The week saw a lot of activity on the appointment front. The news of Nilesh Shah being appointed as managing director and CEO at Axis Capital Ltd broke as the week commenced. Personal computer maker Dell Inc., named former Wipro Ltd veteran Anand Sankaran as its new president and head of its infrastructure services and cloud computing consulting business. In an interesting update, Yahoo announced the appointment of New York Times technology columnist and gadget reviewer David Pogue. Pogue will work on similar content for the Yahoo website and work towards making it more compelling.

Economic Times reported that Prabhir Jha, senior vice-president and CHRO at Tata Motors is set to join Reliance Industries. Microsoft Corp. Another news came from Microsoft which has appointed Anil Bhansali as managing director of Microsoft India (R&D) Pvt Ltd. Bhansali will head Microsoft’s development centre in India and will be based out of Hyderabad.

In another development, Mint reported resignation of Shreekant Javalgekar, MD and CEO, Multi Commodity Exchange of India Ltd.

There were a few important hiring updates during this week. According to a report, Chennai-based Indian Overseas Bank (IOB) is expected to recruit around 4,100 this year. According to an ET report, technology services provider Mindtree plans to fill a third of its senior leadership team with external hires. Mindtree told ET that over 15 executives had joined in the recent past at various leadership levels in sales. News of dip in online hiring activity came up as job portal Monster.com reported a 9 per cent decline in online hiring activity in September.

LinkedIn has ranked technology services company Accenture at the first place in the list of 20 most sought after employers in India. Accenture is followed by IT majors Wipro and Infosys, ranked second and third respectively.

Internet giant Google has been ranked as the world's best multinational company to work for by 'Great Place to Work Institute'. Google is followed by software developer SAS Institute and network storage provider NetApp in the second and third place, respectively. Software giant Microsoft was ranked fourth.

On the diversity front, an Economic Times report showed a ray of hope. According to this report many Indian companies are taking steps towards a gender balanced workforce. At Quintiles India 52% of the workforce is women. L'Oreal India is merely 6% short of the halfway mark, while at boutique consulting firm YSC, the number of women employees far exceeds the men.

JPMorgan Chase & Co has reached a tentative $13 billion deal with the U.S. Justice Department and other government agencies to settle investigations into bad mortgage loans the bank sold to investors before the financial crisis, Financial Express reported.

State Bank of India (SBI), the country’s largest lender, has reinstated the so-called check-off facility to its officers’ federation, Mint reported. The check-off facility was started in 1970.