The country’s oil and gas sector seems to be amongst the first few to

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begin fresh recruitments signaling an end to depressed jobs market. India’s largest refiner and oil marketing company, Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) hired more than 500 fresh graduates in the current financial year.

The company will hire another 500-600 new employees in the next year. “We need more than 500 new employees every year. 80 per cent of them are fresh graduates from engineering, management and finance background, while few are experienced professionals,” said VC Agrawal, director (HR), IOC.

In addition, the company will consider Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) score from next year instead of the written test format followed until now. “Graduates, who want to apply for IOC, will have to appear for GATE. We were not very satisfied with the written test conducted in the past, so we decided to follow GATE,” said Agrawal.

IOC that has 34,000 employees, hires fresh engineering graduates from institutes like IITs, NITs and Indian Institute of Petroleum, Dehradun. “IOC offers a starting package of Rs 7 lakh per annum excluding other allowances, which is more than average package for a fresh graduate,” Agrawal added.

The director told Financial Chronicle that fresh graduates are hired for the company’s core business that includes refining, marketing and pipelines among others. “Freshers undergo training for an year, after successful completion of which they become permanent employees. IOC is a transparent company and all lines of actions are under certain guidelines. Five percent of the annual profit before tax is divided among top executives of the company as incentives. All other incentives in the company are performance-linked,” Agrawal added.

Meanwhile, Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL) hired 12 fresh management graduates from IIMs in 2009-10. BPCL hired new professionals at a time when companies were laying off their employees, a senior official at BPCL told Financial Chronicle on condition of anonymity.