Why top banks didn't bank on IIMs this year

Mumbai: The US recession seems to be having an impact on IIM-Calcutta. Global firms were shelling out the big bucks to new graduates despite the downturn - but no longer.

The I-banks came to campus and took only a chosen few. Global financial powerhouses like Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, Deutsche Bank, Barclays and Goldman Sachs may have come to the IIMs, but the number of offers they made have come down.

At IIM-Calcutta, the total number of offers from the financial sector dropped to 33 percent in 2008 - it was 42 per cent in 2007.

This is mainly due to a shrinking number of global offers from financial players. However Indian companies from the sector continued to hire aggressively.

IIM-Calcutta Dean Anindya Sen says, “Number of I-banks offers is definitely lower this year. Particularly at IIM-Calcutta, people have strong quantitative backgrounds and prefer jobs in the financial sector, particularly I-banking. I think there has been a shift away from that at the top towards consulting firms.”

Its not just IIM-Calcutta. 56 per cent of the IIM-Ahmedabad batch did a summer internship in the financial sector.

But only 45 per cent of students walked away with finance offers in the final placement. And even though the I-bankers walked away with the highest salaries this year too, the rise in salary levels failed to meet expectations.

“Since worldwide we have a little bit of a downturn, it was only to be expected that all the salaries on offer will not be reaching very high stratospheric levels, “ Sen adds.

The drop in finance offers has been offset by aggressive hiring from consultancies, media and realty firms.

So while the traditional heavyweights from the financial sector may be losing their dominance, overall placements at the IIMs remained upbeat.

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