Placements 2007: Code of Silence, Statistics and Much Ado About Everything

Previous

But the sudden decision to bar salary data was more than expected; as of late whole salary drama had gone out of control and was impacting overall balance in institutes themselves. The high salary figures, which were offered to less than 10% of the class, were impacting not only inflow of recruiters but also the overall moral of rest 90% of the class.
Hence, to think that security issues are driving these salary bans is to stretch issues of law and order a bit too far.

In fact there are various reasons why salary details get banned and which, in our view, are steps in the right direction, as over a period of time these juicy stories are going to do more harm than any benefit.

Highest Salary Package and Very Low Median / Average Salary

Every year institutes have been talking of those big salaries (last year some civil servant got a package of INR 45 Lakhs at IIM Ahmedabad, and an ISB student bagged an offer of USD 233,000 p.a.), but they rarely mention lowest salary or highlight median salary. When the highest offer is of INR 45 Lakhs and median is just INR 9 Lakhs, one can safely assume that 60-70% of the class is below the average (interestingly, very few of the B-schools in India provide median salary details unlike their international counterparts), and hence, these high figures are causing more heart-burns, and are also creating myths, which have started to turn quite counter-productive.

Hype Impacting Reality

In every placement season, whatever number of corporate visit a campus, the worry of placement committee is not Day Zero but Day Five, as placing the tail-enders becomes a big task and nerve-wrecking exercise; and to have a good placement season, you need to have a good line-up of companies even on Day 3, 4 and 5. Further, salaries apart, job profiles are also very important which many of the mid-size companies are able to offer instead of high paying jobs. Unfortunately, given the high decibel publicity given to a crore figure salary, a lot many first-time potential recruiters are slowly becoming just potential only as they can not match the figures, which are being touted by the media, and hence, are opting out of whole process, thus, denying a lot many students a desired job profile with a fast growing mid-size company.

Next