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Anurag Modi, 26, had three job offers before him ? two from companies in the telecommunications industry and one from an automobile firm. Eventually, the chartered accountant rejected all three and joined a private insurance company. “I couldn’t believe one could get multiple job offers in Calcutta,” Modi says.
Mumbai-based journalist Prita Chowdhury (name changed) was similarly preoccupied. The 28-year-old experienced reporter was considering job offers from two newspapers. She eventually plumped for one of them at almost double her salary.
Modi and Chowdhury are but some of the hordes of people who’re riding the crest of an unprecedented nationwide jobs boom. “I have spent 36 years in this profession, but this is the first time I am witnessing a jobs boom like this. There are so many openings now,” exclaims Bish Agarwal, chairman of ABC Consultants, a headhunting firm with a presence all over the country.
A hoarding for IBM in Bangalore’s busy Banerghatta Road says it all. “IBM is hiring. Come on board,” it screams over a picture of a luxury car, with its back doors open. The symbolism is overt ? for there are jobs galore in various industries, often cutting across sectors and states.
The software industry alone is expected to create 1.2 lakh new jobs. The business process outsourcing industry is expected to hire 1.5 lakh people; more than 25,000 new sales, customer service and engineering jobs will arise in the telecom industry. That’s not all. As a result of the lifting of import quotas worldwide, more than 50,000 new jobs are likely to be created in the textile industry.
The jobs boom, of course, is fuelled by resurgent economic growth (gross domestic product is growing by a healthy 6.9 per cent a year), the outsourcing of business from the West to India and the recent spurt in investment. According to the Mumbai-based Centre for Monitoring of Indian Economy, which tracks economic data, the number of new projects in the infrastructure, manufacturing and services sectors has gone up from 6,124 in 2002 to 10,138 in 2005.
“The investment outlook was bleak in the mid-Nineties but now people are bullish once again and the job growth is a natural outcome of that,” says Aniruddha Chatterjee, CMIE’s manager (business development) in Calcutta.
According to a report published by the Chennai-based human resource (HR) consultants Ma Foi in June this year, while the information technology (IT) and information technology enabled services (ITES) industries have been the top hirers so far, the telecom industry is number three on the totem pole. The print media and the entertainment industry, pharmaceuticals, transport and logistics, healthcare, textile and garments and hospitality industries follow closely on their heels.
Strikingly, jobs are now available in several industries that have not been previously known to have hired at a furious rate. Take aviation. With up to five low-cost airlines launching this year alone, a host of others waiting in the wings and the existing airlines drawing up ambitious expansion plans, the airline industry is hiring as if there’s no tomorrow. Over the next three years, the demand for cabin crew jobs alone is estimated to touch a whopping 20,000, says Rakesh Agarwal, managing director of the Frankfinn Institute of Air Hostess Training in Mumbai. In the last six months, Frankfinn placed nearly 100 students as cabin crew in airlines.
Around the same time, Bangalore-based Kingfisher Airlines hired close to 850 people in various positions to kickstart its commercial operations in May. By January next year, this number is expected to swell to over 1,000. Kingfisher thinks it will need 96 employees per aircraft.
Many airline companies are also setting up cargo operations. This means more jobs for pilots and airline engineers, apart from ground staff. “We receive 60 faxes a day announcing fresh job openings,” says Subhash Motwani, director of the Institute of Hotel, Cargo and Tourism Management in Mumbai and publisher of Opportunities Today magazine.
There’s good news for the hordes that enter the jobs market ? the most opportunities exist at the entry level. According to an HR panel constituted by Monsterindia.com comprising recruitment experts from Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Adobe, Accenture, Computer Associates, Mahindra, British Telecom, Oracle and Eicher among others, entry-level hiring will grow by 28 per cent in 2005.
New streams like research and development and testing will open for engineering graduates while others can look at the ITES and BPO industries and the retail sector. “Unlike the BPO environment, I think even at entry levels the jobs in retail are extremely dynamic. Also, with the rapid growth of the sector, the opportunities emerging are very large,” notes Brigitta George Abraham, a retail HR consultant in Mumbai.
