Facebook recruits more freshers from non-IIT colleges this year

 Facebook, the recruiter every campus awaits, has not just looked beyond the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) this year but offered jobs to more candidates from non-IIT engineering institutes. It has picked up three of nine IITians and four of five non-IITians who interned at its Menlo Park headquarters in the US from May to August.

They will join after their graduation in 2014. Each will earn $1,00,000 (Rs 62,39,000) as annual base salary, $75,000 (approximately Rs 46,80,000) as a one-time signing bonus and FBstocks worth $1,00,000 that would be handed out over four years.

Of the four non-IITians selected, three — Anish Shankar, Shubhanshu Aggarwal and Rohit Girdhar — are from an autonomous university, the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H). They have accepted the pre-placement offer.M

Last year, FB had not accepted IIIT-H's invitation to participate in campus recruitment but had recruited only from the premier IITs. This time, FB did not come to India, but T V Devidas, the campus placement faculty in-charge at IIIT-H, said four students were chosen as interns. Three of them have been selected.

The fourth non-IITian who has made it, also by way of a pre-placement offer, is Ranjith Mudaliyar from the National Institute of Technology, Trichy.

During his time at FB, Mudaliyar, son of a Chennai businessman, was responsible for automating a few processes that were earlier done manually, thus increasing their efficiency and turnaround time.

The three IITians selected are Sabarinath N, Kanishk Parihar and Lakhwinder Gaba.

A computer science undergraduate student from IIT-Madras, Sabarinath N said, "What I loved about working at FB was that there was no hierarchy. We were all treated on a par with the full-timers."

IIT-Bombay's Parihar said he found during his internship period that people at the social networking site were "cool" and not "hung up on the Cumulative Grade Point Average (a ranking/evaluation method)." He added, "I was keen on learning a lot of things going on there, and people were more than happy to show me around and explain."

Gaba, who will graduate from IIT-Roorkee, said there were no structures at FB and it was a flat organization. Son of an engineer from the Delhi Transport Corporation, he said his parents were happier to learn about his acceptance to the internship programme than when he got the job offer later. "I'll learn a lot at FB and give my best. I'll think of getting a master's degree after a few years," he said.