Oracle has revoked several campus placement and pre-placement job offers across India’s premier engineering colleges, including National Institutes of Technology (NITs) and Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). This comes on the heels of the American technology giant laying off around 30,000 employees globally in April.
According to sources, the impacted freshers were informed earlier this week regarding these offer cancellations, leaving them in a limbo as most of the top institutions have a “‘one student, one job” policy. The students don’t get a chance to try for multiple offers once they bag a job.
NIT, Warangal, VNIT, Nagpur, IIT-Roorkee, IIT-Hyderabad and IIT (BHU)-Varanasi are some of these institutions impacted by Oracle’s move.
“I got a pre-placement offer (PPO) last year following my internship at Oracle along with 12 other interns who had joined from my college. So, I didn’t appear for any other placement test during campus hiring. Yesterday, I got to know from my placement cell head that PPOs of three students from my college got revoked and that unfortunately included my name. Remaining 10 freshers still have their job offers,” a fresher from one of the NITs told Moneycontrol, requesting anonymity.
The fresher added that Oracle had hired freshers for application developer roles and for their server technology teams. But, one of the server technology business units, Oracle health and application infrastructure, got shut down recently, that led to the company revoking all the offer letters for the vertical across the country.
“I did have a good experience working with the team at Oracle last year. I didn’t see this coming. Now, I am hunting for a new job outside,” the fresher said.
A placement cell head at one of the above mentioned institutes, who didn’t want to be named, told Moneycontrol that Oracle did hire in good numbers this year, offering annual packages in the range of Rs 35-40 lakh.
“At our college, three offers were revoked. Oracle got back saying they had undergone a restructuring and had closed some of their business units that they had hired for. They tried but couldn’t accommodate those students in other teams,” the placement head said.
Emailed queries sent to Oracle remained unanswered at the time of publication. The article will be updated once a response is received.
Freshers go job hunting
Several freshers took to professional networking site LinkedIn to share their ordeals and explore new openings.
Thansen Lahare, an MTech student and a teaching assistant at IIT (BHU)-Varanasi had a his full-time offer to join as the member of technical staff (MTS) at Oracle revoked just a month before his scheduled joining date.
“Securing this offer early in the placement process was a significant milestone. During the same cycle, I was shortlisted for interviews with several tier-1 organizations including Citi, SAP, Samsung Electronics, Walmart Global Tech India, Flipkart, Axtria – Ingenious Insights, Microsoft, Baya Systems Virtusa profiles such as Data Scientist, AI Engineer, ML Engineer, and Software Development Engineer,” he shared in a LinkedIn post.
“However, after accepting the Oracle offer, I was removed from the institutional talent pool at IIT (BHU) Varanasi in accordance with the one-student-one-job placement policy.”
Animesh Sharma, a BTech graduate of Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Nagpur, had an on-campus offer from Oracle that got revoked due to “organisational changes”, he wrote on LinkedIn.
Moneycontrol couldn’t independently ascertain the total number of job offers revoked across the country.
Oracle’s India layoffs
Last month, Oracle axed 12,000 jobs in India, which accounted for nearly 50 percent of its workforce in the country. Globally, this was a part of a larger restructuring exercise, impacting 30,000 job roles.
Moneycontrol spoke to several Oracle employees across the country, who said teams were asked to meet specific budget cuts rather than reduce a fixed percentage of workforce.
Employees had mentioned the company’s healthcare vertical was being significantly affected.
In 2021-22, Oracle acquired Cerner Corporation to form Oracle Health, integrating Cerner’s clinical systems with its enterprise software, analytics and automation capabilities.
“Many of those laid off are from the Cerner workforce,” an employee said.