Pharmaceutical companies are venturing into campuses of top management schools in the country for staff recruitment. Some top pharma companies recently camped at Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad and recruited some students from the 2001-03 batch. While one student accepted a job with GlaxoSimithKline and the other with National Kidney Foundation, a Singapore-based Non-Government Organisation, the third student with Procter & Gamble (P&G), which is also in the related nutritive food supplements and cosmetics. Incidentally, all three were foreign placements in Sales & Marketing.

Recruiters from Dr Reddy's Laboratories and Nicholas Piramal had also come with offers for placement, but no student apparently found the offers attractive enough. The students spurned the offers from Air India too, which participated in the campus placement at IIM-A after a gap of nearly 20 years.

In fact, there are always more offers than students during campus placement at the Asia-Pacific region's best business school. This year, there were 241 offers, including 39 foreign placements, as against 184 students. They spurned even three foreign placements. Finally, 36 accepted overseas jobs and the remaining 148 domestic.

For some reason, the Placement Committee sources said, pharmaceuticals and healthcare industry used to elude the IIM-A students. Or, were it the students of Asia-Pacific region's top business school, who refused the 'best' offers from the pharmaceutical companies?

This was despite the fact that a large number of IIM-A students had academic background in engineering (72 per cent) and science subjects (4 per cent) this year. The manufacturing sector too did not offer top posts to management grades in the past but the trend is changing.

Function wise, 50 students accepted placements in Banking & Finance (all in India except three), 40 in Sales & Marketing (all in India except three), 34 in Systems (or IT, all in India), 25 in investment banking, 12 in general management and consulting and 11 in operations (including manufacturing).

The companies that the current batch of IIM-A grads preferred most are: ICICI 15, Lehman Brothers 10, HCL Tech 9, Cognizant Technology Solutions 8 and HLL 7. Rather, HLL had pre-placement offers for about 20 students, with option to let them try their luck during campus placement too.

Capital One offered the highest foreign salary of USD 82,000 per annum the average is being worked out, as parameters differed, but is likely to be below USD 75,000. The highest domestic salary of Rs 14 lakh was from McKinsey & Co to three students and the average domestic salary is expected to be around Rs 6.2 lakh, the sources said.

The issue – as to why the cream among the management students do not accept jobs in the pharmaceutical industry or, conversely, why the industry could not offer jobs to the expectation of the students – has been discussed at various forums by the top brass of pharmaceuticals industry.

The issue is likely to assume greater significance when the domestic industry would have to comply with WTO obligations in another 20 months from now, especially in process patent. Perhaps, the industry could take a cue from the precedence practiced at top business schools.

The three major reasons, which helped the IIM-A grads weather global recession in the job market are (a) increased focus on globalisation through exchange programmes, campus activities and faculty interactions, (b) enhanced interactions with the corporate world through guest lectures, case contests and other academic events, and (c) leveraging IIM-A alumni network by consolidating relationship with existing recruiters and bringing new companies to the campus.