On the 17th of March, 2009, 267 students of the Batch of 2009 at IIM Lucknow received their Post-Graduate Diplomas in Management and graduated with excellent career prospects. The global recession notwithstanding, IIM Lucknow yet again achieved 100% placements for its students in their domains of choice.

Unlike previous years, the final placement process this year was an extended process spread over two weeks. Over 120 companies, including more than 50 first time recruiters, confirmed their participation in placements at IIM Lucknow. By the end of placements, 105 companies had made a total of 284 offers making it the largest placement process this year across premier B-schools, in terms of the number of candidates placed successfully. Out of the graduating batch, 25 students accepted the Pre-Placement Offers extended to them whereas 7 students chose to start-up on their own. This year, several students also managed to secure lucrative international offers from reputed firms such as Barclays Capital, Frost & Sullivan, Ernst & Young and Alshaya among others.

The Higher Entry Placement Process (HEPP), which facilitates lateral placements at IIM Lucknow, was held from January through March 2009. Ernst & Young (Middle East), Barings Private Equity Partners PricewaterhouseCoopers, IBM, Wipro Consulting, Deloitte, Citibank, Aditya Birla Group, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant and Larsen & Toubro were among the major recruiters that participated in HEPP 2009. A total of 48 students bagged lateral job offers.

This year’s placements showed the rising trend of a change in the focus of students, with almost 31% of the offers being made in the Marketing domain in addition to about 40% of offers coming from the Finance domain. In addition to these, about 16% of the batch accepted Consulting offers while the rest took up offers from HR (5%), General Management (4%), Operations (2%) and Systems (2%) domain.

This year students received offers from major recruiters like McKinsey & Co, The Boston Consulting Group, Proctor & Gamble, Hindustan Unilever Limited, TAS, HSBC, Axis Bank, ICICI Group, Deutsche Bank, American Express, Frost & Sullivan, Asian Paints, Alshaya, Cadbury, Johnson & Johnson , GlaxoSmithKline and Reckitt Benckiser which have regularly participated in placements at IIM Lucknow.

The students belonging to the Agri-Business stream also performed well to bag offers from major recruiters like ITC, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Agrotech Foods with DCM Shriram offering international locations during the placement process.

In addition to these, this year more than 50 companies recruited from IIM Lucknow for the first time. Some prominent ones among these are Jaypee Capital, Siva Ventures, L’oreal, Tholons Consulting, Virgin Mobile, Religare Securities, Darashaw & Co, Allegro Advisors, Eli-Lily, Jindal Steel, Kellogg, Maersk and Bharti Telesoft.

IIM Lucknow also hosted more than 14 PSUs, including some of the Navratna PSUs, in this placement season. Some prominent ones among these are Bank of Baroda, Union Bank of India, ONGC, SIDBI, BHEL, NTPC, SAIL, GAIL and Coal India. PSUs were well received by IIM Lucknow students with 65 offers - highest across all IIMs, being accepted during the placement season.

Summarizing the season, Dr. Sushil Kumar, Chairman – Placements, added, “Despite the market scenario, the campus succeeded in securing handsome job offers for the entire batch, while strengthening its relationship with several regular recruiters and establishing new associations with many firms. The successful conclusion of Placements 2009 at IIM Lucknow has upheld the caliber and potential of this institute.”