Companies in India have not indulged in outright layoffs, choosing to bench their employees and offer them continued employment at lower wages. They are also deferring joining dates for recently hired workers. He recently got a letter from the company telling him that his date of joining has been deferred by six months. At this point, he is not sure they want to hire him at all. They did not give me any reason for pushing back my joining date.
Campus recruitments are a long, drawn out, rigid process in engineering colleges around India.
Companies set aggregate cutoffs and give written exams to prospective applicants, some of them three hours in length. Students who do not have the company's minimum grade-point average are automatically disqualified. Only after they clear the test, can candidates submit their r sum s to the company and then they might get called in for an interview. College career development centers allow students to test with a maximum of two companies. But now Lucent has sent me a regret letter, telling me they would be happy if I looked for alternatives.