Monday, January 31, 2005

For 2005 Grads, Job Offers Are Rolling In

After three slack years, employers across a range of industries have headed back to campus in US
When Katherine Ho returned for her senior year at the University of Michigan in August, she was busy with more than classwork. Within weeks the 21-year-old mechanical-engineering major had plunged into a whirlwind of on-campus job interviews with nearly a dozen companies, from Boeing to General Electric to DuPont . By early September she had her first job offer -- and earlier this month she settled on another, accepting a spot at GE Aircraft Engines. Many of her friends already have offers, too. Having watched the Class of 2004 struggle to find work, Ho was plenty relieved. "It was easier to get interviews," she says. "And I was surprised there were more job openings -- it was definitely hard last year."



After three years in which many college grads found jobs scarce, the picture seems to be brightening for next spring's 1 million-plus grads. A study of 582 companies conducted by Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University showed that companies plan to expand hiring of grads by 20% over last year; better yet, average pay could rise 4% to 7%. And the change appears to be across the board: Industries ranging from investment banking and health care to retail and real estate say they'll recruit more heavily on campus this year.

Of course, that 20% surge looks particularly good when compared with the dismal performance of recent years. College hiring last spring was up only about 5%, according to the Michigan State survey. In 2003 job growth was flat -- following a combined 50% contraction for the two previous academic years. "We're not back to the dot-com era," says Lois Meerdink, assistant dean for business-career services at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "But the trend is definitely heading up."

PENT-UP DEMAND 
Why is corporate America back on campus? Forecasts for continued solid economic growth account for some of the gains; just as important, many companies can no longer continue to put off hiring for jobs left empty through attrition. Add to that the expectation that Baby Boomers will start retiring in a few years, says Phil Gardner, author of the Michigan State survey, and companies have "a human-resources gap to fill." What's more, sectors such as consulting and investment banking figure business will pick up in 2005.

Investment banks are recruiting aggressively. Goldman, Sachs & Co. (
GS ) plans to hire about 1,100 grads this year. That's a fraction of the level at the peak of the bull market in 2000, but it's up a fifth from last year. Like other investment banks, Goldman is moving early to get the best talent. Aaron Marcus, its director of campus recruiting for the Americas, says Goldman finished interviewing seniors in October and made most offers within a week or two of the first meeting.

It's too early for undergrads to breathe easy, though. If the economy slows in coming months, recruiters could vanish once again. Still, for Katherine Ho and many other students with jobs waiting for them, this is the best news in a while.
Are You Google Employee Material?
what does it takes to be a google employee

A strong brand, hot IPO and an intense engineering culture help make search advertising company Google a dream employer for a lot of people. Now, a new aptitude test Google is circulating purports to find the best and brightest. But is it really a brilliant ad campaign?

On Thursday, Alan Eustace, vice president of engineering and research for Mountain View, Calif.-based Google, published an aptitude test for "uber-geeks."

The 21 GLAT questions include engineering brain-twisters such as, "Consider a function which, for a given whole number n, returns the number of ones required when writing out all numbers between 0 and n. For example, f)13)=6. Notice that f(1)=1. What is the next largest n such that f(n)=n?"

One question asks: "What's the coolest hack you've ever written?" Another says: "What's broken with Unix? How would you fix it?"

The test is also heavy on the sort of twee humor that characterizes Google's public persona. "This space left intentionally blank. Please fill it with something that improves upon emptiness," one question implores.

A question with multiple choice answers states: "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. There is a dusty laptop here with a weak wireless connection. There are dull, lifeless gnomes strolling about. What dost thou do?"

"We're a little obsessive about digging into hard computing problems, and we love finding more people like us," Eustace said in a note on the corporate site. Acknowledging that such tests often "suck," he offered, "What if there were a standardized test that led, like, immediately to the really cool job?"

The test also ran as an insert in print magazines, leaving some observers to conclude that the GLAT is an extremely clever ad.

"Pre-employment testing is a science, and [the answers to these questions] are not very objective data," said Sean Lally, an Encinitas, Calif.-based technology recruiter. Lally said he saw the GLAT as a recruiting ad for engineers. "It's a help-wanted ad designed to show they have a sense of humor and are not just about making tons of money," he said. The ad is designed to show that "Google is very much an engineer's company, but they're still irreverent and fun."

