Unfolding The Layers of Declining Hiring Trends In The IT Sector
The monthly index of Naukri.com Naukri Job Speak calculates and records the hiring activities across various industries has recorded decreasing recruitment trends in the Software and IT sector. The August index of the Naukri Job Speak points to the trend of hirings going down in the feeder sector of India. Since 1998, this sector has stretched its contribution to India’s GDP from 1.2 percent to 10 percent in 2019. As per the data of NASSCOM (The National Association of Software and Services Companies) the total revenue of IT/Software accounted for $180billion in 2019 while total cost of export revenue stood at $99 billion and domestic revenue was to the tune of $48 billion. According to the statistics of 2020, 4.36 million Indians are working as IT/Software professionals across the globe. The powerhouse sector is fostering the huge population of the country. The recent data discourages the 50 lakh engineering students who come out of their college every year and search for a job.
The cause behind this trend
Daya Prakash, Founder of Talent on Lease, a platform that helps the employers to find right talent and also helps job seekers to find a job matching their skills, said, “Decline in the hiring trends in the IT/software sector is surely a repercussion of the global pandemic where most of the companies were shifting to the online and remote mode. In India grasping the shift was quite difficult as prior to pandemic Indian corporates never practiced work from home. The Western world had started using the ‘contingent workforce’ that helped them in maintaining their company cost while the Indian corporate world never followed the contingent workforce, leading to the firings during the pandemic as the fix to maintain company-cost’’.
Ground-zero situation in leading companies
With tag line of ‘Connected World , Connected Experiences’ Tech Mahindra, among the leading multinational IT and consulting companies, has been serving customer- centric services to the world and also generating employment on a large scale in India. Harshvendra Soin, Global Chief People Officer and Head of Marketing, Tech Mahindra said, “At Tech Mahindra, we have used the ‘reset’ brought by the pandemic to redesign employee experience, to be more human-centric, and nurture a purpose-driven culture. Covid-19 accelerated our transition towards hybrid working and we expect the trend to continue. We are working towards building future-ready talent across niche digital skills such as artificial intelligence, the internet of things, XDS (Customer Experience), deep tech, and space technology, among others. We are also hiring candidates with a STEM (Science, Technology Engineering, and Mathematics) education as they are adept in digital skills and new-age technologies.
The Trend across the industry
Cut in the recruitment is not the same across the whole industry, it is mainly concentrated around few firms that are finding less hiring as the solution to work efficiently. Lenovo India Pvt Ltd. is a China-based multinational technological company that has specialisation in designing, developing, manufacturing, and marketing. In FY22, Lenovo India recorded a 38 percent increase in revenue to $2.2 billion. Bhavya Mishra, Director & Head of HR in Lenovo India shared the hiring practices in her company and said, “In Lenovo we are hiring at all verticals, and despite the negative impact of Covid-19, we are trying to accelerate our growth as a company and definitely we will do better in the coming future’’
The quick-fix to this issue
India, the country of engineers and IT professionals cannot afford to watch the youngsters lose their job opportunities. “We should not see this trend only in the negative point of view as the number of startups in India is increasing day by day, and the owners of most of these startups are the IT professionals/ engineers’’ added Daya Prakash. As of 30th June 2022, a total of 72,993 startups were recognised by the Department of Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade. India has registered 15,400 percent rise in the number of startups since 2016.
India with more than 50 percent population of youth, a large number of whom aspire to become an engineer and IT professionals, such trends can be troublesome. However, the hiring pattern in the IT sector is not being followed by every company; many leading companies are active in the recruitment process and appointing employees on a good scale. Increasing number of startups is another positive news that seems to compensate for the declining trend in the hirings of IT/Software sector. It makes youngsters believe that they are not going to be without a job.
