The placement season for the academic year 2020–21 was different from previous ones due to the year being online. Despite this, 91.83% of the registered undergraduate students got placed. The EPC spoke to Pranav Dinesh Kumar, the co-ordinator for the PU for semester II, Academic Year 2020–21 about on-campus placements during the Academic Year 2020–21. 

Disclaimer: The majority of the interview and analysis was in context of the undergraduate placements. 

Season Overview

In total, 301 companies visited the campus for the 2020–21 placement season. 764 of the 832 registered first degree (FD) students were placed whereas 264 of the 348 registered higher degree (HD) students were placed. Talking about both FD and HD placements, the CTCs offered ranged from 3.5 LPA to 45.6 LPA while the overall average salary offered was 15.59 LPA with the median being 12.33 LPA. 

The pandemic caused a number of mix-ups in both semesters, according to Pranav. The students with summer internships (SI) who usually sit for placements in semester I were allowed to go for PS-II in the odd semester between July 2020 and December 2020 as PS-II got delayed to August and did not clash with their SIs. Due to limited PS-II seats in semester I, 2020-21, the students who usually sit for placements in the even semester had to sit in the odd semester, leaving them at a disadvantage since they were alongside their peers who had higher CGPAs. The uncertainty during April 2020 caused a lot of students to want to sit for placements in the even semester, which made the companies impose a hard CGPA cutoff.

Pranav said that the PU was able to convince some companies which normally only visit IITs to come to BITS Pilani as the online mode greatly reduced the logistical efforts they would have to take. However, he added that moving placements online also opened up companies’ prospective pool of students to include more colleges. Across both semesters, there were about 50 companies that had zero hires from the Pilani campus, some of which were CodeNation, Cognizant, L’Oréal, and JPMorgan Chase. According to Pranav, the HR representatives from these companies said that Pilani students were not prepared for placements as well as those from the Hyderabad and Goa campuses. 

Pranav mentioned that the shrunken job market has been a major negative impact of the pandemic. Further, companies were reluctant to hire, and were turning to local colleges or the Goa and Hyderabad campuses. Moreover, talking about companies offering lucrative roles, specifically non-core ones, he said, ‘They would rather fill that up in the IITs, or they would rather fill them up through off-campus waves.’

Pranav said that the IT sector had a very good season. Owing to the high demand for IT roles amongst students, the PU reached out to a large number of companies. He said that there were about five 30+ LPA companies and a lot of 20+ LPA companies in Semester II, 2020-21 alone. Having more companies made it possible for the PU to have a complete Day 3 of placements.

Core

Pranav talked about the importance of being well prepared for core placements. ‘Essentially, what a lot of recruiters are telling us right now is that the core mechanical and core chemical concepts are extremely weak, even in the people who are interested,’ he said. A student’s understanding of the subject matter would have to be strong for core mechanical or chemical placements according to him. Similarly, he stressed the importance of being thorough with core electrical concepts for ET placements. He added that recruiters also ask questions regarding the internships students have done in core companies, to try to gauge the kind of work the students have done in the past.  

Non-Core

Despite the increasing demand for non-core profiles in comparison to core, Pranav said that the former was also a huge challenge this season. He added that the reluctance of companies in hiring new people during the pandemic and the smaller number of non-core roles in a company made the available opportunities quite limited. According to him, it is especially difficult to have these roles available for semester II since the IIT placements happen just before this term and the roles are essentially filled up. He said that a number of companies who had been in verbal agreements with the PU since October backed out in December since their requirements were already met by the students from the IITs. Considering the situation and the state of the market, Pranav said that non-core placements were pretty good. He explained how PU tried to find as many non-core roles as they could for which they had companies like Indus Insights as well as legacy recruiters like Bain, Axis Bank and Flipkart APM. According to him, due to a low joining rate and lack of financial knowledge in students, finance companies often do not look to hire from BITS.

Companies

Disclaimer: The maximum CTCs mentioned below are in reference to both first degree and higher degree placements. 

SEMESTER I

Talking about the semester between July 2020 and December 2020, companies like Cisco, Appdynamics, JPMorgan Quant, Myntra, Cult.fit, Paypal, and Tekion visited on Day 1. Day 2 saw companies like Atlassian, Deutsche Bank, Zynga, and Pensando. Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Micron offered roles in the electronics sector. Tata AIG offered roles in banking and finance while PayU, BNY Mellon, and Standard Chartered hired students for IT roles. Indus Insights, ZS Associates, BCG, Dalberg, and o9 Solutions came for consulting roles. Flipkart APM visited for product management. AppDynamics offered the highest package of 45.6 LPA. Samsung SSR offered 30.75 LPA for an ET role. In non-core, Flipkart APM made an offer of 26.57 LPA. 16.9 LPA was the highest package offered for a core mechanical role by KLA Corporation.

SEMESTER II

Companies like L&T Infotech, Alphonso, Media.net, Wells Fargo, SAP Labs, Udaan, Amazon, and Flipkart visited in the semester between January 2021 and May 2021. Flipkart hired for an IT role and an associate business analyst role. Other companies hiring for analyst roles were Landmark Group and Axxela. Myntra, VMware, Citrix, Confluent, Reliance Jio, Samsung Research and Development (RnD), and Samsung Semiconductor Institute of Research (SSIR) also visited. The PU called companies like Xilinx and Signal Chip in the ET sector. They also called three major FMCG companies—HUL, Mondelez, and Reckitt Benckiser. These companies offered supply chain management roles. For pure core mechanical and chemical roles, ExxonMobil, Hero, and Honda were the major companies that visited. Some of the top CTCs offered in Semester II were from Alphonso which paid 37 LPA, Confluent with 33.75 LPA , and Wells Fargo with 30 LPA. 17.1 LPA was the highest package offered in ET by Micron. For core mechanical and chemical, the highest package offered was 27 LPA by HUL. The biggest recruiter was PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) which took 27 people. 

Challenges for the PU

Since the placement interviews took place online, the PU did not have to book rooms but rather set up Google meet links and coordinate between HR representatives from companies and students. Pranav mentioned that network issues made reaching out to students more difficult.. He also talked about how some students did not understand the seriousness of placements in the online mode, and would be unavailable for interviews. The students needed to be more serious and vigilant about placements according to him. ‘If you want the Ubers, the Goldman Sachs to keep coming, it also needs to mean that you’re prepared enough to impress them and make them make you an offer.’ he stated.

Another challenge that Pranav talked about is the fact that BITS Pilani students, in general, show a very low joining rate. A lot of them choose to abandon their placements for higher education or other offers that they get through PS-II, he said. This reflects badly on the institute and makes companies reluctant to hire from Pilani. 

Overall statistics

Disclaimer: The charts displayed below are a close approximation of the actual figures given the nature of the data available from the PU. Statistics displayed below are pertaining to the undergraduate placements only. 

Takeaways

Coming to core sector companies, he said that recruiters talk about how students’ core mechanical and chemical concepts are weak. He reiterated that having a strong knowledge of the subject matter was essential for those branches, as well as ET. For the non-core sector, he talked about the importance of building a good resume and portfolio.

Pranav stressed the importance of training for placements, especially with the increase in standardised testing. He said that he had tried to encourage training during his tenure. Adding that students assume getting placed is easier than it actually is, he emphasised that students need to put in effort to get good placements or SIs. For students in circuit branches, particularly those interested in IT, he mentioned that they would benefit from focusing on internships, as they would get an offer earlier that way. His reason for the same was that numerous companies were shifting to exclusively utilising the internship model for hiring and students getting placed through that medium ended up with higher packages on average.