Indeed, the retail industry (including malls) is expected to generate 60,000 jobs every year. For every 300 square feet of retail space, companies are expected to hire at least one person. So, in the next two years, as total retail space in the country touches 40 million square feet, the sector is estimated to generate close to 1,20,000 jobs, according to Gibson G. Vedamani, chief executive of the Retailers’ Association of India.
By the year end, Pantaloons alone plans to increase its total square feet of retail space from 2.5 million to 4 million and double its manpower strength from the current 6,000. In the next two years, the Mumbai-based retail chain’s total number of employees will be 18,000.
One of the surprise recruiters this year is the engineering and manufacturing sector. Online recruitment firm Monster Asia reported “a 14 per cent month-on-month resum? growth and a 22 per cent growth in job postings in the engineering and manufacturing segment.”
Still, when it comes to hiring, the big boy continues to be the IT industry. Software giants like IBM, Infosys, Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services have projected that they’ll be hiring upward of 13,000 people each year. On July 11, 730 trainees joined the Infosys training centre in Mysore ? possibly the largest number of employees to join a company on a single day in India.
As the jobs market explodes, what’s clear is that the jobs are in the cities, not the countryside. Close to 80 per cent of the job openings is concentrated in Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad and Pune. Of late, however, Calcutta has seen considerable action (see box).
One outcome of the jobs deluge is salary increases, though most companies now prefer to link pay with productivity. According to international HR consultancy firm Hewitt Associates, average compensation in India climbed by 16 per cent in 2004-2005, the highest in Asia. “The increments are not exponential but normal increases that come every two years,” says Geeta Thakur, chief executive of Select Consultants, a Delhi-based HR recruiting firm.
Industries with high attrition rates are devising new ways to tie down employees. While software firm Oracle is sending employees on a one-month stint to the US, on a rotational basis, some such as Kingfisher are getting employees to sign two-year bonds.
“We spend considerable time, effort and money on our cabin crew and pilots. We do not want to end up as a mere training ground for the employees,” explains Aparna Banerji, HR manager at Kingfisher Airlines.
Yet, the big question is whether this boom is another bubble waiting to burst? At the moment, that doesn’t seem to be the case. “The dotcom boom did not create any value. Now more realistic levels of production capacity are being built. This is sustainable growth,” says Ajit Isaac, managing director of Adecco Peopleone India, an IT recruitment firm in Bangalore. Job seekers, meanwhile, continue to pop the champagne corks.
Bengal boom
Jadavpur University’s head of the construction engineering department, Partha Pratim Biswas, can testify to this. For the first time, he found each of his students bagging two job offers during the recently-concluded placement season — something unthinkable even two years ago.
Business is looking up in Calcutta, the real estate market is booming and investments are pouring into the city. The city’s business confidence index has soared from 39 per cent last year to 69 per cent in 2005, according to a TeamLease-Gallup survey of business and employment expectations in seven cities. More companies are keen to start or expand their businesses in Calcutta. “The jobs boom, largely restricted to Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore barely two years ago, is fast spreading to other cities including Calcutta,” says D. Bose, director of Quest Consultants, the headhunting firm.
Between 1999 and 2004, the number of computer services companies in West Bengal rose from 30 to 124, resulting in the manpower strength of these companies growing by more than tenfold to 9,000.
In the telecom industry, cellular services company Hutchison Telecom East plans to recruit 300-odd people every year for its operations and call centre in the eastern region. Besides entry-level graduates, it will hire a large network of engineers, marketing people and maintenance staff.
Banks, too, are expanding. UTI Bank, for instance, is expanding its network of branches in the state by adding another 26 branches to its current 47 offices. It will thus increase its 15 per cent growth in hiring over the last two years. “There is a huge appetite for young people, preferably with two to three years’ experience,” says S.K. Mitra, senior vice-president (east) at UTI Bank.
