Not only IT, the intent to hire is at a 27-month high across most sectors: Ramani Dathi

“The maximum hirings that we are seeing right now are at junior level. The senior level hirings are also happening but not at the highest levels. So, junior profiles, especially into sales, marketing, the entry level programmers within IT and engineering blue collar profiles. These are the cases where we are seeing maximum hiring is happening,” says Ramani Dathi, CFO, Teamlease Services.

We always use jobs as a benchmark to judge the economy. What is the recent data indicating? Are things moving in the right direction or are they slowing down?

They are nowhere close to slowness. In fact, in the report that we released yesterday on Employment Outlook for Q2, shows a 7% quarter on quarter growth and as per our report, we are almost out of the Covid related job losses. So the intent to hire is at a 27-month high.

We expect this kind of trend to continue for the rest of the year as well and this is driven not just by the IT industry because for the last one year or so. all the talk has been about IT industry hiring and all that but now we are seeing the demand coming across all industries and not just IT. Education, telecom, ecommerce, retail essentials, healthcare, FMCG, banking and financial services all are hiring.

Across all industries we are seeing very strong intent to hire. To some extent, that is also because the attrition levels were also very high last quarter. It is one of the quarters with the highest ever attritions that we had over the last few years. So high attrition coupled with very strong demand is translating into a lot of new jobs especially in formal industries, largely in the metro cities.

There is some sort of slowness I would say in few industries like manufacturing, infra and agriculture related but with the government side also the push like PLI schemes and others we believe that in the coming quarters those sectors will as well push.

Walk us through your interpretation of data. Does this include listed as well as non-listed, start-up as well as the gig economy?

It is not just listed companies. We cover a sample of industries and companies across listed private but largely formal industries because we do not get that much data from informal industry. Gig is getting covered under e-commerce. The food delivery companies are getting covered but not the MSME segments and the informal segments are not covered in our data.

Be specific about IT. Attrition is higher and wage inflation is high. This year, do you expect attrition to be lower and wage inflation to be lower?

Looks like because while in Q1 attrition levels are very high, for Q2 we are seeing early indications of attrition levels tapering down and with the kind of salary corrections that have happened over last one-one and a half year in IT industry, this year the early indication is that the salary inflation may not be as high as it was a couple of quarters back. So, the attrition level will also come down for Q2 and Q3 in IT.

When you are saying that broadly across sectors it is all looking good when we talk about the hiring but at a time when we are also seeing inflation, is this broad-based hiring happening at higher salaries?

The maximum hirings that we are seeing right now are at junior level because at senior level also the hiring are happening but not the highest levels. So junior profiles, especially in sales, marketing, entry-level IT programmers and engineering blue collar profiles are seeing the maximum hiring.

Also, we are seeing maximum jobs getting created in metro cities and tier one and tier two cities. While the companies are talking a lot about decentralisation of their operations and creation of more jobs in smaller towns and cities, as of now we have not started seeing the jobs on ground in the smaller locations yet.

Because of Covid, we had seen the reverse migration. Then we had inflation from start-ups to unicorns to those in the old economy and there was a lot of talk about shortage of gig workers, shortage of labour. Is that behind us now?

There is always this thing of unemployment and shortage of talent, it is not really shortage of talent it is mainly the gap between the matching of demand and supply because we have been hiring only 5% of the job seekers who approach us for jobs. The rest 95% can’t be hired, because of the fitment, because the candidates have to be mobilised from some other location or have a different skill set which the companies are not looking for.

At this point in time. except for IT we are not seeing that much of a gap in terms of demand and supply. We are having a very good supply of talent across other industries. In IT, there is definitely a crunch and that is also getting reflected in the kind of salary inflation and the attrition levels there. Otherwise non-IT the demand and supply levels are good enough and we are able to close almost 50% to 70% of open positions that we are getting across the industries.