With the final placement season fast approaching, India’s top B-school, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA), is “cautiously optimistic” about the hiring process as recruiters are reassessing their workforce requirements.

“We have managed to attract quality recruiters from a diverse background for the recently-concluded summer placements for the MBA Class of 2026 of the post graduate programme (PGP) in management at IIMA. However, as the economic headwinds have been very heavy, and as the economy is not fully back on track, we are cautiously optimistic about the final placements that will be held at IIMA early next year,” Prof Vishwanath Pingali, Chairperson (Placements), IIMA, told businessline.

During the recently-concluded summer placements, a total of 159 firms participated, the highest in the last four years. Of the total recruiting firms, 51 had come for the first time for recruitment in the campus. “We are doing better than last year in terms of summer placements. We did not see any drop in the number of offers compared to last year. We have done slightly better in terms of the number of offers. But the final placements will be the correct barometer to judge how the job market has behaved in the current economic situation. For summer internships, both the firms and students look to experiment. So while we look at the summer placements as “positive”, we do not look at it as conclusive evidence of a trend in the job market,” Pingle added.

Shift in demand

Despite a better show in the summer placements, the IIMA placement committee did see some gaps. “Some of the firms (who came for the placements) told us that they were looking to reassess their workforce requirements which are lower than what the firms had predicted at the beginning of the year. The number of offers made by some of the new firms that came for placements were not as high as we had hoped for,” the IIMA Professor said.

Though 159 firms came for these placements only 125 firms made offers for 147 roles. “We need to work hard for the final placements. There is no concern as of now. IIMA has traditionally withstood a lot of economic shocks and has managed to place the past batches decently. But having said that, we need to actively talk to the recruiters and understand their concerns,” he added.

Of the 394 students placed during the summer placements, 38 per cent opted for consulting, 22 per cent BFSI and 11 per cent FMCG. The placements that were held in three clusters in mid-November saw Accenture Strategy emerging as the largest recruiter in the transformation and operations consulting cohort that was part of cluster-1.

Accenture Strategy’s India market unit extended six offers and Accenture Strategy Global Network made 33 offers. In the management consulting cohort, Boston Consulting Group (22 offers), McKinsey & Co (15), Bain & Co (14) were the top recruiters. In the investment banking and markets cohort, Goldman Sachs (11) and HSBC (India and Hong Kong) (6) were the top recruiters. EY-Parthenon India (8) led the charge in the advisory consulting cohort. The private equity/venture capital cohort was led by WinZO Fund (6) and White Oak Capital (3).

In Cluster-2 of the placements, Amazon and Mahindra led by making eight offers each, followed by HUL (7), Aditya Birla Group (6), Sun Pharma (6), Lodha Ventures (6) and TAS with five offers. In Cluster-3, TCS was the largest recruiter making nine offers in the niche consulting cohort, whereas in the enterprise technology cohort, Adobe led the charge with five offers and Microsoft with four. In Cluster-3, Tata Steel and Silver Consumer Electricals were the largest recruiters in the infra and core manufacturing domain with five offers.