PayPal is on a hiring spree from the Indian Institutes of Technology. During its first campus recruitment, it hired 80 graduates from the country's premier institute.
This is one of the largest number of hires by a multinational product company from the IITs this year.
The US-based company has around 2,250 employees in its Chennai centre. It plans to add another 900 people before the first quarter of next year. It has also announced the opening of a Bangalore centre; nearly 1,000 employees will be working there in the next 3-5 years, said Mr Anupam Pahuja, Head, PayPal's India Development Centre.
He did not reveal salary details but industry sources said a fresher from an IIT would earn approximately Rs 7 lakh a year. The new recruits are ‘high-end technologists' and will focus only on product development. This could be in areas such as payments, architecture and middleware, he said. “From now on, we will visit the IITs and other top engineering colleges every year,” he said.
On Monday, the new recruits joined PayPal's centre at Sholinganallur on Chennai's IT corridor.
An electronic board at the reception displayed the names of all the recruits, who also got laptops on joining.
They are on an eight-week ‘boot' camp with 12/14-hour daily training before being associated with various centres of excellence in centres at Chennai, San Jose, Boston or Shanghai.
Digital wallet
The Chennai centre contributes nearly 60 per cent of PayPal's global product development work.
eBay acquired PayPal in 2002. With 110 million active accounts in 190 markets and 25 currencies globally, PayPal enables global e-commerce. It acts as a digital wallet, where one can store all payment options, such as bank account and credit card.
Chennai used to be a delivery centre, taking orders from architects located in other centres.
However, things have changed now. The centre will now design, develop and deploy the products to be used globally.
On attrition, Mr Pahuja said it was ‘unhealthily low' at around 4 per cent, while it is almost in double digits at other product companies.