Lally doubted that Google hiring managers would pay much attention to the answers -- even though they could uncover people without a sense of irony. "[Hires] are going to be based the quality of the resumes," he said. "Somebody who has real cultural issues might not get half of the jokes, but if he has a Ph.D. from MIT in the specific type of technology they need, they won't care if he doesn't get any of the cultural stuff."

Wannabes are invited to print the Google Labs Aptitude Test, or GLAT, complete it, then mail it back with their resumes. "Score high enough," Google promises, "and we'll be in touch." In other words, don't call Eustace, he'll call you

Job interviews: What not to say

1. Don't pick a fight with the interviewer. Example follows ...

Applicant: "So you are making a decision this week?"

Me: "Well, no, I don't think so. I'm narrowing down ..."

Applicant: "This is outrageous. I was told that you would decide this week!"

Me: "I'm sorry if there was a miscommunication. I'm hoping to reach a decision soon, but there are still some interviews ..."

Applicant: "This is extremely unprofessional and unacceptable ..."

Me: "All right, listen. If you came in here and knocked my socks off, sure, I might have made a decision this week. But you didn't, so goodbye."

A shame really. The person was on my short list up to that point.

2. Don't argue like you already work here ...

Me: "That's an interesting story pitch. But it's very legalistic. You see, for our readers, you really need to identify the points in the process where investors can get a clue about buy, sell or hold."

Applicant: "Well, now you're just thinking like an editor."

Sigh.

Hey, it's not all me. The deputy managing editors here do some interviews too.

3. Know what you want to do (or at least make the interviewer think you do).

Deputy: "So do you want to work here or not?"

Applicant: "I'll let you be the judge of that."


/*
My friend actually did say this during an interview with a consulting firm. Needless to say, he wasn’t hired.
*/
Interviewer: "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?"
Interviewee: "In your chair!"
**************************************

/*
Aren’t we all human?
*/
Interviewer: "What are your weaknesses?"
Interviewee: "I have no weaknesses. I am always right and never make
mistakes. I always get the job done right."
Interviewer: [shocked]

Foreign-student enrollment declines in US

New foreign-student enrollment in U.S. graduate student programs dropped this fall, according to two recent reports.


The decline is sure to fuel heated debates about the role of international students in U.S. graduate programs, whether a technology talent shortage looms and how to preserve the country's long-term technological leadership. Foreign students make up a large chunk of the students in U.S. graduate programs in technology-related fields.




In a report released Wednesday, a coalition of education groups said more than half of the U.S. doctoral and research institutions that responded to a survey reported a decline in new international graduate enrollments this fall.


The study follows a report last week from the Council of Graduate Schools, which found a 6 percent decline in first-time international graduate student enrollment from 2003 to 2004. First-time enrollment from China decreased 8 percent and from India 4 percent. Following a decade of steady growth, the number of first-time international graduate students studying in the United States decreased between 6 percent and 10 percent for three consecutive years, the council said.


The fields of life sciences, business and engineering saw the steepest declines in foreign-student enrollment, while physical sciences was the only field that showed an increase in first-time enrollment, according to the council.


"The three primary factors leading to declines in international graduate applications, admits and enrollment are increased global competition, changing visa policies and diminished perceptions of the U.S. abroad," Council of Graduate Schools President Debra Stewart said in a statement. "While these numbers are distressing, the declines are not nearly as great as some had feared."


The coalition of groups behind Wednesday's report is composed of the Association of International Educators (NAFSA), the Association of American Universities, the Council of Graduate Schools, the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges and the Institute of International Education.

Skeptical, stressed, scared, sucked dry IT Workers
Slashed resources and impossible demands have caused IT morale to disintegrate
Skeptical, stressed, scared, sucked dry. This is how IT professionals feel about work these days.

Other telling words that surfaced repeatedly during more than 30 interviews and in 200 written survey responses include fear, loathing, disgust and dread.

To be blunt, IT worker morale sucks, and it's getting bleaker by the day.

"It's the worst I've ever seen," says a 22-year IT veteran in the banking industry. "Morale is twice as low this week as it was last week."

Research backs up that claim. In June, nearly three-fourths of 650 companies surveyed by Meta Group Inc. reported having morale problems among their IT staffs. The year before, two-thirds of executives cited poor worker morale as an issue.

No wonder spirits are plunging. The U.S. technology sector suffered yet another round of widespread layoffs during the third quarter, according to a recent report by Chicago-based recruiting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. "High-tech job cuts are on the way up as the end of the year approaches," says CEO John A. Challenger.

