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'The noise that we are hearing is because the five big IT players are not hiring significantly.'
What is the employment scene in India suffering from?
Unemployment? Under employment? Jobless growth?
Whatever name you give to the current situation, the bitter reality is that youngsters are not getting jobs or the kind of job they studied to do.
Even the government's Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data acknowledges the fact that 'underemployment metric is unsurprisingly high'.
The CMIE's Consumer Pyramids Household Survey says that the unemployment rate in India rose to 8.1% in April 2024 from 7.45% in March 2024.
Then comes the Deloitte Campus Workforce Trends 2024 survey that says, for the first time in five years, the projected salaries for management students are experiencing a drop of 5% to 10%.
Rediff.com's Shobha Warrier asked Shantanu Rooj, CEO, Teamlease Edtech, what the real employment situation in India is right now. The first of a two-part interview.
After the recent report that hiring of fresh engineering graduates is at a 20 year low, comes another report that says even MBA graduates from reputed institutes find it tough to land a job. Is it only happening at the entry level, or all across?
There are certain industries where the hiring sentiments are low whereas there are other industries where hiring of graduates and post graduates is fairly good.
We publish reports periodically and our latest career outlook report brings out an element of freshers hiring sentiments among various industries and employers.
What we have found is that most of the industries are fairly bullish about hiring freshers.
And the noise that we are hearing is because the five big IT players are not hiring significantly.
Were the top IT giants not the ones that have been hiring in thousands?
Absolutely. Yes, they were hiring not in thousands, but in hundreds of thousands.
Now, when they told the market that they were not going to hire, the hiring sentiment is lost slightly more than what the reality is.
The industries that are hiring are e-commerce and technology start-ups, and they continue to hire freshers, and in fact they are increasing the hiring intake.
How do you compare these numbers with how the IT giants were hiring?
Obviously, the numbers are not even comparable to what the big players hire.
When the big players are not hiring, it means that 150,000 to 200,000 positions have vanished from the market for engineering graduates.
The question is, who are the people who are filling the gap?
We believe that e-commerce companies like food delivery companies, edtech companies, etc. are hiring in significant numbers because digital business in this country is growing.
A new category of IT companies have come up, the Global Capability Centres and they are hiring in good numbers.
Though none of them individually will be able to match the top five IT companies in hiring, when you look at it collectively, the situation is not that bad.
Manufacturing, telecom, engineering infrastructure sectors are also hiring, and a large number of engineering graduates have landed up in these industries.
But not many of them were looking at the core engineering placements at all. That must be leading to lack of hiring sentiments among them.
If the IT giants were hiring between 150,000 to 200,000, these industries are hiring around 30,000 to 40,000 people.
Telecom is hiring another 25,000 to 30,000 people.
Then, why is it that the young graduates are uncertain about their future?
There are two reasons. Number one is, the open positions that are available today are not matching their aspirations. For example, an IIT graduate aspires to get an annual salary of Rs 30 lakhs to Rs 40 lakhs, but that's not happening this year.
In fact, a lot of IITs have barred mid-size companies that offer Rs 15 lakhs to Rs 20 lakhs from going there for recruitments. Naturally, they will say our students are not getting jobs.
The students are a bit disillusioned by the remunerations offered by the IT services and global consulting companies today, and hence are not finding the current offers good enough.
Secondly, they still are desisting from taking positions in the core engineering domains. They are waiting for the tide to turn, and the IT services positions to reopen.
Feature Presentation: Rajesh Alva/Rediff.com