IT companies: We are witnessing a steep drop in IT hiring: Sunil Chemmankotil, Teamlease Digital
There are a lot of contradictory reports out there which claim that India and the Indian tech space will be an outlier now. You have this one report which says actual demand and open positions from tech companies have reduced in the month of December, have you observed that trend?
There has been a huge dip in the hiring intent. I mean hiring real demand has come down compared to last year. In fact the tightening has started happening from June itself. We have seen a 50% drop in June and it deteriorated further as we moved to the December quarter and here we are seeing a huge dip in hiring unlike previous years where we had a fight for talent. We see that there are no takers now so that is a situation currently.
People are hoping their employers will give them a big raise in salary what is the likelihood of that happening? What is the extent of drop in demand for talent in the IT space?
When it comes to IT hiring it demands 70% employees from IT services companies and we all know that IT services companies have kind of completely slowed down. They are only doing need based hiring and that is where the whole problem exists.
We can compensate that with some small number of hirings in the tech and non-tech and other industries where there is some amount of hiring happening. But I definitely see a huge dip. Yes, December normally is a very low month when it comes to hiring but the trends also speak a lot about how things are shaping up and that is where the concern is. We normally have open positions in December but they do not hire owing to the holiday season. Currently when we close the December month we do not have enough open positions like what we used to have in the earlier years so that raises a concern that the coming quarter is also going to be a slow quarter.
On the expectation of hikes, yes the expectation is always from the employees to get a very good hike but I do not see that happening this year. It is going to be a muted increment which actually employee should expect because when the market was hunting for talent I think lot of people got a huge hike and the cost optimisation is very key to improve the matrix for IT companies. So I do not see a huge hike, they can expect but it may not happen that is one.
Second is that yes I agree that there are certain skills we identified around 10 skills in our study where there is still dearth of talent and the requirements are still open and that will continue in the next year or so and those are the skills where they can expect better compensation.
We have been talking about this in the context of the IT space but we know that export dependent businesses will have a tough time. You had the IMF Chief say that we are going to face a global recession in large parts of the world. What is the kind of impact that is going to have on the job space in India overall even beyond IT?
India has demonstrated a lot of resilience and we are hoping that it will continue to demonstrate that there is a huge amount of financialisation and industrialisation happening across with various PLI schemes and government policies. So that will ensure that the jobs are created and we might be better off compared to the rest of the world.
The export driven industries like IT particularly which is predominantly export driven will face certain challenges but I do not see similar issue in other industries whether you take BFSI or if you take telecom. We expect all these industries to not see that kind of an impact.
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