The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) Tuesday started the final hiring season for their outgoing batches in a robust note negating the economic downturn as companies hired more and offered better pay packages on the first day.

While IIT Roorkee, IIT Guwahati and IIT Kanpur bagged between 69 and 125 offers in the first half of the day, IIT Madras said 123 offers were made in the same time. This was excluding the pre-placement offers made to the students before the final campus placement began on Tuesday. And authorities said by tomorrow over 1500 offers will be bagged by students of the older IITs.

“The placement process this year is robust despite the economic concerns, and the average salary offered this year to our students is higher than last year. Though the final numbers of Day one will be available by Wednesday as hiring continues till late in the evening, over 100 students were already placed in the first half of the first day,” said Bhavesh Loungani, a placement coordinator at IIT Kanpur.

“Companies like Microsoft and Goldman Sachs have hired in double digit numbers and some established start-ups as well as technology and financial firms have made good offers too,” said Loungani.

IIT Madras said, Microsoft was the top recruiter with 19 offers, followed by Texas Instruments (12), Bajaj Auto and space agency ISRO making 10 offers each.

“A total of 123 offers were made by 22 Companies during Day One’s Session 1.1 and this is higher than any of the preceding academic years. During the last academic year of 2019-20, 102 offers were made by 20 companies at the end of Session 1.1,” the Chennai based tech and engineering school said. 24 more companies including Wipro Ltd, GE, are hiring IIT Madras students till midnight and over the next one week, over 270 firms will hire IIT Madras students.

IIT Roorkee said it has bagged 272 offers including 153 pre-placement offers in the first session of the day one, the first day saw the highest salary offer coming at ₹80 lakh per annum from domestic firms as against Rs.60 lakh offered last year.

Similarly, IITs in Delhi and Kharagpur saw a good start to the placement process. The overall placement scenario has not been affected so far in 2020 and the institution “hopes to see improvement in overall placement statistics”, IIT Guwahati said adding that it got 69 offers on first session of the placement season besides 133 pre-placement offers it has already bagged. “We expect an upward trend in placement this year,” IIT Guwahati director T.G. Sitharam said.

Companies like Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Qualcomm, Google, Amazon, Walmart, Bajaj Auto, JP Morgan Chase and Co, Flipkart among others hired from multiple IITs. Though IITs did not divulge the salary details, sources in some of the older IITs said that multiple students in several campuses bagged offers in “excess of Rs.50 lakh per annum and few students across IITs also got package in excess of Rs. 1 crore each”.

The campus hiring this year at IITs are happening virtually due to Covid-19 restrictions and students studying largely from remote locations as classes in campuses are closed.