Choose your first job with care, for it is the basis of your career :

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If you are looking for your first job today and have both the qualifications and the confidence, you don’t have to jump on the earliest offer. It’s easy, for instance, to get a job at a business process outsourcing (BPO) company or call centre. They pay you well and there are plenty of perks. But look before you leap; you could well be blighting the rest of your worklife.

“Joining a BPO is, in a way, putting off a decision,” says Mumbai-based HR consultant Shashi Rao. “You know that’s not what you want to do in life. You are just marking time until you find your mission.”

A BPO, she points out, comes with problems you don’t realise. First, you get used to a certain salary level. It is difficult to join another company — and a job with a future — where you have to take a pay cut. Secondly, other industries don’t regard your BPO stint as work experience. Thirdly, some recruiters regard the BPO phase as negative; they feel that you pick up a lot of bad habits that you have to unlearn.

In the West they have started making a distinction between “the best companies to work for” and “the best places to launch a career”. A BusinessWeek list of the latter (see box) indicates that it’s the consultancies and the finance companies that dominate. There are also some technology companies like Lockheed Martin, IBM and Google.

If such a survey is done in India, some definitions need to be re-looked at. The unstated assumption in the BusinessWeek survey is that all the companies are basically decent places to work in. Here, that’s not the case. There’s the BPO example given earlier. A more treacherous trap is the giant family-run business to which you get seduced by a huge pay packet and promises. You will find soon enough that you are tarred for life. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. It is sometimes easier to make a list of worst companies to start a career with.

Data from B-schools do throw some light on this issue. It would have been better if this had been clubbed with information on how many jobs at these so-called top companies are actually accepted and, more importantly, how many of the people who join stay beyond two years. Anecdotal evidence says that attrition is more than 50 per cent. Many of these, then, are good companies to start a career with (but not make a career with).

Look at placement 2008. Some of the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) did not make the data available. As is well known, they are now at the top of the heap. With other institutes catching up, the only way they can go (relatively speaking) is down. They thus refuse to participate in Indian surveys. They fawn over foreign surveys, where none of the IIMs feature among the world’s top 100 B-schools.

In 2008, IIMs Ahmedabad, Calcutta, Lucknow and Indore did not reveal much of their placement information. At IIM Bangalore, according to a CoolAvenues compilation, McKinsey was the top recruiter (15 offers) followed by Lehman Brothers (11), Boston Consulting (11), Deutsche Bank (7) and Bain & Co, AT Kearney and Merrill Lynch (6 each). At IIM Kozhikode, Reliance ADAG made 34 offers and Reliance Industries 23. They were followed byDeloitte & ToucheTouche (13), PricewaterhouseCoopers (13) and Accenture (8).

ICICI Bank and its subsidiaries feature amongst the top recruiters in a lot of places. Cognizant, Infosys and Wipro are fairly prolific. And you have an overdose of banks (HSBC, Yes, Kotak, Axis), finance companies and consultancies.

It must be remembered, however, that these are offers made. In fact, some companies dole out offer letters liberally because they know the hit ratio will be very low.

Rao doesn’t like the high attrition rate. “MBAs from the top B-schools have a choice,” she says. “Unlike many others, they don’t have to take the first job that comes their way. They have an information system in the alumni. If they then make a wrong choice, there must be something seriously wrong.”

“We are still in the money-matters-most mode,” she concludes. “And those at the top — the IIMs — are the most affected.”

The right step The best places to launch a career

1 Ernst & Young

2 Deloitte & Touche

3 PricewaterhouseCoopers

4 Goldman Sachs

5 KPMG

6 Marriott International

7 Google

8 Lockheed Martin

9 IBM

10 J.P. Morgan

Source: BusinessWeek

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