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Business Line November 24, 2008
Recruiters headed for slow-growth phase |
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Business Line October 22, 2008
Cos going slow on lateral hires |
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The Times of India Monday October 20, 2008
Pink Slip Blues |
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The Times of India Friday October 17, 2008
Recruitment market shrinks; hirers in a fix |
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The Economist Times Friday October 17, 2008
Recruitment shrinks, hirers in trouble |
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The Telegraph Thursday October 16, 2008
10 ways to ride the bad times |
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Business Line Tuesday September 01, 2008
IT majors see red at the bottom |
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The Times of India Monday July 28, 2008
'Outplacing' employees to become leaner |
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Busniess Line Thursday July 08, 2008
Hefty salary hikes turn a thing of the past |
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Livemint.com (THE WALL STREET JOURNAL) Tuesday June 10, 2008
Small outfits offer big opportunities |
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Busniess Line Thursday May 22, 2008
They are beginning to look beyond IT space |
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The Times of India Saturday March 15, 2008
More pink-slips for techies this year |
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The Economic Times Tuesday March 11, 2008
Hiring in IT industry slows down 40-50% |
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Corporate News Wednesday March 5, 2008
Microsoft, Infosys 'incubating talent' to beat attrition blues |
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The Times of India Monday January 14, 2008
Rookies rule the roost today.... Fresh Look |
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The Times of India Friday January 4, 2008
Bada title, chhota kaam from indian techies |
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The Economic Times Wednesday January 2, 2008
ENABLING COMFORT At Workplace |
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The Hindu Business Line Wednesday January 2, 2008
Hiring moves beyond realm of IT, ITeS |
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Rookies rule the roost today. As the scramble for talent gets intense, fresh graduates have emerged as the most sought after community in the Indian tech marketplace. |
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The Times of India |
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January 14, 2008 |
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Mini Joseph Tejaswi |
Pravin Sood searched for more than a year before he landed a technology job, after his graduation in 2002. His younger brother Navin, currently a final year engineering student in Andhra Pradesh, already has job offers from two leading tech firms. “As a fresh grad, I was often asked by HR heads to get some experience elsewhere and come back. I would fight back, and ask them how I would get experience, if no one hires me?’’ recalls Pravin, who’s now an analyst with an MNC.
Today, however, it’s a different world. Like with Navin, before you’ve completed your graduation, you are likely to have job offers on hand. And we are not talking only about graduates from leading colleges. Tech firms today are stocking up as many fresh grads as they can, from a wide range of institutions.
Recruiters who didn’t previously look at more than a dozen colleges in Karnataka today recruit from almost all of the 124 colleges in the state. About 30 of the colleges are visited directly by the recruiters. Recruiters also visit 300 of the country’s 1,400 colleges and don’t hesitate to recruit from the rest either.
Cost cutting
This new-found love for freshers isn’t difficult to understand. Last year, when the rupee appreciation started hitting tech firms hard, TOI had reported that most of these firms were considering putting a greater focus on hiring freshers to lower costs. That’s indeed what’s happening now.
The cost pressures on IT companies have been huge and relentless. The rupee appreciation apart, there has been the issue of soaring salary costs. The cost of an employee rises dramatically once he/she achieves two to three years of experience.
So going forward, about 50 to 70% of the total people base is expected to be in the 0 to 2 year experience category. Recruiters say that those leading the wave of fresher-hiring are firms like Infosys (which has given 18,000 offer letters in campuses this year), TCS, Satyam, Cognizant, Wipro and HCL, with MNCs joining the bandwagon selectively.
“Companies with outstanding training capability and infrastructure have already gained big out of this and have stayed extremely competitive despite the cost pressures,’’ says B S Murthy, CEO of recruitment firm HumanCapital.
Mohan Lal Menon, MD of Sentient Consulting, a people-acquisition advisory firm, says high-volume hiring of freshers offer two kinds of liquidity advantage to enterprises: “It saves them from high operational costs involved in acquiring skilled talent. It also creates talent liquidity within the enterprise, so that they are better equipped to handle project flows and delivery schedules.”
