NEW DELHI: Steadily climbing up charts on academic rankings, the new IITs are now looking at ways to build their academic brand in a big way and one of the target areas identified by them is bringing in world class faculty to their institutes.So even the younger set of IITs are now heading to foreign shores to hire faculty. Case in point- IIT Ropar, one of those that has made it to the top 10 on the National Indian Rankings IIT Ropar is set to go to three countries and six locations next month scouting campuses from London to LA to hire its new faculty.IIT Gandhinagar has taken quite a lead on ‘internationalising’ its faculty with the bulk of its assistant professor level faculty across departments coming from universities abroad. The majority of its faculty ‘joining soon’ is also drawn from foreign varsities. IIT Hyderabad, Gandhinagar, Ropar and Patna have stood at the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th positions, respectively, on the India Rankings 2016 released by the Human Resource Development (HRD) ministry. Outreach and Inclusivity is one of the parameters on which every institute was ranked.The global footprint of an institute is also a regular parameter across international academic rankings.IIT Ropar teams will go to Canada, USA and UK between May-June 2016 to hire new faculty for the institute and will target Indian students doing a post doctoral in reputed engineering schools, interview probable candidates and even issue an appointment letter then and there if a candidate meets the IIT quality standards.To ensure that the best of candiadtes are selected, the team has on board besides the IIT’s Director and Dean, three external experts from IISc , IIT, Delhi, and IIT, Roorkee. So, it is Universities of Waterloo, Ontario, Vancouver and McMaster in Canada, in USA it is Universities of Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, Illinios, Chicago, Purdue, MIT, Harvard and Georgia Tech.