Samsung, RIL, Oracle and Flipkart top employers of IIT graduates this year

KOLKATA/MUMBAI: Where is the country’s top engineering talent heading to in a year of subdued hiring? Samsung, Reliance Industries (RIL), Oracle and Flipkart topped the hiring charts for the class of 2014, according to data from the top IITs at the end of the first phase of this placement season.

With 271 offers, almost a 100 more than the second-largest recruiter, Samsung is the clear winner so far. This number includes 69 pre-placement offers (PPOs) and 28 postings in Korea.

The South Korean conglomerate has ramped up hiring numbers by as much as 71% from 158 last year, emerging as the biggest recruiter at the IITs so far. It had made 23 international offers last year.

“We focused on campus hiring for multiple reasons — strengthening our core competency in embedded computing and building new skills/capabilities in UX design, enterprise software and data analysis,” said a Samsung spokesperson in a written response to ET. Out of 243 candidates selected for India, 211 are from software engineering and 19 from UX design.

RIL, another regular recruiter, made 177 offers, lower than last year’s 202. Students have been taken on in the roles of graduate engineer trainees (GETs).

“Other than some 45 PPOs, RIL has hired 132 students from 8 IITs – Delhi, Bombay, Roorkee, Kharagpur, Guwahati, Madras, Kanpur and IITBHU. In addition to this, Reliance Jio hired 5 GETs, one from IIT-Hyderabad and 4 from IIT-Indore,” said a Reliance Industries spokesperson in a written response.

These numbers reflect hiring at the end of the first phase of the placement season in which roughly 50-60% of the batches have been placed across IITs. The second phase will start in the first week of January and will cover the remaining students.

Tech major Oracle was another big recruiter, taking on close to 135 students across almost all IITs. While its overall campus hiring numbers remained fairly consistent over the last three years, it made a few US-based offers for the first time this year.

“Oracle has a number of different business groups internally and we hire students across a variety of positions.

Many students will join Oracle, working in product development roles across our hardware, software or industry-specific based groups,” said a company spokesperson.

E-commerce major Flipkart, as reported earlier by ET, has been a big draw at the IITs during the first phase of placements. The company increased hiring from around 100 last year to 118. “Campus hiring is strategic for us. It helps us identify and bring new talent,” Sachin Bansal, co-founder, Flipkart, told ET.

“Past experience has shown us that talent from tier-I colleges like the IITs and IIMs and the way they meet the challenges posed by a high-growth environment like ours has been remarkable -- and a great fit for an organisation like Flipkart that stresses on ownership and innovation,” added Bansal.

Several other companies emerged as strong recruiters, according to hiring data from six of the older IITs at Bombay, Kharagpur, Madras, Roorkee, Kanpur and Guwahati.

Business process outsourcing company EXL Service, for instance, made 97 offers across 7 IITs this year compared to just 46 across 5 IITs last placements. The increase in the number of campus hires in the roles of consultants and analysts is to power the company’s analytics business, which has been growing at more than 30% for the last few years.