He says that even with the cost of training and education, the economics of hiring freshers works very well for enterprises compared to hiring readyto-deploy talent. “More than the cost incurred in training and education, it is the cost of the opportunity lost that is critical,’’ says Menon, who is also on the board of several large tech firms.
Anand Adkoli, CEO of e-learning firm Liqwid Krystal, says a constant inflow of talent is crucial for the quantum growth of the industry. “Also, freshers are hungry to learn. They do not have pre-set minds, so it is all the more easy to train, teach and groom them for specific requirements,” he says. “It makes resource allocation easier,” says Nirupama V G, MD of recruitment firm AdAstra, explaining the mass hiring of freshers. “Companies will not land into emergency situations. They also get time to prepare people for specific functions.’’
Turning freshers billable
But most freshers are not immediately billable (cannot be put in projects). According to Forbes Asia’s December 24 issue, only 15% of India’s 2.3 million graduates are employable. It also projects a talent shortfall of 1,50,000 by 2010, against Nasscom’s shortfall outlook of 5,00,000 by that year.
Over 30% of the people in the IT industry are non-computer science or nonelectronics engineers. HR experts say India could be the only country in the world where a large army of non-IT grads are being cultivated and morphed for IT jobs.
This involves heavy investment in training and education infrastructure. Infosys today owns the world’s largest independent corporate training facility in Mysore and other locations, set up at a cost of Rs 1,650 crore. “The industry is playing a game of scale. Training, educating and grooming are the key words, because no other means can create billable talent,’’ says T V Mohandas Pai, head, training & education, at Infy.
, which even hires non-grads, has a large training school in Thiruvananthapuram. Cognizant Academy trains well over 10,000 freshers each year; about 65% of the company’s annual recruits are now freshers from campuses.
IBM, Accenture, CapGemini and EDS also have training programmes that they run independently and in partnership with academia. MindTree Consulting is currently in the process of training its 1,000 campus recruits.
Puneet Jetli, head of people functions at MindTree, says campus hiring is a critical factor for the company’s overall recruitment strategy: “We want to maintain a good balance of the people pyramid. This will keep our overall cost under control. Campus/fresh hiring accounted for almost 60% of our hiring in the last couple of years and this will continue.’’
However, he thinks the next fiscal will see a new trend emerging in the fresher-recruitment space. “Instead of today’s mass inductions, companies in the future are likely to stagger the onboarding of fresh talent to ensure constant inflow, to reduce the ratio of benchsitters and also provide efficiency training,’’ he says.
The industry may also move into a consolidated approach of assessment and grading by routing these processes through Nasscom-promoted grading and hiring systems. “This will make the catchment area wider and larger,” Jetli says.
Flip side
But there are some who are worried by the excessive focus on freshers. A Wipro manager who has been mandated to recruit more freshers into his team wonders whether quality aspects would take a beating in the future. “Despite all the training, they are unlikely to be as good as people who have actually worked on projects. With more freshers, we could have situations where projects are delayed or deliver projects that have more bugs in them, with serious repercussions,” he says.
Also, with everybody jumping into the fresh market, fresher salaries are expected to go up more than it has in the past few years, negating some of the benefits the strategy is expected to bring.
“There is a quantum jump in the number of freshers hired during this fiscal. This has put huge pressure on the talent supply chain, creating a scenario where the size of salary has become the sole deciding factor for freshers,’’ says Amitabh Das, CEO of recruitment firm Vati Consulting.
Companies doing high-end work are said to have raised entry-level salaries this year by 30%, taking it to Rs 6 lakh and more per annum. High-end application development firms have hiked salaries by 15% to between Rs 4 lakh and Rs 5 lakh while certain services firms are seen to have effected a similar hike to bring salaries in the range of Rs 3.5 lakh to Rs 4.5 lakh.
In other words, freshers may soon bring on the same concerns that experienced employees have. Unless India can quickly ramp up the spread of education and the employable pool. |
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