Job cuts in technology jumped 60% between July and September to 54,701, compared with 34,213 layoffs in the second quarter, the report said. To make matters worse, the growing number of layoffs is not being countered by any move to hire, Challenger says.

And job insecurity is just one part of the problem.









Going Down Fast
Image Credit: Jonathan Weiner
Boosting morale should be near the top of almost every CIO's strategic agenda. But before management can devise strategies to address the problem, it must truly understand the causes of IT workers' misery. Frequently, it's not about money or challenges. Instead, workers point to slashed resources, unrealistic expectations, willfully blind management and inane policies and procedures as some of their biggest pain points.

These factors engender fear, exhaustion, bitterness and resentment, all of which blunt innovation and productivity. They can also cause long-term harm to workers' overall health, according to some experts.

In a 2004 Computerworld survey of 9,854 IT workers, 88% of the respondents said they experienced some kind of stress at work.

"We now know from research that in a work environment where there are a lot of pressure and demands and where people have very little control that substance abuse is two times higher, that heart problems and back pains are three times higher, that there's a greater rate of infections and mental health problems," notes Michael Koscec, president of Toronto-based Entec Corp., which specializes in measuring employee satisfaction and commitment at large companies


continued>>

India Inc. is Twice as Fast as Japan Inc.

It took Japan Inc. more than 30 years to obtain a strong position in key U.S. industries, such as Automotive and Consumer Electronics. It will take half as long for India Inc. to do the same for service-oriented industries with IT leading the charge.


The Bottom Line: India’s rise in IT and other areas means U.S.-based companies must radically change their view of competition and what becomes strategic domestic employment.


What It Means: The term India Inc. has been thrown around in the popular press for the last year as an embodiment of the new competition arising from India in IT and other areas. For manufacturers, this has a similar resonance of Japan Inc., a term that came about in the 1970s as Japan attacked key U.S. manufacturing industries, including Automotive, Steel, and Consumer Electronics. Unfortunately, many U.S. and European companies continue to underestimate the impact of India Inc. and have not made the needed changes to their business and employment models.


The fastest change is occurring with the major software vendors that have moved much of their core product development to India. For example, nearly all of SAP’s BW product development and much of NetWeaver resides in India. Oracle and PeopleSoft have accelerated deployment of Research and Development (R&D) and support resources in India; Oracle has more than 6,400 people now employed in India and plans to have nearly 10,000 by the end of 2005.


Some companies, such as Kana, have taken an extreme view and have sent all R&D to India. Venture capitalists require that any startup have a plan and capability to deploy R&D in India. While technology-oriented companies have embraced offshoring, most end-user organizations continue to be cautious about how much and how fast they can offshore IT operations. In the next few years, however, their internal IT cost models will prove too high and force them to change.


With this hypergrowth in job openings comes an equal focus in education. Potential IT workers are not waiting for jobs to come their way, but are instead fostering a fast-growing base of colleges and trade schools offering comprehensive and inexpensive technical education and certification. Local and national newspapers are full of ads for such training.


Like Japan Inc., one of the initial attractions of India Inc. is low-cost labor. Ironically, India offers lower cost labor than Japan ever did, but higher quality than is delivered by many companies today. This paradox is not readily understood and is why many U.S. and European companies continue to ignore the potential of India Inc. Indian software companies hold the highest number of Level 4 and 5 Software Engineering Institute-Capability Maturity Model certifications, which is the software equivalent of Six Sigma certification for defects in manufacturing.


Along with this enhanced quality comes enhanced delivery of value. The perception that India is only capable of low-cost, tactical work is as true as the false perception that the Japanese cars of the 1980s were cheap U.S. knockoffs. The establishment of low-cost offshore delivery centers in India for traditional IT service providers / Systems Integrators (SIs) is well underway, as are business processing outposts for all the services industries (Financial, Telecommunications, Legal, Engineering, etc.).


And unlike many of their U.S. and European counterparts, upwards of 50% of all SI/ Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) jobs are profitably taken with a fixed price bid. The high stock price of many Indian offshoring companies, as well as pre-tax margins in excess of 20%, illustrate that these companies have management expertise and execution quality.


