IT industry association Nasscom has asked engineering colleges and companies to schedule placement sessions in the eighth or final semester of BE/BTech course to reduce the waiting time for freshers to get the appointment letters.
Though Nasscom had come up with guidelines earlier that IT companies need to go for campus placements only in the eighth semester, several companies schedule placement sessions as early as sixth and seventh semesters to pick up the cream from different colleges. This makes freshers wait for nearly two years to get appointment letters.
"We have asked the companies and colleges to hold placements only in the eighth semester. We are telling companies not to hire before that," Nasscom President Som Mittal said.
He was responding to a query, after the Nasscom's start-up promotion event here recently, on the problem of companies delaying the appointment letters for the freshers they had hired from the colleges. The industry is expected to hire some 1.50 lakh this year (2013) as against 1.80 lakh last year.
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Ganesh Natarajan, Vice-Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Zensar Technologies, asserted that his company always preferred to approach campuses in the eighth semester even when its larger peers book slots in the earlier semesters.
"We are going to hire 400 recruits from campuses this year," he said.
Rahul L. Kanodia, Vice-Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Datamatics Global Services, has a different point of view. "The students and the companies that believe in catching them young and nurturing them, choose to hire from fourth semester onwards," he said.
Some companies, he argued, utilise this opportunity to reduce their hiring cost. "This has also a flip side, clearly evident in increasing attrition rates among the new hires," he said.
Anil Valluri, President of NetApp India Marketing and Services, felt that the Nasscom idea would benefit the industry. "Industry would get added time to rationalise and accommodate some of the offers it made last year; while students will continue to upgrade their skills and competencies during the course of the 8th semester and may be in a position to land better offers.
