Oracle spent the placement season hiring hard on Indian campuses - twenty-five to thirty-five offers on some of the bigger ones, full-time roles and summer internships alike, across IIT Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Madras, BITS Pilani, NIT Warangal and more. Students signed, celebrated, and under the standard "one student, one job" rule were pulled out of every other placement queue on the strength of that letter.
Then, roughly a month before June-July joining dates, the letters started coming back. The stated reason was "internal organizational restructuring" and "headcount-related challenges" - the same language attached to the company's wider 2026 layoffs. By the students' count, more than fifty offers evaporated, landing on graduates who no longer had a placement season to return to.
The All IITs Placement Committee did not take it quietly. It issued an ultimatum: honour the offers or pay three months' salary in compensation, per its own guidelines, with an August 15 deadline and the threat of a campus ban for firms that don't comply. Placement cells are now shopping the affected resumes to other recruiters. The offer letter, it turns out, was the easy part.