This is encouraging a small number of companies to look at hiring students across programmes, breaking the earlier trend of hiring only from the Post Graduate Programme (PGP) or Post graduate Programme in Management for Executives (PGPX).

Apart from the flagship programme, the PGP with 250 students and the Post Graduate Programme in Agribusiness Management (PGP-ABM) with 30 students, recruiters will be able to hire from the second batch of PGPX with around 70 students, 21 students from the first batch of Post-Graduate Programme in Public Management & Policy (PGP-PMP) and 70 participants from the six month certificate in Business Administration for retiring defence personnel.

More than 50-60 companies have already given, or are about to deliver pre-placement talks at the institute, where placement officials say that some of the teams that arrive on campus on behalf of the company have a representative or two to look at programmes other than the one they usually recruit.

"Companies can look at a wide range of recruitment needs this year, right from the lower-middle to the highest level of management with the institute's diverse course offerings," said a placement official.

Typically, investment banks and consulting firms are interested in the PGP course where they recruit fresh students for middle or higher middle level positions, while the manufacturing, corporate banking, retailing, IT, telecommunications, energy and consulting companies look for PGPX participants for the upper level management positions in India and abroad, considering they have a minimum of seven years work experience.

Companies from the food, supply chain, procurement, agricultural finance, retail and commodity trading recruit from the PGP-ABM programme where placements 2007 saw interest of FMCG majors.

Already, infrastructure companies, SEZs, NGOs and some private organisations dealing with government projects have met students of the first batch of PGP-PMP.

However, not all students will be up for campus placements, with the trend of entrepreneurship set to continue this year. Around 8-10 companies had visited IIM-A during the start-up fair organised recently, where some of the PGP students have shown interest.

IIM-A's back-up option to entrepreneur students of the batch of 2007 to sit for placements for two years, has no takers so far, but the the option could be extended to PGPX if such a proposal being mooted by a PGPX student to the PGPX committee comes through, said an institute source.

Whereas, in the PGP-PMP batch, only 21 among the batch of 33 students will be available for placements since the rest are sponsored by various government departments.