Due to the frequent postponement in Delhi University’s online Open Book Examination (OBE) owing to COVID-19 situation which has come out as a huge hurdle for students offered placements and many are unable to join their jobs and unwillingly negotiating with recruiters.
The OBEs for final-year students were slated to be held from July 1 but subsequently, exams were postponed to July 10. Currently, they have been postponed again to August 10. Normally, DU students are done with final exams in May.
According to The Indian Express reports, A B.Com (Honours) 3rd year student of Shri Ram College of Commerce was supposed to join a major consultancy firm in the month of June.
The student said, “When the lockdown started and the OBE was first scheduled, we told our recruiters that we would join after the exams and they agreed to push back our date of joining. Now once again, the exams have been postponed for another month…”
For several DU students, the postponement has meant that they are unable to join work even if they are willing.
“A good part of recruiters are stringent and have said that only graduates can work — so students need to have their final marksheet before they can join. We too are only being able to give them an estimated time-line for the results, so for now we’ve said mid-September,” said a representative of Hindu College’s placement cell.
Some recruiters have redrawn their joining timelines too, as per the representative from Miranda House’s placement cell statement. “One of our recruiters hires graduates for teaching and they are taken to Gujarat. Since that is not feasible, they have now pushed joining to December/ January and have signed MoUs with the recruits stating that they may work with other organisations till that time,” she said.
She further said that since the joining process has been pushed back, recruitment has not come to a stop. “Pay packages have reduced — from an average of Rs 8-Rs 10 lakh per annum to Rs 6-Rs 8 lakh per annum. We don’t have high-end companies and high-profile positions approaching us right now but recruitment is still on through the lockdown with smaller companies,” she said.
While the Hindu College representative said the delays are creating problems for the next placement cycle.
He said, “Thankfully, most of our recruiters are from finance and consulting, so they haven’t been hard hit enough to revoke offers. However, one issue that is emerging is that we are not being able to start a new cycle of recruitment with firms which have not been able to honour their existing offers. This will impact the batch of 2021.”
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