A spectacular initial burst at least 15-20% more jobs, 10-20% higher average salaries and 30% increase in global offers — set the pace for this year's placement season at Indian Institutes of Technology which kicked off on Monday.
Sources from eight campuses that ET spoke to said hiring and salaries will shoot up this year, after a relatively slow 3-4 years.
In the first 20 hours, online social networking giant Facebook ruled the roost with a Rs 1.55 crore ($250,000) salary offer including bonus and ESOPs for a US posting.
This is the probably the highest ever offer across IITs in recent years.
Facebook made the offer for software engineer profiles based out of California to three students at IIT Kharagpur and to an unknown number at IIT-Bombay, sources at the two institutes revealed. The company did not respond to an email sent by ET.
Overall, big-ticket offers were back with a bang as other top paymasters, according to campus sources, included Samsung - $150,000 (Rs 93 lakh), Microsoft -$129,000 (Rs 80 lakh), Oracle - $125,000 plus Esops (Rs 78 lakh plus Esops), Google - $125,000 (Rs 78 lakh) and Visa -$140,000 (Rs 87 lakh).
At IIT-BHU, Varanasi, the top package from a multinational was Rs 77.5 lakh ($100,000 base salary, $15,000 sign-on bonus and $10,000 relocation and stock options), an over 19% jump over the top offer last year. At IIT-Kanpur, it went up over 36% from $110,000 last year.