BFSI cos scale up campus hiring amid global gloom

In a challenging year for placements amid a global slowdown and mass layoffs by technology majors, the BFSI sector - one of the prominent recruiters on campus - has outperformed itself, bringing some relief to the Class of 2023 during final placements. Banking, financial services and insurance companies including HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, JP Morgan, NatWest Group, DE Shaw India, Ambit, and Edelweiss Tokio Life Insurance, are significantly ramping up campus hiring across engineering and regular graduate colleges, business schools, and even CA and law institutes.

In some cases, such as JP Morgan, hiring of fresh college graduates will hit a new peak in 2023.

HDFC Bank has onboarded over 60% more from campuses this financial year over 2021-22 and added more institutes. "At our scale, the campus programme is a very important and sustainable avenue for onboarding young talent," said Geetha George, executive vice-president, human resources at HDFC Bank. "We will continue to invest in building talent through campus programmes in alignment with our overall growth plans."

There's been a jump in hiring in technology and data sciences on campuses as adoption of technology - accelerated by the pandemic - transforms the BFSI sector, industry executives said.

"We hire from top schools across India, focusing on people with backgrounds in areas such as software engineering, data and quantitative analytics, risk, research, finance and investment banking, and operations," said Gaurav Ahluwalia, head of HR, India corporate centres, at JP Morgan. ICICI Bank intends to hire around 550 people (including economics and statistics specialisation) from top engineering colleges such as Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and National Institutes of Technology (NITs) this year, besides close to 650 management trainees from campuses such as Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and National Law Universities (NLUs). The bank has also hired close to 325 from graduate colleges this year.

"We continue to nurture relationships with educational institutions for inducting talent from diverse sources," said TK Srirang, group chief human resources officer of ICICI Bank. NatWest Group India (formerly RBS India) made around 300 offers during final placements for the class of 2023, a 50% increase over last year.