How to hire excellent engineers from India

India is filled with very many excellent professionals- ranging from excellent doctors to scientists to engineers. Hiring engineers from India is a lot different from how it is in the western countries. This post is meant to be a short informational answer to the question.

The premier engineering institutes of India — The Indian Institute of Technology, commonly known as IITs are autonomous public institutes of higher education. Below is brief information about IITs and the courses offered before moving to the hiring process.

Structure

There are total of 23 IITs in various states of India. However, 16 of them have graduating batch in 2016 and 2017. The Ministry of Human Resource Development in India have been establishing more IITs to promote the engineering and research mindset in India. The list of IITs can be found at MHRD’s site and more generic information could be found at the Wikipedia page.

Course

Although, each IIT have different course structure, the most common programmes are- Bachelor of Technology (BTech), Master of Technology (MTech), Master of Science (by research — MS, by coursework — MSc), Master of Business Administration (MBA), Doctor of Philosophy (PhD).

The IIT-JEE (Now known as JEE-Advanced) and GATE are two important factors behind the success of IITs, as it enables the IITs to accept only a select group of meritorious students. This combination of success factors has led to the concept of the IIT Brand. The acceptance rate is a mere 1%.

There is an even more variation in the departments at various IITs. Few of the major departments are: Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Bio-sciences and Bio-engineering among others.

All the IITs follow the credits system of performance evaluation, with proportional weighting of courses based on their importance. For each semester, the students are graded on a scale of 0 to 10 based on their performance, by taking a weighted average of the grade points from all the courses, with their respective credit points. Each semester evaluation is done independently and then the weighted average over all semesters is used to calculate the cumulative grade point average (known as CGPA).

How to hire — Placement Process

The placements of the graduates from the IITs is mostly through on-campus placements. A pretty big team of students, staff and faculty is behind conducting the placement process at the IITs. The serve as a facilitator for hosting the companies on the campus for placements. Let me walk through the general placement procedure:

• Company registration: The company approaches the placement cell to register for the placement season. The company is asked the information about the job profile to be offered, some company specific details and the compensation offered. To make the students clear about the job prospects offered, the company is a given time slot to host a pre-placement talk with the students either by coming to the campus of through a webinar.
• Student registers: Based on the company and the job profile, students register for the said company by submitting their resume and filling up a form with personal information.
• Shortlisting: Company is given freedom to shortlist the student — this may be on the basis of resume, CGPA, screening test(online or offline), screening interview(video conferencing, face to face, telephonic), and/or some other criterion.
• Selection: The results are announced and the student selected is considered out of the placement process for subsequent companies.

Let me clarify the placement process with few more points:

• Each IIT have to be approached separately for the process, and the placement process is completely independent for each IIT.
• The placement process is very competitive one — not only for students but also for the companies. The companies offering higher compensation and better job profile are given earlier dates in the placement season.
• Many startups also take part in the placement season and students are willing to join such startups in numbers.
• Many companies that want to hire employees for their out of India offices also take part in the placement season and students are willing to join such companies in numbers.
• Many companies who have only a limited number of opening also take part in the placement season.
• Companies can take part in the placement season through a complete virtual process — having the screening and shortlisting process online: through video and/or telephonic interviews.
• Companies can hire both full time employees and summer/winter interns.
• All IITs have a placement website, where they can be reached. [Example]

Companies find it a better way of hiring than off-campus hiring because they get access to a better pool of talent with spending a very little resource. There is a huge opportunity of hiring fresh and excellent talent from the IITs.

P.S. — I am placement coordinator at one of the IIT — Indian Institute of Technology Mandi and would like to invite companies to liaise with campus recruitment process for students graduating in June 2017. You may reach us at placement@iitmandi.ac.in or visit our website: http://iitmandi.ac.in/placements