Mumbai: Now, the students of IITs have a reason to cheer. Unlike last year, many companies will be coming head-hunting when the campus recruitment kicks off this December. The improved scenario for pre-placement offers is significant because IITs and other higher education institutions had hit a low in placement offers during the global financial in the last couple of years, reports Kalpana Pathak & Vinay Umarji from the Business Standard. The companies which had not issued pre-placement offers earlier have queued up and overall, the response is very good. At IIT-Bombay, more than 100 companies have already confirmed that they would recruit campus graduates and many more have expressed their desire to be on campus and participate in the process. About 20 students have received pre-placement offers following successful summer internships in the companies. Many more are expecting to get offers. "We are confident of more than 200 companies preferred by students, to recruit from the campus. We are currently having openings for jobs in Japan, UK, Taiwan, Malaysia, UAE and the U.S. among others. "Many other multinational firms will be recruiting our students for positions in their India offices, but these students are often rerouted to international assignments soon after their first year," said the IIT Bombay placement office. The institute said other than the core job offers relevant to each of the engineering disciplines, it has received good response from the finance, consulting, FMCG, analytics, IT and software, public sector units and research and development sectors. At IIT Kharagpur, the improved pre-placement scenario has translated into 13 offers by Barclays Bank, apart from offers by Singapore-based Deutsche Bank, among others. Interestingly, Deutsche Bank has come up with a salary package that is higher than last year's best ( 22 lakh or 2.2 million) to one of the candidates. The response from companies, especially from the core engineering sectors and banking & IT, have been very good. "Things are definitely looking brighter than last year," said Sunil Srivastava, head of training and placement, IIT Kharagpur. While last year around 160 firms were present in the campus for pre-placement talks, this year, the institute expects the numbers to rise to close to 200. At IIT Madras around 100 companies, including some top oil and gas majors, have confirmed their participation in campus recruitment. The 2008-09 academic year witnessed several leading firms expressing their regret for not being able to participate in the placement process at IIT Roorkee. Moreover, 15 students of IIT Kharagpur had received regret letters where US-based information technology companies - Montolova, Magma Design Automation and Paradigm - had said that they were unable to absorb the students due to 'internal restructuring plans'. While in 2008, 3,031 students from seven IITs were recruited by MNCs through campus placements, in 2009 the number had dipped to 1,606.