school — the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A). IIM-A concluded its final placement procedure for the graduating batch of the Post Graduate Programme (PGP) in Management. Accenture Strategy made the highest number of offers, 21, followed by e-commerce giant Amazon, which made 13 offers whereas 11 students opted out of placement procedures to start a venture of their own. The placement process for the batch of 375 students was carried out with the concept of “dream application” that allowed students to choose the sectors and functions of their choice for their final placement.
The placement process was conducted in two stages. The first was the laterals process where firms interviewed students with a prior work experience and offered them mid-level managerial positions. In the second stage, firms were grouped into cohorts based on the profile offered and groups of cohorts were invited to the campus across different clusters. The first cluster comprised of four cohorts — international trade, investment banking and markets, management consulting and private equity, venture capital and hedge funds. Second cluster consisted of ten cohorts: Analytics, banking and financial services, consumer electronics, consumer goods, consumer services, internet and e-commerce, general management and leadership, management consulting, niche consulting and technology. The third cluster consisted of seven cohorts, which included banking and financial services, consumer goods, consumer services, general management and leadership, internet and e-commerce, management consulting and technology.
About 50% of the batch was eligible for lateral placements, which provided students and opportunity to optimally leverage their work experience. Over 110 firms including Aditya Birla Group, Alvarez & Marsal, Amazon, Flipkart, Google, Microsoft and Star TV participated in the same. The internet and e-commerce space included recruiters such as Amazon, Flipklart, OlaCabs, Quikr, Snapdeal and Uber.
In terms of number of offers, Accenture Strategy was the top recruiter across all clusters having selected 21 students from the campus, followed by McKinsey & Company and The Boston Consulting Group extending 10 offers each in the strategy-consulting domain. Among banking and financial services firms, YES Bank made 10 offers and Goldman Sachs made five offers for various roles. In the internet and e-commerce and technology sector, Amazon made 13 offers whereas Samsung extended 10 offers.
BrowserStack, a self-funded, fast-growing and young technology start-up operating in over 130 countries also recruited for the first time from IIM-Ahmedabad this year.
Ritesh Arora, co-founder of BrowserStack, said, “Due to the innovative nature of our company, the challenges we need solved are unique. Recruiting from IIM-A gives us access to a talented pool of candidates, who have out-of-the-box thinking and thus are ideal for our work environment.”
Rahul Gangal, partner at Roland Berger, commenting on the experience at IIM-A, said, “Considering the needs of a global consulting firm like ours, we have always got applicants with appropriate experience levels and strong analytical skills at IIM-A, a fact that keeps bringing us back here.”
Recruiters in the consulting space included global strategy consulting and niche consulting firms: Accenture Strategy, Alvarez & Marsal, AT Kearney, Bain & Company, Deloitte, KPMG, McKinsey & Company, Oliver Wyman, Roland Berger, Strategy&, and The Boston Consulting Group, among others.
The Banking & Financial Services sector participation included Avendus Capital, City, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC and Nomura amongst others.
This year, IIM-A also saw participation from PE/VC firms such as Matrix Partners and Apollo Global Management.
A large number of students took up roles in sales and marketing in various companies such as Asian Paints, Hindustan Unilever, ITC, Johnson & Johnson, L’Oreal, Mondelez International, Nestle, PepsiCo, P&G, Reckitt Benckiser, Shell, Vodafone and Wipro Consumer Care, among others.
General management and leadership profiles were offered to students by the Aditya Birla Group, Bharti Airtel, the CK Birla Group, Lodha Group, Mahindra, Reliance ADAG and TAS, among, others. Students secured roles in technology sector firms such as Cognizant, Google, EdgeVerve, Microsoft and Samsung. Recruiters in the pharma domain includes Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories and GlaxoSmithkline Pharma.
First-time recruiters such as Hopscotch, Future Group and Practo also participated.
