'Zero' Campus Placement of CAs – An Eye Opener!

Dear Friends & Professional Colleagues,

 

The dismal campus placement statistics ( Pls refer CA Journal – Oct 2012 ) should shock the collective conscience of the Professionals, particularly our Council leadership. Only 5.52%  ( 587 out of 9382 ) of freshly qualified CAs all over India, who registered for campus placement, were offered jobs! As far as Pune is concerned not a SINGLE job was offered in Pune to the 597 CA job aspirants. Even more surprising is the fact that in a vibrant economic hub like Pune, only ONE corporate attended the campus program. This really should be an eye opener for taking immediate review and corrective actions.

 

On reading about these statistics in the CA journal, we interacted with a few CFOs of Pune based companies and found that the Industry is very much in need of and is keen to recruit qualified CAs. The question therefore that begs to be asked is: Why then is the campus placement program not found attractive enough by prospective employers? One of the key reasons for the same seems to be the exhorbitantly high campus interview fees charged by ICAI from corporates, going upto several lacs in most cases. This seems to have put off many companies from participating in the placement program.

 

In order to ensure successful campus placement program in future, we have a few suggestions in mind:

 

a)      Only Nominal participation fees to be charged from Companies.

 

b)      A separate, fully vibrant placement cell to be set up at ICAI with full time senior employees who would be continuously engaging with Corporates so as to appreciate their needs and facilitate their easy participation in campus program.

 

c)       Thinking in terms of organizing continuous job fairs at frequent intervals ( say bi monthly ) instead of 2 campus placement programs in a year. This could be modeled on the lines of Walk – In interviews that take place in several big MNCs.

 

d)      A complete revamp/overhaul of the existing ICAI job portal, that has been an abysmal failure on account of lack of vision/direction and ineffective management/administration of the portal. With our membership now touching almost 2 lakh figure, our job portal should be no less than any world class portal in providing job opportunities to both junior and senior members.

 

We are exploring the possibility of holding an experimental job fair in Pune to try out some of the above ideas, but that would need support of our members, especially those in Industry at senior level. We look forward to some valuable feedback/suggestions/help from our fellow members so as to pro-actively take this idea forward and help out our young professionals.

 

Warm Regards,

 

CA Ranjeet Natu               CA Arun Anandagiri

Founder Members – CA Forum for Good Governance