It was business as usual for students of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIMB), who had a field day picking and choosing their prospective employers from among close to 120 top notch corporates including multinationals bidding for the IIM brand.

From 140 companies that evinced interest in the campus placements at IIMB, 120 are participating in the final session. They include 12 consulting firms, 12 banks, 14 financial institutions, four advertising and market research firms, 48 marketing companies and 30 IT and dotcom players including startups.

The Financial Express checked out the campus mood on Placement Day One.IIMB placement officer GK Nagaraj said compared to last year the average compensation package offered was higher at Rs 7.5 lakh against last year's Rs 5.96 lakh.

With a number of overseas consultancy firms like Mitchell Madison Group, JP Morgon and Boston Consulting Group picking up talent for the first time in India, it reflected the optimism in the economy, he said.

``This also shows that international companies have realised that Indian B-school students are in no way inferior to their global counterparts,'' he said.

Incidentally, the power of choice vested with the 180 students might actually result in close to 40 companies having to go back empty-handed.IIMB chairperson (placement) Rishikesha T Krishnan said there was a 30 per cent increase in the number of companies while the salaries have shot up by 25 per cent with IT firms fuelling the boom. Among the students, the rush to pick up jobs with consulting firms and venture capitalists is evident.

The growing venture capital industry was in fact a more exciting prospect with the opportunity to evaluate dotcom start-ups rather than take up an overseas assignment, Sanjay K, who has landed a placement with Chrysalis Capital at Rs 8 lakh per annum, said.

As for technically qualified students, IT consulting firms like Exeter and Deloitte Consulting were the hot favourites.

According to Vikram Jitsingh and Manish Rachhoya placed at Deloitte Consulting Singapore and Arthur Anderson (Business consulting) respectively, ESOPs, job content and the opportunity to deal with dotcom start-ups was a key attraction.

Students said the positions on offer, salaries and the choice of companies -- especially venture capital firms and IT companies -- had substantially gone up since the previous batch.