India's job market heats up- Changing tactics?

This week's edition of India Knowledge@Wharton-says it all!!

The article quotes a bevy of India's topnotch thought leaders in the ‘business of hiring’ with well articulated surveys to back their convictions.

Let me try and give you a quick gist of some of the interesting views :

- The Indian economy will create 87.37 million new jobs by 2015. And most certainly, "India is set to create close to a million new jobs in 2010-2011 in the organized-sector jobs".

-While hiring will continue mostly to meet the replacement demand created as a result of the erstwhile hiring freeze, there are likely to be mixed trends in the level of hiring activity across sectors.

a) "India as a production base is dependent on the global recovery and the outlook is more uncertain.

b)Those jobs in India market driven by domestic consumption are going to be the fastest-growing sectors going forward.

c) Emergence of a new normal around employment elasticity. Or the scar tissue; many managers hated the downsizing at the deeply personal level and many swore that they did not want to go through it again. So they are being very cautious in raising headcount before they are sure that this recovery is for real.

-"While the average attrition rate stood at 7.8% in the second quarter of 2009, it almost doubled to 15% by the year-end, as the job market improved."

-The Indian workforce is the most"mentally mobile" in the world -- a measure of the willingness of the country's employees to change jobs

- Indian salaries will rise 10.6% in 2010, (6.6% LY)the highest in the Asia-Pacific region!

-Changing in the way 'hikes are being given'!

i)Companies that were not punishing non-performers were, in effect, punishing performers and in tough times were disadvantaged against companies who were more performance oriented."

ii)"It traditionally had almost myopic focus on benchmarking and best practices. While these have been and will remain important elements in pay decision making, they need to be balanced more evenly against what is right for your organization, what impact this will have on your business, and measuring the RoI(return on investment) of the total reward spend, etc.

The focus will be on hiring people who will stay on rather than those who switch jobs frequently."

Here is another interesting thought-Demand Surge leads to skills clusters -

Salaries for certain skills are seeing the highest growth in certain regions.

For instance, Chennai, Pune and Bangalore, which have a high incidence of automobile and allied industry skills, have seen the highest salary growth in this sector. .

Similarly, food and hospitality temp executives in Delhi and Chandigarh got an 8-10 per cent growth in salary last year, while contract workers in health careand pharma in Mumbai and Bangalore earned the highest salary hikes, which is around 11-12 per cent.

For IT employees, being located at Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad,Pune and Mumbai would not make much of a difference because all these cities gave similar hikes.

This kind of bunching or banding together of talent resulting in standard salary hikes in fixed locations has created job and skills clusters. Is it an advantage for the hiring industry as sourcing would become easier and there's more transparency in compensation packages??

Well, are we missing out on any other trends? I shall be glad to hear from you...