Friday, February 22, 2008

Who is hiring in India?

The general feeling I get from fellow professionals from the fraternity is that there has been a slow down in hiring -and one is subjected to many theories. But if one were to do a cursory surfing exercise on the net you see a lot of action likely to happen.
The Business Line has a section exclusively for the topic "Who is hiring" . One can see that hiring plans are across industries- IT, marketing/retailing, banking/financial services, agriculture, airlines, consulting, hotels, pharmaceuticals, real estate & construction, road transport, shipping, textiles, and even Government /PSU's .
Just see a few samples in the last fortnight:
- Computer Science Corporation to double its headcount from 16500 to 33000 in the next 2yrs-thru organic and inorganic growth. There is a mention of CSC hiring only 10% from campuses-so the rest are lateral hires!
-Capgemini hints at expanding headcount from present 17000 to 40000 by 2010. Could look at acquistions to meet growth aspirations.
-British Telecom to hire 6000 for advisory services to enable Indian companies to scale up the value chain by providing professional services to meet all communications strategy, planning, design, infrastructure, networking, security, applications and training needs of a business.
-Deloitte is turning its attention from offshoring to the growing Indian market and expects to grow its strength from 8000 to over 20000 "beyond 2010"!

What does it mean?

-The rules are changing. If earlier companies were chasing numbers, now they are looking for quality. Gone are the days when one joked about hiring tresspassers! Companies have started investing in hiring systems and background check is increasingly becoming a mandatory practice.
-With acquisitions becoming the easier option, there is definitely going to be a lot of due diligence done in the evaluation of a company's human capital. There are rumours that some companies are for sale. We can already see that some MNCs are occasionally laying off 'small numbers' every month, in a bid not to attract too much media attention. Recruiters are aware of the insecure employees- who despite being good performers - are 'sitting ducks' in the industry!
- Earlier this week, I had a project manager of a global Indian services company -who has been abroad in US and UK for the last decade, airing his thoughts. . If earlier the MNC banking giant (client) accepted any software programmer recommended , in the last 2 years the MNC had set its own offshoring centre in India -and discovered that it could attract a better talent for the dollar rate they were paying all the while!! The client has clearly raised the bar!
-Companies are adopting the 'horses for courses' adage. As a part of NPA, The Worldwide Recruiting Network, I have been privy to global recruiters looking for executives with international experience! While returning Indians are in demand, companies are also looking at expats -who have a substantial India experience. For instance, courtesy my Singapore based associate, we now have mandates for professionals of Singapore/Malaysian nationalities -with experience in handling projects in the Indian infrastructure scene. (anyone with over a year's local experience is in great demand!!)
There is something more than meets the eye, right? I look forward to hearing from others who can see things I am missing out...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

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Abhinav Mishra said...

Hi Menon sir, Its a really enriching piece of writing.

In the current times we had seen big To and Fros in the market globally, US dollar getting weaker and which had also affected our indian market specially IT business significantly.
And at the same time we have seen many Indian IT giants like Infosys and TCS showing awesome revenue figures..

I believe that you might be aware of the fact that there is a aprehension among many IT/engineering graduates which are going to passout in the coming next years that IT-Industry would not be so kindhearted as it was in the former years. Do you still see that IT would be the benign options for all those aspirants who were choosing the IT (interestingly or uninterestingly)as their specialization in education, for the sake of getting the advantage of having more placements options in that, as compared to other streams.., Should they still go with IT as their career option..

Do you see, again a salubrious growth in IT for the coming next say 5-10 years..

Abhinav Mishra
/Researcher and Recruitment practitioner.


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