The hunt for talent at engineering institutions has begun with IT firms including TCS, Cognizant, Wipro, and Infosys hitting the campuses to hire for 2016. This year, most of the colleges in Tamil Nadu are having more than four companies sharing slots on Day One. This placement season will see a 10 per cent increase in pay packets at Rs 3.3 lakh per annum.
At Vellore Institute of Technology, five firms – Cognizant, Wipro, TCS, Infosys and Accenture are sharing the Day One slot. Last year, four firms were competing here and 3,600 students got placed. “There was a time when companies chose the best talent, but now students are selecting the firms where they want to work,” says V Samuel Rajkumar, Director – Placements, VIT. Interestingly, after a gap of five years TCS has come to hire engineers at VIT.
With 588 engineering colleges, Tamil Nadu has always been a fertile ground for recruiters in the IT space and more than 50 per cent of the industry demand is picked up from here. Ballpark figures indicate that in the last three years, TCS and Cognizant have made over 10,000 offers each in engineering colleges here. While Infosys and Wipro have offered 5,000 jobs each, Accenture and tech Mahindra have made over 3,000 offers during the same time.
S Vaidya Subramanian, Dean, Planning and Development, Sastra University, who shared his thoughts on campus placements, said, “Shared model is a necessity for campuses that have a huge student base and is a non-issue for small campuses.”
Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai has also opened up to a shared model and embraced others firms like Accenture, Infosys, Cognizant and Wipro this year. The college always had TCS hiring from their campus.
Two months back, Nasscom indicated that hiring in the IT sector will rise around 6 per cent this year. Currently, the industry employs around 3.5 million people. Nasscom also indicated that HR and hiring is witnessing a seismic shift and the war for talent has shifted from scale to skill.
Different skill sets
“The IT companies now look for a different set of skill sets. Earlier, the focus was on communication. But now, companies expect domain expertise. The students have to be strong in their core engineering subject. The transformation was set in motion last year. Students in tier one institutions are aware of the change.
With India going digital there is now a need to have expertise in data analytics,” says S. Mohamed Tajudeen, director of placement and training, B.S. Abdur Rahman University.
