According to bankers and executives at some of the large engineering and management colleges, compensation could range from ₹8 lakh to ₹40 lakh, depending on the roles on offer.

Axis Bank, Bank of Baroda, Standard Chartered Bank, HSBC India and Deutsche Bank India are among those who have approached for roles ranging from sales and marketing, to global banking, said a placement executive at a Bengaluru-based engineering college that has more than 1,000 students to place in the 2024 batch.

“Last year, we had hired about 180-200 students from campuses, but this year, the target is higher. If we hired 10 students from tier 1 B-schools—mostly the Indian Institute of Management—this year, it will double,” a banker at one of the lenders mentioned above said on condition of anonymity.

The banker said lenders are hiring aggressively because they need to build a talent pipeline that is young and can pick up digital skills faster. “We do not have enough resources and will expand more into tier two and three colleges to get a wider talent pool,” the executive added.

“Hiring from top engineering and B-school campuses continues to be an integral part of our hiring strategy,” said Shivshanker S.V., India and South Asia head, human resources (HR), Standard Chartered Bank. He said as part of its graduate programmes, Standard Chartered hires mainly from B-schools for various roles under core banking and also across functions such as risk and conduct, financial crime and compliance. “In addition, we also hire from engineering schools for various roles such as data scientists, software developers across our subsidiaries and global business services.”

“Axis Bank, Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered are some of the banks which are ready to hire at a pay range of around ₹20 lakh for some profiles,” the placement executive cited earlier said, adding last year, seven-eight banks rolled out 40 offers, and more are expected this year.

Archana Chadha, head of HR, HSBC India said in terms of numbers, the bank is definitely expecting a significant spike in hiring requirements for the coming season. “Great thing about being a bank is the variety of roles that we offer; ranging from treasury to marketing, relationship management to strategy we continue to extend a wide range of career opportunities for young graduates. With growing focus on data skills; we offered roles in data analytics, machine learning and risk analytics domain as well,” said Chadha.

Queries emailed to Axis Bank, Bank of Baroda and Deutsche Bank remained unanswered till press time.

B-schools will start their placement season in February while some of the engineering colleges have started the process. Banks hire from campuses beginning November so that they can also head to older IITs which start their placement season from December.

“Banks are also recruiting for their back-end IT and software maintenance roles, and hence are willing to pay ₹19 lakh to computer science and IT graduates,” said the executive.

HR experts said banks have traditionally hired management trainees from tier 1 B-schools and sales professionals from second- and third-rung management colleges. “Frontline sales hiring has become challenging for banks and other financial services firms. Attrition is very high and the cost of hiring in the market is much higher, as employees from other banks would ask for 25-30% hikes to join,” said Veinu Nehru, managing partner, Fynehand Consultants.

Nehru said that despite hikes, banks cannot be sure if they would be able to retain these frontline recruits for long, compared to a campus recruit who, if trained, can stick around for longer.

“I believe it is for these frontline sales roles that banks will recruit more,” said Nehru.

Last financial year saw a jump in attrition as demand for younger workers surged in sales, marketing and digital skills in insurance, retail and fintech companies. The uptick in campus hires will also help banks cushion the talent loss.

Attrition has been somewhat secularly spread across private sector banks. HDFC Bank, India’s largest private sector lender saw attrition of 34.15% in FY23, up from 19.1% in the previous fiscal, with the highest levels seen in the non-supervisory staff roles which include sales officers. Other private lenders like IndusInd Bank and ICICI Bank have reported attrition of 51% and 30.9%, respectively, in the same period.

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Updated: 14 Nov 2023, 12:19 AM IST