Calcutta, Nov. 16: Engineering graduates may no longer find it easy to bag good jobs by doing well in their semesters alone. They need to be backed by a good rank in the Joint Entrance Examination.

Big companies who pick up the best and the brightest from campus have now decided to take into consideration a student?s rank on the JEE merit list along with other academic achievements while judging a candidate.

Samir Bandyopadhyay, the West Bengal University of Technology registrar, said: ?The companies want to know the JEE rank of the students before holding campus interviews because they want to make their process of selection more methodical.?

The university has more than 70 engineering colleges affiliated to it.

Several top recruiters have written to the joint entrance board requesting it to send the JEE merit list with the names of the institutions and departments to which the students were recommended.

For instance, Jadavpur University has 15 departments. The list shows that students accommodated in its chemical engineering department figure between 172 and 738 on the JEE merit list. It also shows the opening and closing ranks of all students who have made it to the university.

?The central selection committee of the joint entrance board has finished preparing the list sought by the companies,? said N.R. Banerjee, the vice-chancellor of the Bengal University of Engineering and Science who is also the board chairman.

A university official said: ?The companies want to split their jobs in various categories. They may call those holding higher ranks for interviews for better posts. Lesser ranked students may be called for other categories.?

The companies that have approached the joint entrance board include TCS, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Tisco and IBM.

Till last year, the companies held campus interviews together for all posts and the final selection was done through phases of screening. This delayed the entire process.

This year, the companies have also laid down another condition to the engineering colleges for holding campus interviews. Once a student gets selected by a company, he/she will not be permitted to appear for interviews held by any other company.