"They stretched in a never-ending line. Across the margin of a bay."

These sadly aren't daffodils though, but people looking for work. The video above is a scene outside the Bengaluru office of HCL Technologies last Sunday, when some 8,000-and-odd young people, mostly engineers, turned up for a walk-in interview. It wasn't clear how many would be hired.

Where are the jobs? Bangalore Mirror reported, "The combo of unemployed engineers and the new-age advertisement through online/social media that spread the word about the job availability made for the chaotic scene at HCL: 1,200 posts and 8,000-plus candidates lining up on the not-so-broad Velankani Drive in E-City. The post on offer – Engineer Trainee – came with an annual package of (Rs) 2.75 lakh. The candidates invited were 2014/15 grads of information technology, electrical and electronics engineers, electronic and communication engineers and BTech."

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People travelled from other cities to Bengaluru for this interview. But the company had not anticipated such numbers and are believed to have cancelled the interview, leading to more chaos and, ultimately, police intervention.

"The company officials have not intimated us about the recruitment drive; if they were expecting more than 500 people they needed to take permission for both security purposes and also for the traffic police to make arrangements. They called us in when they panicked about the crowd. We had to get our city armed reserve police to control the crowd after the company asked them to leave," a Bangalore Mirror report quoted a policeman.

For engineering graduates from India's tier II and tier III cities, finding jobs is quite hard today. According to the Aspiring Minds National Employability Report based on a study of more than 1,50,000 engineering students who graduated in 2015 from over 650 colleges, 80 per cent need to upgrade their skills further to be employable.

In terms of cities, Delhi produces the highest number of employable engineers, followed by Bengaluru and the western parts of the country. The report adds that tier-III cities also produce a fair share of employable engineers, and should not be neglected from a recruitment perspective.