While admissions to business schools for the MBA batch of 2025-27 are in their final phase, placements for outgoing students have moved to their last lap, with many schools concluding the process.
Some key trends around placements for this year have emerged. While the older business schools of the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) of Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Calcutta, Indian School of Business (ISB) Hyderabad and Mohali and XLRI, Jamshedpur have placed 100 per cent of their students, some of the newer IIMs and others below the top 20 have faced challenges in getting all their students placed.
Among the top 20 business schools, the highest average salary was in IIM-B at Rs 35.92 lakh per annum (LPA), and the lowest was at NMIMS, Mumbai, at Rs 25.13 LPA, according to the management education portal MBA Universe. The average salaries showed a mixed trend. While there has not been any substantial increase in salaries at most business schools, the decrease in salaries in schools where they have fallen is also not much. IIMs at Rohtak, Ranchi, and Vishakhapatnam have bucked the trend.
As high as 80% of the recruitments in some of the top 50 business schools are from three sectors, namely IT Services/Global Capability Centres, Consulting, and Banking and Financial Services. The recruitment process in the previous year saw participation from a wider range of sectors, including Analytics, Product Management, FMCG, and E-commerce.
It is business as usual for corporate placements in most Indian business schools. One of the key takeaways from the trends is that, despite global geopolitical uncertainties, conflicts in some parts of the world, early signs of recession in Europe, Trump’s trade tariff wars, and the increasing popularity of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to boost productivity and consequently decrease manpower, corporates have not pressed the pause button on hirings.
This is, of course, good news for two reasons: one, according to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, some of the top US business schools of Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, NYU Stern, and MIT Sloan School of Management witnessed poorer placements than the previous year.
Harvard Business School had not placed 23% of its graduating students as of early this year. Two, even though a large number of companies hiring in India are multinational corporations, their Indian operations have not been negatively impacted, and consequently, they have not cut down on their campus hiring of MBA students.
“Amidst the current volatile state of the geopolitical environment, we expected strong headwinds for this year’s placement season. However, corporates showed faith in IIM-A as usual,” Professor Viswanath Pingali, Chairperson of the Placement Committee at IIM Ahmedabad said.
Professor Himanshu Rai, Director, IIM-Indore conveyed a message that was quite similar in tone to the one from IIM-Ahmedabad, “Despite the uncertainties in the economic landscape, the success of our students in securing remarkable career opportunities across various sectors highlights the efficacy of our philosophy.”
What the recruitment process also showed was that for recruiters, quality and reputation continue to matter. The traditionally top IIMs at Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Calcutta, and Lucknow, XLRI Jamshedpur, and ISB have by and large not been impacted by the challenges that corporates are facing. One indicator of this is the new companies, apart from legacy hirers, which come to campuses. This year, both ISB and IIM-Kozhikode saw 70-plus new companies that came to each campus. Another indicator of the credibility of business schools among companies is reflected in the high cost to company (CTC) salaries offered this year. While the number of business schools where salaries offered above Rs 1 crore per annum have reduced compared to the past years, a school like IIM-Lucknow this year saw a company in the product and analytical domain offering Rs 1.23 crores per annum to a student.
Third, thanks to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) requirements, many business schools in India are moving towards better gender ratios, which consequently help companies focus on DEI and hire many more female students. IMT Ghaziabad and ISB are two schools that have taken progressive steps in this regard. This year’s average CTC salary of female students at IMT is higher than that of male students and is even above the overall school average. The average CTC of female students stood at Rs 18.03 lakh per annum compared to Rs 16.95 lakh per annum for male students.
True, things are not bleak for business school placements in India when compared to that of US and other overseas business schools. However, Rahul Mishra, Professor of Strategy at the business school IILM Institute of Higher Education, says, “Today’s MBA has been commoditised. Beyond the relatively higher ranked and better institutions, very few of the MBA students who pass out from the rest of the hundreds of B-schools in the country do not add any value to the companies they join. Many of them are unemployable, too. There is therefore a need to reimagine the MBA of tomorrow.”
