Offers galore as campus hiring hits pre-Covid level

Engineering colleges in Bengaluru have reported brisk campus placements which seem to have reached pre-pandemic levels with students bagging lucrative offers.

While many companies stuck to the online mode of hiring this year, too, the 2022 batch of graduates received better offers compared to what their seniors got with placement activity up five-fold, according to colleges where placements have concluded.

Packages on the higher side ranged between Rs 14 lakh and Rs 65 lakh per annum.

Some colleges witnessed record placements. The 105-year-old University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering (UVCE), one of Karnataka’s oldest institutes, is one of them. “Our students got 652 offers this time as against 435 last year,” UVCE placement officer B M Rajaprakash said, adding that this was a six-year record.

At PES University, the number of companies hiring on campus and student offers increased. “The number of companies that visited the campus went up 42 per cent this year. Of the 1,315 students who got placed, 538 got more than one offer. Interestingly, some companies made repeated visits,” PES University Registrar K S Sridhar said.

Students at Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering (DSCE) got offers with a 20% increase in the CTC. “As this was the first post-Covid hiring that saw companies resuming physical visits to the campus, we were expecting low CTCs. Surprisingly, the CTCs increased,” DSCE placement head Guru Venkatesh M N said.

The Covid-19 pandemic hit campus hiring in the last two years. Students were not comfortable with the virtual hiring process earlier. Over time, students were trained to attend the virtual hiring process and placement officers say that the demand from companies has increased. The hiring demand is expected to go up 10 per cent for the 2023 batch.

Students with niche skills like machine learning, artificial intelligence, robotics and automation, data analytics, Pega, IoT, Block Chain were in high demand.