NEW DELHI: India Inc is all set to step up hiring in the last quarter this fiscal as employers are more optimistic than their counterparts in other nations, said an industry survey released Tuesday.

“Brisk hiring is anticipated by Indian employers during the upcoming quarter,” said the Manpower Employment Outlook Survey.

“With 38 percent of employers expecting total employment to increase, 2 percent forecasting a decrease and 53 percent predicting no change, the net employment outlook is a robust 36 percent,” it added.

“Once seasonal adjustment is added to the data, the outlook stands at 39 percent.”

The services sector is the most bullish on hiring followed by public administration, education, mining and construction, finance, retail and manufacturing.

“India has been reporting the strongest hiring expectations globally since the third quarter of 2008,” said Naresh Malhan, managing director of Manpower India.

“The good news is that employer hiring expectations across all industry sectors are improving in the first quarter of 2010, and job seekers in key sectors can look forward to the most favourable hiring environment in over a year,” he added.

India’s employment outlook in January-March is better than bigger economies including Australia at 19 percent, Canada at 13 percent, China at 11 percent, and the US at 6 percent.

The survey was conducted in 35 countries and regions including the Americas, Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Africa among 71,000 employers. Employers in 25 of such territories surveyed Read more…

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MUMBAI: What social revolutionary Babasaheb Ambedkar and late prime minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh could not see during their lifetime may be quitely getting underway in corporate India with the largest group, the Tatas, leading the way.

The Tatas were the first to bring many material things to India — power, star hotels and steel, to name a few. The $71-billion group with interests from tea-to-telecom is also now probably the first to introduce a hiring policy that emphasises ‘positive discrimination’ for its scores of enterprises located across the country from the seashores to deserts to mountain tops.

“What we have said is if everything is equal in merit and so on, please select somebody from the SC/ST communities. This is positive discrimination towards Dalits while hiring,” says JJ Irani, a director at Tata Sons. “We now have a Tata (recruitment) policy where our group chairman personally made the corrections in his own handwriting when we presented it to him.”

A Tata Sons spokesperson said the policy had been in place for some time, and has been most successful in newer companies which were in the process of building up their workforce.

“Tata group companies have been following a recruitment policy over the past few years where they have been encouraged to step up hiring from disadvantaged sections, particularly the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities, without sacrificing merit — in the spirit of positive discrimination. This policy has seen most traction in Tata companies which are in the process of building or renewing their workforce, including Trent, Tata Business Support Services, Tata Teleservices, Tata Capital, Tata Consulting Engineers, Tata Power and NDPL. In one or more of these companies, there have been significant additions at the entry levels, both at the worker and the officer levels, and some of these companies are also endeavouring to increase numbers at intermediate levels,” the spokesperson said.

Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes are communities which feature in a specific schedule of the Indian Constitution. This makes them eligible for various privileges provided by the state, including reservations in education and government jobs. Scheduled Castes are also widely referred to as Dalits.

Indian corporates, which are ringing in thousands of crores of profits year-after-year, are coming to grips with their obligation to give back to a society where people are deprived of essentials such as food, schools and medical attention.

About three years ago, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh stressed the need for affirmative action, a policy which traces its origin to attempts in the US to increase representation of African-Americans in various spheres of life.

Meira Kumar, the current speaker of the Lok Sabha and the social justice minister in the first UPA government (2004-09), had suggested a number of times that reservation of jobs, as practised in the government, could be considered in the private sector too.

But industrialists of all hues, such as Wipro chairman Azim Premji and Ashok Leyland’s R Seshasayee, said mandatory reservations, without considering merit, would cripple the corporate sector that was just emerging from the clutches of the Licence Raj. Hence, the lobby group, Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), constituted a panel under Irani on Affirmative Action.

“Companies are being encouraged to provide for more executive positions from the SC/ST groups,” according to CII senior director Indrani Kar. “Industry is stepping in to create capabilities through scholarships, coaching programmes and funding entrepreneurs.”

Social discrimination has been a vexing issue. A huge section of society was once termed ‘untouchables’ — whom the father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi, called “Harijans”, people of god, in an attempt to erase the taboo. Many reformers such as Ambedkar from Maharashtra and EV Ramasamy Naicker, also known as Periyar, from Tamil Nadu, have fought for the rights of these deprived sections of society.

COMPANIES DOING THEIR BIT

The onset of liberalisation after 1991 has meant that most of hiring is now taking place in the private sector, leading to demands from politicians and social activists for affirmative action and even reservation.

“We are making conscious efforts to widen the canvas of people we employ and make certain we are not leaving specific groups of people out,” says Surinder Kapoor MD of Sona Steering, an auto parts maker. “We are not just looking at it from an employability point of view, but from a grassroot level in terms of training and education.”

Some of the experiments in hiring people from specific castes Read more…

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NEW DELHI: Corporate India is getting ready with hiring plans and higher pay packets for 2010, as signs of economic recovery are becoming visible along with a rising confidence in the economy’s growth.

“We think Indian companies are getting ready for the revival and plan to hire strategically going forward. 2010 looks to be a good year from a salary increase perspective,” Hewitt Associates Practice Leader (Performance & Rewards, South & West Asia) Sandeep Chaudhary said.

“It will not be the double digit growth (in salary) that we have now become used to in India, but will reflect the growing confidence in the Indian economy,” Chaudhary added.

Hewitt Associates, which released the findings of its ‘Asia Pacific Salary Increase Survey 2009-10′ in a magazine, stated employees in the fastest growing markets may see higher salary increases in 2010 than the others.

