The Hiring Comes at a Time When Many Companies Across the World have Deferred their Recruitment Plans: President HR, Uflex

COVID-19 has acted as a cork in a bottle, halting all progress that was due at the end of FY 19-20—resulting in a higher rate of unemployment, job losses and more. Going against the wave, Chandan Chattaraj, President - Human Resources at UFLEX Group states that the comeback seems to have been greater than the setback, hence they are back in action with their hiring spree!

“Globally, we continued our expansion plan to start new manufacturing facilities at some vital strategic locations and kept pace with the timelines we had set, which is a real testimony to our organisation's values of speed and execution excellence. We are opening new plants in Russia, Nigeria, Hungary and adding a new line to our existing facility in Poland. For the same, we are beginning to hire around 400+ professionals spread evenly across these locations,” explains Chattaraj.

Currently, they have already staffed about 60 per cent of these and should be completing the others in the next few months. The new talents joining the team will be a mix of expatriates and locals.

The hiring comes at a time when many companies across the world have halted their expansion and deferred their recruitment plans, given the unexpected challenges posed by the pandemic. With the increasing awareness about sustainable ways of packaging and need for new formats of packaging, skilled workforce becomes an essential asset to behold. This is further helping the company in continuous innovation, resulting in introducing newer lines at regular interval. They will be expanding both in India as well as overseas in the coming year and will also be hiring considerably more than what they hired in the past two years.

Flexible packaging has always been in demand by FMCG and Pharma sectors to pack its products due to the convenience and safety it offers. The hazards attached to non-packaged products COVID-19 contagion has made flexible packaging find a safe mark amidst the contagion and boosted its demand substantially.

Businesses are looking for digitally conversant, highly adaptive and multi-skilled people who can be moulded into any role. Multiskilling provides resilience as the employees can then be developed into multiple different responsibilities and kept productive. The resource spread would be across various functions with expertise in Operations, B2B Marketing, Production, Quality Control, R&D and Supply chain.

Chattaraj claims that with businesses going online and the need for more skilled workers rising, we believe in giving opportunities to both experienced as well as freshers as the latter brings newer ideas and outlook to the table, whereas the former brings in the understanding of the industry. Hence, the collaboration of both can prove to be extremely fruitful.

Uflex is currently looking to hire more freshers and provide them with ample opportunities at the beginning of their career. The team at Uflex is hiring trainees across levels from Technical Trainees (ITIs) to Diploma Engg. Trainees (DETs) to Grad. Engg Trainees (GETs), Management Trainees (MTs) and Strategic Trainees (STs). From a wide spectrum of institution across India from local ITIs to leading Business schools, the hiring spree is on full swing.

Talking about remuneration, paying scheduled salary increments and variable pay-outs has been especially significant right now, given the arduous number of companies that have submitted into salary cuts and layoffs in the past month or two. “We have matched industry standards in compensating all the new hiring. We have a structured way of assessing our compensation competitiveness in the marketplace and keep our compensation at par with the industry standards to attract the right talent,” states Chattaraj.

“As a leader in flexible packaging that has a strong workforce of 9000+ people across the world, we are quite bullish about our growth and that of the industry as well. To grow our various businesses, we house under UFlex group we have further expansion and investment planned to upgrade our technologies, process, and machines. A company can never grow without right people and for this we continuously look to add to our pool of talent.”