The IT industry is on a hiring spree.

WAITING TO EXHALE

The IT industry is on a hiring spree. Firms are constantly hiring people thereby increasing the number of employees on the bench, all in anticipation of the projects that might come to them in future

It’sand a well China known are fact on top that of India the outsourcing list and are approached by the US, UK, countries from Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand for their software related projects. India and China are known to have various favourable factors like highly-skilled manpower, worldclass institutes, cost effective markets, proximity to markets and round-the-clock advantage.

However, nothing is predictable including the working of the Information Technology (IT) industry. There is always an element of volatility and fluctuation regarding the projects that are outsourced to various organisations across the globe, including various firms in India. With this rise in outsourcing, the IT sector is on a hiring spree to meet requirements that might come up in the future.

The major reason behind this hiring spree by IT firms is because of the growth in business, which is ignited by the market boom across the world. In its 4th year of unprecedented boom cycle, economies around the world are booming, the customers need for outsourcing has increased and there has been an increasing demand of talent in the industries. In order to address the growing rate of inflation, IT firms are planning to introduce alternative measures by increasing work hours, increasing the employee strength of the company etc.

WAITING TO PLAY

Once hired, these new recruits are ‘benched’ for a certain period of time and are not given any project to work on. However, organisations know that they will be given some kind of work/project for all the recruits at some point in the next several months. Many firms involved in the hiring spree are the cash rich companies who can afford to pay these employees to just sit on the bench for some months.

Organisations have their own way of managing the benched employees. Once they are recruited, they are put on training of new skills or are placed in various in-house projects. In many of the big IT firms, the percentage of on-bench employees is nearly half of the total head count, if not more. Instead of ‘bench’, organisations call them the ‘under deployed talent’ which comes to about 20 per cent of the total head count. It includes people working on in-house projects, undergoing training, people earmarked for future project, talent undergoing trainings for new skills and back up for projects.

As per many industrial sources, there is no need for the employees on bench to be sceptical about their job as there is no discrimination in IT firms. They get equal payment and other benefits at par with their counterparts. Organisations don’t discriminate between anyone in the organisation in terms of salary or any other benefit. Every employee is given equal opportunities to nurture their career. Various opportunities to choose a career of their choice are offered on ‘internal job opportunities’ forum across the organisation. Identifying the skill matrix of the internal talent pool and putting to good use during business exigency optimises the manpower utilisation at any given point. Better resource and manpower redeployment management would be one of the key to the success of future workforce planning.

THE HUNTING GAME

Some overseas projects force companies to recruit many people at a short notice. Such brisk hiring mostly results in the employment of those who are not adequately qualified or entry of candidates with fake CVs, etc. In order to avoid such repercussions, companies focus on the advance ramping up of the talent pool.

Organisations have realised that it is best to be equipped with a buffer or a pipeline of suitable candidates to avoid any last minute surprises. Organisation, which has gone on rampant panic hiring spree to manage their short-term business needs without considering the flip side of lay-offs has lead to negativity of the market credibility. If a company is more efficient, it can avoid such unpleasantries and image tarnishing for themselves.

To get the right person for the job is a big challenge that all the companies face as recruitment is a tedious process. With only a quarter of the talent pool employable, evaluating and identifying the right candidate presents a major challenge. Owing to the scale, interviews lose validity as a reliable selection tool and scientifically designed assessments have become the backbone of the selection processes. With the talent pools hugely dispersed, reaching out to multiple locations within a limited time frame severely tests the bandwidth of recruitment teams while challenging the standardisation of processes in multi-location recruitment drive. Given the facts, it is impossible for firms to avoid people on bench. Only way out is hiring more people, as no firm wants to be pushed off the market due to lack of enough manpower to handle a new project.