Employees in India are expected to receive the highest salary hike of 9.2 per cent in the Asia-Pacific region in 2010, the report forecast. They have received an average salary increase of 6.3 per cent in 2009.

Moreover, about 61 per cent of the firms surveyed reported they were planning on strategic hiring in 2010.

The report also pointed out that employers appear to have much more confidence in the economy in 2010.

Coincidently, Indian companies also project a low percentage of salary freezes in 2010 at six per cent.

The survey further said that employers across the country are now focused on employee performance and are re-looking at compensation budgets and retention of high-performers.

“We believe the metrics of performance and productivity for compensation and rewards will continue to remain in focus.

“Firms should ensure they set clear performance expectations, ensure rigorous measurement and reward high performance. These measures helped firms tide economic slowdown and will remain invaluable in times of recovery and growth,” Chaudhary added.

The survey measured actual and projected salary increases and compensation practices of 238 participating firms across 13 primary industries with 20 sub classifications.

Information used in this report was collected during the period of July to August 2009.

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NEW DELHI / KOLKATA: Salary-earners are seeing their pinched pockets bulging, as companies are untying their purse strings. Top IT companies such as TCS and Infosys are leading a revival of employee-centric HR policies in India Inc marked by high variable payouts, double-digit salary hikes and promotions, less than a year after the global meltdown forced them to slash salaries and freeze hiring.

Buoyed by signs of faster-than-expected economic recovery from India and elsewhere and a jump in demand, a clutch of companies across sectors including carmakers Maruti Suzuki, Tata Motors and Hyundai Motors are busy paying out variable bonuses ahead of Diwali.

Some others, like top white goods maker LG Electronics, biotech firm Avesthagen, consumer products company Dabur and private insurer Bharti AXA Life Insurance are rewarding select employees with salary hikes and promotions.

India Inc has turned its focus back on its people power as companies are looking to expand, encouraged by improved demand and enquiries, BSE Sensex more than doubling in just six months, and signs of faster-than-expected global recovery that made the International Monetary Fund up its forecast for world economic growth in 2010 to 3.1% from 2.5% predicted in July.

This is in stark contrast to just a year ago when the global recession that felled several global financial giants including Lehman Brothers hit India, forcing companies to shelve expansion plans, downsize operations, cut salaries and freeze recruitment.

“In the past 15 months, HR heads were not at all bothered about attrition. But now that several sectors are bouncing back to normalcy, poaching might see a rise. Hence, companies want to secure their talent pool with mid-term hikes and promotions,” said P Dwarkanath, Max India group director (human capital) and a former president of the National HRD Network.

The drive to please employees is most visible in the country’s $60-billion technology services sector that is seeing more business trickling in.

Worst-hit sectors may give hikes

“It is a people-driven industry. At a time when the sector is witnessing positive signs of recovery, such announcements become even more relevant for both the company and employees. This would not only help companies in retaining their existing talent, but attracting new talent as well,” said Joy Nandi, client partner, global technology practice, with Delhi-based headhunting firm Korn/Ferry International.

Tata Consultancy Services, the largest IT exporter, for example, has restored variable pay it had cut earlier this year due to a drastic demand slump.

Its main rival Infosys Technologies plans to give higher variable pay for the second quarter, besides declaring salary hikes and promotions across levels in October.

The firm will increase the variable component of employee salary if its overall performance is up in the second quarter, said a company executive requesting anonymity. Infosys will announce its Q2 results on October 9.
TCS did not pay variables in the January-March quarter due to overall decline in performance, while Infosys cut its variable pay by up to 55% in the first quarter. The average variable component in both firms is 30% of an employee’s total salary.

The third largest player, Wipro, did not cut any variable pay and will continue to give variable linked with performance, a company executive said. Earlier this month, Mahindra Satyam (erstwhile Satyam Computer Services) announced restoration of variable pay of its 28,000 employees. Satyam had held back variable payouts from April to trim costs as revenues were under pressure.

Zensar Technologies, which employs more than 5,000 people, has hiked salaries by 6.5% on an average on a selective basis, besides paying full variable to 95% of its employees, its CEO Ganesh Natarajan said. With the recovery in economy activating the job markets again, companies in other sectors too are promoting key performers and doling out 8-12% mid-year salary hikes.

Avesthagen, for example, is promoting employees “who have worked overtime during the recession and were loyal to us”, according to Villoo Morawala-Patell, its founder and CMD. Similarly, LG Electronics has just promoted a select bunch of employees in the general manager level and gave them a mid-term hike, according to Y V Verma, its HR director. Bharti AXA Life Insurance’s HR director Priya Ranjan said the insurer will hand out about 15% hike to some 20-odd employees later this month.

Also, several companies that had last year migrated from half-yearly appraisal cycle to one-year cycle due to the slowdown are returning to six-month appraisal cycle. “For companies who had given measly hikes or cut salaries, a mid-term appraisal provides an Read more…

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NEW DELHI: India Inc’s staff cost went up by 11.2% during January-March last fiscal, growing at a lesser pace than the previous three quarters of 2008-09, reflecting the economic slowdown, according to an RBI study. The staff cost of 2,549 companies taken for the RBI study had risen by around 20% in each of the first three quarters of 2008-09.

However, with corporate India reducing its overall expenditure, the rise in manpower costs, too, were arrested. As the impact of the global downturn became severe since September-October, the corporates were forced to cut down the pace of the total expenditure.

“Reflecting the impact of the financial market turmoil, economic activity post-September weakened substantially,” the study said.

The total business expenses, which grew by over 36% in the first two quarters, contracted by 0.5% during January-March Read more…

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