Startups may rescue campus hiring this year as they ramp up placement targets

Bengaluru/Mumbai: Startup and e-commerce companies may rescue the hiring season for the batches of 2025 at India’s top engineering and business schools by ramping up campus placement targets when the jobs market is still tepid.

“For the upcoming placement season, we have set an ambitious target of hiring over 230 recruits across multiple roles—a 55% increase from last year," said Manmeet Sandhu, head of human resources, for fintech platform PhonePe. To achieve this, Sandhu said, “we are significantly expanding our presence" at Indian Institutes of Techonogy (IITs), Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and Indian School of Business (ISB), aiming to boost the share of recruitment from these campuses from 15% to 25% this year.

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For startups, this marks a U-turn from the last two years when the industry contracted out its hiring to cut costs. Higher intake comes as several startups look to float initial public offers and ramp up operations, increasing the need for young professionals in data analytics, sales, finance, project partnership and implementation teams. That contrasts with the overall sentiment as colleges expect the placement season to be slow, like the previous year, amid two wars and a retreat from the pandemic-driven frenzy.

2,000 to be placed

About 2,000 students are expected to be placed in the upcoming year at a leading Bengaluru-based engineering college. “Of the 90 companies that have registered for placements over the last two months, about 36 are startups," said a placement executive at the college. “We are seeing more startups coming for hiring this year. This has resulted in a better placement season for us this year."

Online retailer Meesho hired 150 graduates from the batch of 2024, with a majority of them coming from IITs, IIITs, and National Institutes of Technology (NITs). It plans to “more than double that number this year", Ashish Kumar Singh, Meesho’s chief human resource officer (CHRO), told Mint. “Our recruitment drive spans multiple critical roles across key functions like analytics, technology, business, finance, product & design, and fulfilment & experience."

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Of the 23 IITs, the first-generation institutes—in Kharagpur, Chennai (called Madras), Mumbai (Bombay), Delhi, Roorkee and Kanpur—start the placement season in December. The second- and third-generation IITs, along with the NIITs, begin their placements in August-September. The B-schools including IIMs will start their placements from February 2025.

While new-age startups are coming up, the placement officer from one of the older-generation IITs said the institute cross-checks their authenticity. “We are looking at the companies that have registered, their size, funding and other details before allowing them for placements."

Among the larger internet companies, “Zomato has already been in discussions to hire from us," the officer said.

Hiring the best

According to the placement teams at IITs, Zomato recruited algorithm engineers and those with a combination of software developer, machine learning and data science skills.

“Zomato’s campus hiring strategy is focused on hiring the best talent in the market and is not limited to IITs and IIMs," said Niharika Mohanty, vice president for HR at the restaurant search and food delivery company. “We are constantly looking to hire people that will help us build an organization of the future."

Overall, placement teams of IITs and NITs expect a slow pace of hiring as companies in other sectors such as manufacturing, banking and financial services and auto are taking time to firm up their recruitment numbers this year. Headwinds include wars raging in Europe and the Middle East, inflationary pressures and the presidential elections in the US, which could determine the outcome of offshoring policies.

Yet, for some of the newly founded startups, hiring from premium colleges shows that they have the funds and ability and roles to attract top talent.

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Fractal Analytics, a software-as-a-service platform, has mapped out its campus recruitment plan for the coming years. “We hire about 250 from college campuses every year with a gender diversity of 60%. We intend to scale our campus hiring to reach about 1,000 people in the coming 2-3 years," co-founder Srikanth Velamakanni said. The company is scouting for profiles such as AI engineers, data scientists across various areas of expertise including generative AI, cloud and full stack engineers.

Business-to-business fintech platform Zaggle onboarded more than 100 newcomers in the first half of this financial year and is looking to add another 100 during the year to support its growth plans for the next 2-3 years.

“We have handpicked lateral talent from IIMs and also onboarded candidates from tier 2 universities," said Zaggle’s CHRO Latha Iyer. “We may look at hiring anywhere between 15 and 20 people from various campuses across tech & non-tech functions."