chennai an increased appetite for quality talent in emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and data analytics has led to a surge in the number of companies showing interest to hire freshers from iitmadras this yearscheduled to begin on december 1 the placement season at the premier engineering institute has seen 326 companies register to offer more than 490 job profiles for its first phase of placements a 20 increase compared to the 270 recruiters who visited the campus last year more than 50 startups are also hiring from the campus this year iitm said in a statementthe surge in interest in hiring iitm grads follows a trend seen as a continuation of the colleges preplacement offers ppos this year iitm saw a 20 increase in ppos with students receiving 130 offers for internshipsmore than 1300 students registered for placements across streams a 10 increase over last year and iitm expects this number to increase in line with the previous year around 30 students have opted to defer their placements as they are keen to either pursue business ventures of their own or plan to undertake further studiesmicrosoft goldman sachs intel citibank are among the large recruiters set to hire from the campus this year with as many as 23 companies offering international profiles to students in us japan singapore and taiwan google and mckinsey also return to the iit campuses this year after a threeyear gap bain company nomura jaguar land rover and electric vehicle startup ather energy are some of the firsttime recruiters visiting the institute this year speaking about this years placements prof manu santhanam advisor training and placement iitmadras told toi that an increase in the number of niche profiles in emerging areas such as data science is a key reason for the heightened interest in the institutes students this year iitm has received over 59 analyticsdata science job profiles for this year as of now compared to around 48 in the whole of last yearthe number of recruiters coming to campus has seen an upswing this year which is clearly an indicator of the growing perception about the quality of students coming from iitmadras in addition to our consistently top rank in nirf he addedaround 34 of the recruiters expected at iitms placements are from the core engineering and rd space 21 of the companies hail from finance and consulting fields and it constitutes 32 of the fresher hiring while the first and larger phase of campus recruitment will be held from december 1 to 8 the second leg of the placements season which facilitates roughly 40 of the hiring will take place in january