Finance, consulting cos have lion's share

Finance, consulting cos have lion's share

STATE BUREAU

Posted online: Thursday, March 08, 2007 at 0020 hours IST

JAMSHEDPUR, MARCH 7 : Finance and consulting jobs are still in focus at top B-schools if one goes by the recently concluded campus recruitment process (CRP) 2007 at the XLRI here.

As much as 30% of the B-school's 180 business management and personnel management & industrial relations students were picked up by the financial sector, while 24% opted for jobs with consulting firms. Hewitt recruited 18 managers.

The other big consulting firms that had their piece of the B-School cake were Ernst & Young, KPMG, McKinsey, Stern Stewart, Mercer, and first-timer Tata Strategic Management Group.

The financial sector picked up 60 graduates, 48 opted for consulting jobs, 40 for the FMCG sector, and the remaining for manufacturing, retail, marketing, etc.

The school has been witnessing the trend towards finance and consulting jobs since last year. "We are offering some elective courses that make it possible for students to opt for combinations of their choice," said N Casamir Raj, director of XLRI, here Wednesday. He said students are now able to 'get what they want'.

This year's campus recruitment process saw a 50% rise in average salary over that of last year.

Last year, the average salary was Rs 8.4 lakh, this time it's Rs 12.6 lakh, with the highest domestic salary offered coming from one of the top consulting companies at Rs 16 lakh and the lowest at Rs 8.6 lakh.

Of the 10 foreign offers, most of them were picked up by graduates with experience behind them. The average salary offered was $85,000 per annum and the highest at $1,00,000 per annum.

Those prepared for finance jobs had plenty of choices before them---treasury sales, investment banking, risk management, equity research, equity sales, credit rating, private equity handling, etc.

The finance sector was represented by recruiters like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Rabo Bank, CitiFinancial, ICRA, L&T, Adventity and ICICI Prudential, and banking by HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Citibank, Standard Chartered and UTI Bank. New recruiters like Calyon, IDFC Private Equity, and Ocwen Financials had their pick.

FMCG, which picked up 20% of graduates, included Proctor & Gamble, ITC, Asian Paints, Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL), Nokia, Marico, Nestle, Cadbury's, Colgate-Palmolive, Pepsi, ICI Paints, and Reckitt Benckiser.

Reliance Retail, RPG and Raymond made concrete offers, while the general management & strategy sector, represented by entities like Novartis, Aditya Birla Group, Dr Reddy's, and new-comers like Arcelor Mittal Steel, Trident and Pfizer, offered high-level roles to the chosen few.

IT too had offers to make. Cognizant Technology Solutions, Motorola, HP, IBM, TechMahindra, HCL and first-timer Sasken Communication Technologies picked up systems professionals.

Of the 180 that got placed, as many as 86 had job experience behind them. They received 140 job offers laterally from companies.