Conclusion: The availability of inexpensive and reliable network and computing technology implies that any job or task that does not require the physical presence of a person can be sent offshore. India followed by others, including China, Eastern Europe, Russia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, are creating a sophisticated pool of highly specialized and educated workers who have shown the ability and willingness to deliver high-quality, low-cost work. Using many of Japan Inc.’s techniques of continuous improvement, quality circles, and process innovation, India Inc.’s 30% annual growth in IT services is being replicated in other service industries. U.S. and European companies need to reevaluate their worldwide employment models to ensure that they can benefit from India Inc. rather than be consumed by it. U.S. automakers and consumer electronics firms ignored Japan Inc. for decades until it was too late to recover; IT and other service providers do not have nearly as much time to recover from a similar misjudgment.

Offshoring company looks to make programmers obsolete
One of Indias biggest offshoring players has launched software that converts legacy applications to modern programming languages.

Mahindra British Telecom (MBT) said the software almost completely automates the process of converting legacy applications written in languages such as Cobol, Pascal, Delphi and Smalltalk to modern languages such as C, C++ and Java.

The company is a joint venture between Indian technology group Mahindra & Mahindra and BT Group. It has development centres in the UK and India and specialises in applications outsourcing and offshoring for the telecoms industry.

Such a system would help many companies still lumbered with software from the 1970s and 1980s, which has to be maintained by specialised staff familiar with the legacy systems. MBT cited Gartner Group figures estimating that 70% of all business and commercial applications are based on Cobol.

MBT claims its automated system reduces the human factor of converting legacy code by 90% and ensures "zero-error" quality. This is possible because any programming language can be abstracted to a few fundamental principles, MBT said.

The company said it carried out an automated conversion for a Scandinavian telco in six months, for a project that ordinarily would have taken 75 man-years. The automated conversion took less than a day, with the rest of the time devoted to tweaks by a small team of 10 specialists, MBT said.

In theory automated conversion is feasible, but in practical terms the code produced is so bloated as to be useless, according to John Harvey, lecturer in computing science at the University of East Anglia.

"This type of technology has been around for years, and it is only any good if, for example, the Java produced is quick and usable," Harvey said. "It could be unstructured garbage which is impossible to maintain and slow."

The system is designed to convert one procedural language to another, for example Cobol to C - or one object-oriented language to another - for example Delphi to C++. Converting from one paradigm to the other can only be semi-automated, MBT said.

MBT said the converter had completed initial trials but didn't give a launch date.
The Impact of Indian Boom
Pros and Cons of Indian Economic Boom

While the growth in offshore business service imports is beginning to cause a stir in the United States, it's leading to dramatic changes in the Indian economy and society.  Professors at Emory University and its Goizueta Business School who know India well say that they have seen tremendous economic and social changes in this huge nation since the service boom began just a few years ago, and they predict even greater changes and challenges in the years ahead.

 


India today feels a bit like the U.S. during the dotcom boom, Goizueta’s India-watchers say, where a small class of young people are suddenly making much more money than most people had ever dreamed. Although the new industries don’t employ all that many people – most estimates say IT and business process outsourcing employs fewer than a million workers in this nation of over 1 billion – this sector’s success has had an enormous impact not only on the economy but on the country’s culture and self-confidence.


 


One key indication of the magnitude of the shift: India’s foreign exchange reserves have grown from almost nothing to about $100 billion in just two years – a huge number for a country whose gross domestic product is forecast to reach $650 billion in the coming year. “Things are changing very quickly, and the pace of it does surprise me,” says Joy Mazumdar, an Emory economist in the Department of Economics.


 


In the cities, the boom is changing the texture of daily life. “When I lived there, there were no such things as malls and now there’s a new one opening every month in the big cities. You can go in and get almost anything you get in the United States, which even 10 years ago wasn’t possible. Even five years ago in my hometown of Calcutta there wasn’t anything like this,” observes  Sudipta Basu, a professor of accounting at Goizueta.


 


Another indication of change in the subcontinent’s zeitgeist: ten years ago, the top-rated shows were serials based on Hindu religious themes –  the Hindu equivalent, Basu says, of Mel Gibson’s film about Jesus. These days, he notes, the big hit is the Indian equivalent of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?


 


And all this may be only the beginning.  In a November 2003 interview in an Indian business newspaper, the Business Standard, Y.V. Reddy, governor of the Reserve Bank of India, India’s counterpart to Alan Greenspan, said that the country is “on the threshold of a high growth trajectory.” His best guess: 8% growth over the next two to three years.


