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BENGALURU: Diversity hiring is the latest trend in engineering colleges this placement season, and some firms are also conducting exclusive drives to recruit women.

Last year, women-only recruitment camps were restricted to the mechanical stream that has very few girl students. This year, companies are looking at exclusively recruiting girls from other branches. Incidentally, IIMKozhikode, in its summer placement, had 140 women receiving on average a 21% higher stipend than men.

Adobe, for instance, is recruiting only girls from University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering for a Rs 44-lakh annual package.

Exclusive recruitment drives for girls catch on

Goldman Sachs and Intuit are conducting womenrecruitment drives in PES.RV College of Engineering has seven companies offering annual packages of Rs 6.5 lakh to Rs 40 lakh on gender-diversity drives. Other companies making similar campaigns include IBM, Cisco, Paypal, VISA, Hashedin and CMRIT.

“We had only core companies in mechanical engineering looking to recruit girls. That was because it was hard to find girls in the branch. Companies like Mercedes have exclusive scholarship programmes for girl students from the branch. This year, we saw two companies conducting exclusive drives for girls in the computer science department. Our interaction with companies shows the trend is likely to extend to other branches too,” said Sridhar KS, dean, training and placement, PES University.

RV College of Engineering has women-only recruitment camps of seven companies under way, besides three in the pipeline. The college says it’s the first time that such high levels of interest are seen in the diversity factor. “Besides, 10 companies relaxed the criteria to include more girls in the regular hiring process. The packages are the same for both genders,” said D Ranganath, dean placement and training, RVCE.

Special hackathons too

MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology has had 13 recruitment drives for women students. “We conduct training programme and exclusive hackathons for girls. Twenty offers have been made and five companies are yet to declare results,” said Savita Rani M, head, training and placement.

BMS College of Engineering had three companies looking exclusively for girls with 12 offers.

