Besides Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and other engineering colleges, these firms have made, or are planning to make, offers at undergraduate colleges, business schools and design schools to beef up their teams.
“This might turn out to be a good time to pick up great talent because there’s more sanity in the market,” said Saurabh Sharma, CEO of data science and analytics firm Indus Insights.
“We are bullish on hiring. Most of the pullback is happening from unprofitable tech product companies. We have been profitable for a while and aren’t dependent on VC/PE investors providing our next funding round,” he added.
The Gurgaon-based startup has already made around 30 offers across IITs and 25 offers across Lady Shri Ram College (LSR), SRCC (Shri Ram College of Commerce), and Ashoka University.
Similarly, HiLabs, which provides a data science platform for healthcare organisations, said its campus hiring activity has doubled. The platform helps the healthcare sector reduce costs related to large-scale operations. Improving operational efficiencies is practically recession proof and it needs to continue to add to the team to support growth, the Pune-based company said.
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“We hire for data scientists, software development engineers and associate product managers,” HiLabs CEO Amit Garg said. “Salary offers for positions in India are typically Rs 24 lakh plus ESOPs, while we also made US-based offers to two candidates at IITs.”
Salary packages offered by startups on campus range between Rs 10 lakh to Rs 1 crore-plus, according to institute placement sources.
While campuses, especially engineering colleges, are vetting startups keen on campus recruitment, given the current uncertainty in the industry, they are also inviting more of them during placements to make up numbers in a year when average offers from companies, particularly those in technology, have come down amidst a global slowdown.
Consequently, some stable startups are seeing a higher offer acceptance rate from students. Indus Insights’ Sharma said acceptance rate of its offers is at more than 85% this year, even 100% in some campuses, compared to 60-70% earlier.
Digital insurance company Digit Insurance is looking at doubling campus hiring for the 2023 batch, hiring over 550 trainees compared to 280 last year. Batch of 2022 students who interned with the company this year have all been made full-time offers.
“The roles are offered to campus recruits across tech, data science, legal, actuarial, medical, UI/UX, operations and marketing roles,” said Amrit Jaidka Arora, chief HR officer of Digit Insurance.
Modern analytics cloud company ThoughtSpot is looking to grow its team in India by 10% with new graduates across engineering, B-schools and general colleges. The focus is on software developers and product designer roles.
“In September, we announced a $150-million investment in India over the next five years. Part of this investment is in continuing to grow our headcount and hire the talent we need to continue to drive and deliver on our product innovation,” said Pam Holmberg, vice president of people at ThoughtSpot. “New graduates typically offer a fresh perspective to problem-solving, and bring new knowledge and skills.”
AI (artificial intelligence) research and cloud services company Abacus.AI is upping its campus hiring across IITs, handing out offers to software engineers and machine learning engineers at Rs 40 lakh plus stock options, its India cite lead Manish Vora told ET.
Others who have been recruiting across campuses include Flipkart, Navi, Myntra, Zupee, Razorpay, Slice and Zomato among others.