 


Western companies are drawn to India today as a way to cut costs in all kinds of business processes, from IT development to claims-processing, and from call centers to tax-return preparation. But Richard Metters, a professor of decision and information analysis, cautions that the cost savings is not as dramatic as one might expect in a country where the latest government figures peg average per capita income at 10,964 rupees – about $243.


 


“The wage comparison is misleading,” Metters says, because low wages create other expenditures Western companies typically don’t consider. “You can get a worker for a tenth of the wages in the U.S., that’s true, but somebody who makes $3000 a year can’t afford a car, so they can’t get to work. So you have to hire drivers to pick them up and bring them to work. And somebody who makes $3000 a year can’t go out to lunch, so you have to have a subsidized employee cafeteria that feeds them.” Also, Metters says, the weak infrastructure means that companies need to spend more on telephone lines and backup generators, and the country’s ongoing political tensions with Pakistan mean greater expenses on security than is typical for a Western company. Extensive training, such as accent neutralization classes and crash-courses in American geography, increase costs as well.


 


The upshot: a savings of only about 25%, he estimates. But the quality is often good, he says, as college graduates typically take the call center jobs, which are considered good and even prestigious posts. And 25% is a significant savings for companies that watch every penny.


 


It’s probably also just the beginning. After all, these college graduates can do much more than answer phones. In services, Goizueta professors say that India has tremendous numbers of skilled professionals. Consider accounting, for instance. India’s accounting schools produce about 50,000 new accountants every year, according to some reports. By comparison, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants estimates the U.S. turns out about 35,000 new accountants. And not only are the numbers large, but the quality is good:  Basu says that the exams Indian accountants take are tougher than the U.S. CPA exam. 


 


The situation is similar in other professions. Indian nurses and doctors take jobs all over the world. India produces about 290,000 engineers every year, roughly the same as the number that graduate in both science and technology in the U.S. The largely Hindu country even exports Catholic priests, according to Jagdish Sheth, a professor of marketing at Goizueta.


 


Sheth, who maintains close ties to India and serves on the boards of several leading Indian companies, sees many areas in which there are huge opportunities for India’s skilled workers, particularly in science, pharmaceuticals, and agricultural science. In science, for instance, scientists are paid about a tenth of what they are paid in the U.S., says Sheth. This is more than double the differential between call center employees in India versus the U.S.


 


But most professors expect growing pains as the country develops. While most Indians now feel that the country as a whole is benefiting from the service boom, Mazumdar says the growth in income inequality could lead to social trouble down the line, as software developers receiving salaries approaching Western standards try to live side by side with people getting along on several hundred dollars a year. “In certain cities, especially in cities like Delhi and Bombay, it does create this big discrepancy between people,” cautions Mazumder. “It drives up real estate prices and things like that. It has not exploded, at least not yet.”


 


Sheth says that the numbers of women entering the back office outsourcing is also likely to create major social challenges in a country where educated women traditionally did not work outside the home. “Now they have become a significant part of the workforce, especially in call centers, which is creating enormous cultural challenge and change,” he says.  His analogy: Japan in the late 40s, when the U.S. and Emperor Hirohito drove a complete change in women’s role in Japanese society.


 


For its neighbors, India’s growth may be leading to massive changes as well – some positive and some not. Nazrul Islam, an Emory economist originally from nearby Bangladesh, says that Bangladeshi IT firms look to India as a model, and are now even hiring Indians to train their programmers. “That’s the hopeful side,” he says.


 


However, Islam does see one worrisome trend: he fears India’s success may be going to its head. “For the small [neighboring countries] India was always perceived to be a sort of a big brother – not in a benevolent sense…and India’s economic success will probably accentuate that.”    One example: the Indian government’s national river-linking project, a plan to divert many of the country’s eastern rivers to the drier western and southern parts of India. “And they’re going ahead with this project with total neglect of what will happen to Bangladesh, which is the lower riparian country and a smaller country,” he says.


 


Infrastructure remains a key problem, despite gains in recent years. As the prominent emerging markets investment guru Marc Faber told an Indian newspaper recently, "Infrastructure has improved from horrible to very bad."  Electricity, roads, and even such basics as the quality of paper money  (the Reserve Bank of India recently began a campaign to replace notes that have been stapled together in bundles) remains a problem. Metters says that most development is concentrated in self-contained campuses, in which each company has its own security, back-up generators and telecommunications systems. The number of these “islands” is growing, he says.


