Startups wage a hiring war against tech giants at IITs

Venture-backed startups offer joining bonuses, Esops but struggle to attract top talent

- Pratistha Bagai & Mansi Verma

Startups are offering higher salaries, bigger bonuses and more employee stock options (Esops) at the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) this year, but despite securing first-day slots too, they are struggling to attract top talent as campus hiring shifts from mass hiring to picking a few high-quality candidates amid an AI-led productivity boost.

At IIT placements, venture-backed startups like Razorpay, Fractal Analytics, Battery Smart, OYO Rooms, Navi, Meesho and SpeakX are aggressively competing with tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Nvidia, as well as high-frequency trading (HFT) firms, to secure top engineering talent.

While startups have long recruited from IITs—Flipkart extended over 100 offers across campuses for the 2014 batch—they are now more assertive, sharing prime slots with established players and HFT majors as many edge toward initial public offerings (IPOs).