Some students from the placements team at IIT-Kanpur, in fact, told Mint that they have informed companies participating in the campus recruitment that if they deferred onboarding beyond a certain period they would be blacklisted. These students declined to be identified.

The premier engineering colleges are concerned about a repeat of potential delays in joining dates for the selected students, as had happened to previous graduating batch given slowdowns in certain sectors. Across other engineering schools as well, many students who had been selected at campus hirings last year were onboarded only later this year.

As such, the IITs are bracing for a sobering placement season this year. For thousands of to-be engineers in the class of 2024, the number of hirings is expected to taper, although salaries may not drop by much.

“IIT-Bombay and IIT-Delhi have informed the companies with an explicit request not to defer joining dates as was done in 2023,” said a partner at a consulting company that has recruited 8 -11 students from the IITs in the ongoing campus placements.

While the placements season will last a few months, students will graduate from the campuses by July-August.

“We had to onboard students hired from the batch of 2023 in October-November. The students were concerned but we honoured all our offers,” said a recruiter from a multinational firm, adding that the company has informed the IITs that it cannot confirm on the joining dates.

Mostly, it had been companies with large exposure to the US economy that had delayed joining dates for the previous graduating class, said students from placement cells across IITs, requesting anonymity. Consulting firms had delayed joining dates by a couple of months owing to the impact of a sluggish economy on their hiring plans.

Among finance and consulting majors, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey & Co, and Arthur D. Little had offered jobs to IIT graduates with salaries ranging from Rs17 lakh to Rs35 lakh.

The placements exercise at the IITs for the current graduating class began on 1 December.

On the initial day, trading firms offered jobs with salaries ranging from Rs80 lakh to Rs2 crore, according to placement executives across IITs at Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kharagpur, Roorkee, Guwahati and Kanpur.

On Friday, IIT-Bombay said about 80% of its regular recruiters participated in the placements, as compared with last year. IIT Roorkee said Day 1 of its placements that it had received three international and 358 domestic offers, while IIT-Guwahati received 164 offers from 59 firms by Friday evening across core engineering, software, and business analyst roles.

IIT-Kharagpur said on Saturday that more than 60 companies had offered various roles to its students, mainly in software, analytics, finance–banking, consulting and core engineering.