 


You see this gleaming office tower housing all these people, and right outside of that gleaming office tower is garbage in the street and a dirt road and an ox pulling a cart," observes Metters.


 


Mazumdar notes that the lack of infrastructure is probably one reason the service exports have grown more quickly than manufactured goods.  For example, goods that might ship out of China in hours can take up to 18 days to leave India, he says. “But with service exports, things were very, very different because you did not have these transportation hurdles. All you had to do was send it along on a phone line or a satellite link.”


 


The growth of cities, which generally occurs as a country industrializes, could also create difficulties. Sheth says that he is now trying to encourage companies to keep workers from migrating to India’s gigantic, crowded cities. One positive aspect of the service boom is that it should be possible, through local governmental incentives, to locate call centers and other plants in smaller communities.


 


Wage inflation will be a challenge as the number of educated, English-speaking workers is absorbed, says Sheth. Negotiating a new role for women is also likely to be contentious, he warns.


 


Finding jobs for India’s billion plus people is another key challenge that the service boom has thus far not addressed.  To employ its young and growing population, Sheth says that country needs to look outside its service-sector base and export more manufactured and agricultural goods. He says that there’s a lot of potential in these sectors. For instance: India has the largest dairy industry in the world, but doesn’t export any of its dairy products. However, things may be changing. Now, he says, a farmer’s cooperative he spoke to last year about the idea has just concluded a contract with Wal-Mart. 


 

Mazumdar says he expects that the current neat division between India as a servicing hub and China as a manufacturing powerhouse will change. “If these had been fairly small countries, I would say, this specialization is going to continue in the future, but given that these countries are large, there’s enough of a variety of talent that they should actually be able to have a very diversified export portfolio.”
I want to be an MBA

Graduates today want to be an MBA, but have little idea what a manager really does.
“I want to be an MBA," is probably one of the most hackneyed and trite comments of the graduating youth of recent times.

Graduates today want to be an MBA, but have little idea what a manager really does.


Most students are attracted to a management education at top business schools because of the high pay packets they get at the end of it.


Sure, it is a brilliant career to pursue, but if your ultimate aim is to stuff your pockets, you might just cut a sorry figure in your future life or, for that matter, even in your Group Discussions or interviews.


continued..

American Visa Hurdles for International B-schools aspirant
Business schools are doing their best to help foreign students through Americas tougher visa process

After Nadim Saad got his MBA from INSEAD in France last year, he planned to go to the Wharton School in Pennsylvania on a two-month exchange programme. But Mr Saad, a Mexican national who was born in Lebanon, never made it. As his classmates left, his visa was still being processed at the American embassy in Paris, forcing him to reschedule his flights to America every few days. Mr Saad says he was told that his visa would arrive on time, but it never did. In January, the embassy told him that because the exchange programme (whose dates he had already rescheduled) was over, it would not grant the visa.


continued...


 


 

Saturday, January 29, 2005

Fresh engineer at wipro ? Pay Rs 75,000!
Bangalore-based Wipro Technologies has a novel way of keeping its employee attrition rate under control.
While most infotech companies ask their prospective employees to sign bonds, Wipro wants new recruits to plonk a Rs 75,000 refundable deposit on the table before they can collect their appointment letters.

Such a drastic measure was warranted by the fact that nearly 50 per cent of new recruits were flying the coop after their training programme.

"The Rs 75,000 deposit will discourage those who join us only for our training programme," said Bijay Sahoo, Wipro's vice-president and global human resources head.

The deposit system, which works through a tripartite agreement between Wipro, the candidate and a bank, requires the employee to deposit the money in the bank directly.

The deposit, along with the interest on it, is refundable when the engineering graduate completes 12 months with Wipro after the three-month training period. Science graduates, who undergo a six-month training period, have to wait 18 months to claim their refund.

Those unable to put down the deposit have the option of taking a Rs 75,000 loan from the bank, for which they will have to pay interest. At the end of the period, they can claim the deposit amount as well as a retention bonus as compensation for the money they lost by way of interest.

The agreement was introduced in April 2004 and has been used for two placement seasons now. Wipro claims it has had no impact on its campus recruitment.

"All other companies in the industry get their employees to signs bonds and other agreements. So we are not doing something that nobody else is. Our placement has not suffered at all under this tripartite agreement," said Sahoo.

What i think about it ? It is Just another example of slavery in modern world.