BANGALORE: Global consulting and financial firms have queued up with pre-placement offers and interviews to hire the post-graduate programme (PGP) course students of the premier Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore (IIM-B). "Management consulting and international financial firms have made 71 pre-placement offers and lined up 37 pre-placement interviews to our final year PGP course students as the placement season began this week on a promising note," B-school career development services chairman P.D. Jose told IANS Wednesday. The major consulting firms, which made the offers include A.T. Kearney, Bain & Co, Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & Co, Booze & Co, Global e-Procure and Hay Group, reaffirming the institute's position as their preferred destination. The final year batch of the two-year PGP management course has 375 students, including 78 women. Majority of them have undergone summer internship at these firms in their first academic year (2010-11). "The conversion rate was over 90 percent this year with a large number of interns being offered permanent positions by these firms. We are also witnessing a strong demand for summer internship placement for the first-year batch of 375 students, including 85 young women," Jose said. International financial firms such as Blackstone, Barclays Capital, Deutsche Bank (London), Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Nomura, RBS, Standard Chartered (global markets) and UAE Exchange have extended offers to the students. "Most of these offers are made for overseas locations such as Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Hong Kong, London and Singapore. General management conglomerates, including the Aditya Birla group & TAS, FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) majors like Hindustan Unilever Ltd, Proctor & Gamble and Pepsi and multinationals Microsoft, American Express and Philips made pre-placement offers," IIM-B communications head N. Bringi Dev said. Selection for summer placement session of the first-year PGP course students begins Nov 9 in the B-school campus. "We expect more pre-placement offers this year than last year. Many firms, which made job offers have also confirmed participation in the upcoming summer recruitment process," PGP course student C. Sreekanth said.