New Delhi, Dec. 3 -- Startups are offering higher salaries, bigger bonuses and more employee stock options (Esops) at the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) this year, but despite securing first-day slots too, they are struggling to attract top talent as campus hiring shifts from mass hiring to picking a few high-quality candidates amid an AI-led productivity boost.

At IIT placements, venture-backed startups like Razorpay, Fractal Analytics, Battery Smart, OYO, Navi, Meesho and SpeakX are aggressively competing with tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Nvidia, as well as high-frequency trading (HFT) firms, to secure top engineering talent.​​

While startups have long recruited from IITs-Flipkart alone extende...