The Jobs Are Back
- Thursday, February 4, 2010, 9:19
Recession was the answer to all the question in the industry and not just the industry even the college students would often say that they would be under pressure due to the lack of jobs in market and that’s again was due to the recession. All said and done the time has come for us to realize that things have changed. The employees who were waiting for the economy to bounce back before jumping boats are busy again. With the IT market slowly picking up and hiring all set to increase in 2010.
The companies are back at the campuses this time and with an intention to hire and not just hand over the offer letters. Not just that, the ones who were hired and fired, are back on the job. Indian IT industry, in particular, is looking positive and seems to have taken up the responsibility to pull out the almost dead job market.
Now as they say every coin has two sides but this one has many facets. One of them being the attrition; Companies were once at peace, until the recession was a point of worry. The story at one of the biggest IT employer in India, TCS is very bad. The attrition rate is at 21% and employees who are quitting are being asked to hold on with their papers for a day or two in order to maintain a decent monthly attrition figures. HRs in such firms are already in soup and it is an uphill task for them from here on.
2010 would be the year of IT companies fighting over hikes and retaining its employees, at least thats how it looks from now on. Let’s hope this prediction holds true.
Sakshi Nair’s one-year contract with an IT firm ended in June 2009. And the 23-year-old returned Home only thinking her experience would fetch her a job with any major IT giant. But she was in for a shock. Her arrival coincided with a job market that had gone into deep freeze mode since October 2008.
Nair knocked on the doors of banks in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore for five months without success. Then last month, she suddenly got a call a leading IT company. The compensation being offered is lower than what she would have considered a few months ago, but Nair is happy to be back in business. “Getting a job in July was tough with more lay-offs than recruitments. Though it took a lot of time, the this offer was such a respite!” she says. Nair is one of the early beneficiaries of a job market that is beginning to look good after a year-long siege.
Cut to one of the leading engineering campus in India. It is hard to miss the palpable excitement among the students. Better and more jobs are coming their way this year, compared to what their seniors settled for around this time in 2008. By November, 324 of the 700 students of the current batch have firm job offers in hand. The presence of 15 new companies, including food-products giant and engineering majors, has also boosted sentiments.
If engineering campuses across the country are buzzing with excitement yet again, it is because several big companies have announced, after a long gap, their intention to recruit in large numbers. For instance, Infosys Technologies, the IT bellwether, has revised its hiring target for 2009-10 by 11 per cent — up from 18,000 hires to 20,000
The IT jobs
“There has been an improvement in the market, and our confidence is higher,” says Mohandas Pai, director, human resources, education and research and administration, Infosys Technologies said in a recent press release. Now that it has happened, the company is giving 8 per cent increment to its Indian employees. The single-digit percentage nudge in wages is a far cry from the quarter to one-third salary hikes they were used to until last year, but it is looking great considering that until a few months ago, most people were happy to just retain their job, forget salary hikes. Now this is surely a clear picture of what the IT sector looks like and if that wasn’t enough the story from the other IT major also seems to be promising. The other IT biggie from Bangalore, Wipro, also announced it hiring pattern and plans, this time around it seems there is definitely some major hiring from the campuses. The IT companies would limit the numbers to what they can digest. Most IT majors’ images took a beating in late 2008 and early 2009, as they deferred the joining dates of fresh recruits by up to nine months.
Even in a worst scenario, calendar 2010 will create around 50,000 fresh IT/ITES jobs against zero fresh jobs except a very thin campus hiring - in the previous year. The calendar 2007 had witnessed a bumper hiring at over 3 lakh while the growth got tapered off towards the third quarter of 2008 clocking a total hiring of only 1.8 lakh. This means a complete change from the current skeletal and need-based hiring. The large volume-hiring realm (services space) will warm up by the second quarter of calendar 2010. A 15% increment in hiring volumes is expected in the first two quarters while the growth could cross 20% or double towards third and fourth quarter. The requirements will start pouring in like tsunami, HR departments of many corporates have already geared up for large scale hiring after a long standstill.
The Campus Placement
All this while there were worried brows thinking about whether you would be hired or not for the campus recruitment. But with market turning positive there has been a lot of noises about companies starting to hire. The major news came in when Infosys announced that the company will start campus recruitments from Jan 2010. Since most of the companies are moving to tier 2 cities the hiring for the IT professional would be on the positive trend. The most interesting fact in the campus hiring story is that, the companies have assured that there wont be a delay in the joining date as it was during the recession.
The only difference it is now then it was in 2007-08 is the fact that Students of the country’s engineering colleges may now have to wait till their final year for clinching a job with an IT firm. In a bid to get greater visibility of the business environment while hiring, IT companies, such as TCS and Wipro Technologies, are now looking to push campus recruitments closer to the pass-out date. This could also be a sign which means that the companies wants to maintain the bench and increase utilisation, as the company attempts to raise efficiency. Some of the IT companies has also increased the performance bar for its employees to meet higher productivity demands. But all said and done these companies are back to hiring and hiring from the campus. All you need to so is brush up your skills a bit here and there.
The Attrition Trouble
The obvious flip side of a robust job market is a higher employee attrition. Where there is hiring, attrition cannot be far behind. The attrition level increases with the increase in the packages offered but that worry for the HR to manage. The freshers generally don’t attrite when they are in the company. Every sector is off its bottom; be it IT, real estate, media, retail or advertising. The best example would be the a 38 per cent jump in job postings on job networking sites website and most of the IT jobs have a major applying. The industry experts picks for the boom sectors are IT, retail, infrastructure, construction and telecom.
A New Strategy
What is remarkable through this revival is the employers’ desire to keep the additional salary costs low, even as the headcount increases.
Invariably, the revived increments are in single digits across the hierarchy, functions and performance. “The slowdown has helped bring about the much-needed correction in salaries and the career aspirations of employees. The Job losses and the hiring freeze of the past year made people more appreciative of the companies that did not lay off people, and distributed the burden of slump across the board by cutting or freezing salaries. The ‘candidates expectations’ are more realistic today, In some cases, candidates have taken pay cuts to join companies.
The improvement is expected mainly on account of significant revival of on-campus hiring by the IT, financial services and consulting majors.
More Cheers Ahead
The indications are positive for an improved campus placement season in the coming quarters. The pre-placement offers (PPOs) have improved both in terms of numbers and the spread of companies so far this year. Engineering students from Delhi Technology University are happier this academic year as a bevy of manufacturing, infrastructure and IT firms have shown interest in pre-placement offers. So is the case with many of the colleges in the country. We could surely say everything is turning around but then it is not a hockey stick type turnaround in the job market, the slant has clearly changed. But it is going to be one long, measured turn.
