Have job seekers become wary of offers from startups

An article in youstory.com talks about how job seekers have become more cautious while considering offers from startups as they present substantial risk to their long-term goals; along with inputs from Sudeep Sen.
According to experts, job seekers have become more cautious while considering offers from startups as they present substantial risk to their long-term goals.

Hiring consultancy Michael Page’s Director Ankit Agarwala told PTI.

With the premier tech school IIT Bombay blacklisting nine startups, job seekers have become more cautious before accepting offers from them. There could be more job seekers declining offers from these companies as they will weigh the substantial risk they need to take while making such career moves as they consider their long-term professional goals.
Recently, IIT Bombay had blacklisted nine startups for one year as a penalty for various violations, including revoking offers to some graduates. Startups are generally hiring cautiously and focusing mainly on critical or essential roles that will directly contribute to the productivity of the organisation, Agarwala said.

Compared to the previous year, we are seeing tighter control on head count expenditure… there is a strategic move from firms to hire mainly for key roles instead of undergoing large scale expansion, he added.
It will mean that these startups will need to work harder in attracting talent in order to convince senior and high-potential candidates to come onboard, he said.

Echoing a similar view, TeamLease Assistant Vice President Sudeep Sen said that with time to come, startups will be cautious to hire and the incumbents will be doing deeper scrutiny as well.

The onus would be on the startups to have a clear business plan, including reliable funding sources, to build the confidence of senior candidates in the business and financial stability of the organisation, he pointed out.
GlobalHunt Managing Director Sunil Goel said top institutes want to give a very good start to their students, which they think should not be measured only on salary offered but also validity and assurance to honour the offer letter and sustainability of the job. The IIT-Bombay ban on nine startups would have about 15-20 percent impact on other premier institutes inviting such companies into their campuses, Sen said.

Such companies have to pass through acid test of ‘start up employer qualifier’, where valid business plans, long-term stay, return on investment (ROI) and investors, among others, will be scrutinised, he added.
Moreover, the millennials are still excited about startups as they get multi-activity experience in a very short time, contrary to a structured system at the initial stage of their career, GlobalHunt’s Goel felt. However, Goel added that good business models with decent and sizeable investment back-ups are likely to attract the pool of best talent available and will continue to grow at 15-20 percent in coming years.

 

This article was published in yourstory.com

Author

Sudeep Sen

TeamLease Services Ltd

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Urbanisation, less regulations key to job creation in India: panel

An article in Mint talks about how job creation in India can be boosted; along with inputs from Manish Sabharwal.
Two key areas — more regular wage employment and female employment—need urgent attention, say experts.

Over 600 million people in India are under 35 and an efficient workforce can help boost the country’s productivity thus economy.

India’s job problem is complex, and to create more jobs, the country must reduce regulations for industries, focus on urbanisation and boost manufacturing, a panel of experts from industry and World Bank said Wednesday at the India Summit organised by The Economist.

The question is whether India can create a million jobs every month, said Martin Rama, chief economist, South Asia at World Bank.

Rama said there is a gap, and the number of jobs are falling. India, he said, has two key areas which need urgent attention: one, more regular wage employment, and two, female employment.

The female labor force participation rate in India is less than 23%. Around 20% of the total labour force earns regular wages.

“Unless we reduce regulatory cholesterol and improve the efficiency of people, it will be a tough environment. The role of the government is to create a conducive atmosphere,” said Manish Sabharwal, chairman of Teamlease Services, a staffing company.

He said India does not have a job problem but wage problem, and efforts must be made to shift the informal workforce to formal job creation in India.

Urbanisation, overregulation, and human capital are three areas that need urgent attention to address the employment problem.

Over-regulation and the multiplicity of laws are restricting the growth of industries, he said. India has 63 million companies, and 12 million of them do not even have offices. Of the total number of companies, just 18,000 have a paid-up capital of Rs. 10 crore each, Sabharwal explained.

Suraj Saharan, co-founder and chief people officer of Delhivery, a logistics company serving e-commerce firms, echoed the sentiments of the Teamlease chairman. The compliance burden is huge, said Saharan, adding that there are too many laws and too much paperwork.

Saharan said the country needs to have a database of workers to facilitate clean hiring, as background checks on employees right now is a tedious process.

However, all three believe that the demographic bulge in India is not a problem, and things have started improving over the last few years. Over 600 million people in India are under 35, and an efficient workforce can help boost the country’s productivity thus economy.

This article was published in Mint

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Prashant K. Nanda

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When the law needs to catch up with reality

An article in Business Standard, talks about on growing contract workforce in India and the need to revamp the laws governing them; along with inputs from Rituparna Chakraborty.

The size of the contract labour force in India’s largest carmaker Maruti Suzuki is reflective of how the corporate world is responding to the changed dynamics of the labour market. The share of contract workers in the automobile company’s total workforce has grown from 32 per cent in 2013-14 to 42 per cent in 2015-16.

Around 55 percent of the 537 million tonnes of coal mined by public sector behemoth Coal India during 2015-16 was done by 65,000 contractual workers. This ratio is poised to increase to at least 58 per cent in the current financial year.

The Centre remains one of the biggest employers of contract labour. According to the Seventh Pay Commission, the Centre spent Rs.300 crore in 2012-13 on contract or temporary workers.

The growing demand for contract workers is in line with the global trend of seeking employment flexibility. Over the past 25 years unionisation has Men across the world. Job outsourcing and dispersal of the workforce in multiple countries have become commonplace even for medium-sized companies in developed countries. As developing countries like China, Bangladesh, Egypt, Brazil and Colombia are changing their labour laws to permit flexible hiring, developed nations with strong trade unions have been forced to make regulations favouring temporary hiring.

Take, for instance, the concept of zero-hour contract, where the employer has no obligation to provide any stipulated hours of work but the employee is required to be available when the employer needs his service. This is the latest example of flexible hiring in Britain.

In India, companies, particularly those in labour-intensive sectors like automobiles, construction and mining, usually refrain from hiring permanent workers for project-based requirements, as termination requires issuing a notice, payment of compensation, and intimation to the government.

India’s temporary workforce is governed by the Contract Labour (Regulation & Abolition) Act, 1970. An establishment that employs 20 or more workmen on any day of the preceding 12 months can employ temporary workers upon obtaining a valid certificate of registration.

Trade unions say companies prefer the use of contract workers because of the cost arbitrage. Contract workers are paid much less than regular workers. This year’s Economic Survey estimates wages are on an average 20 times higher in the formal sector than in the informal sector.

“When the work in an automobile factory is of perennial nature, why should a company be allowed to hire contract workers?” asks D L Sachdeva, general secretary, All India Trade Union Congress. Sachdeva says there should be no difference between a permanent employee and a contract worker who is equally experienced and does the same job with equal efficiency.

Industry executives point out that the presence of the word “abolition” in the Act sends a wrong message. “We employ people in ground-handling services according to our need. You can’t expect pay parity between workers with experience of 12 years and those with one year,” says an executive with an airline company.

Legal experts point out lacunae in the law and the fact that the judiciary has interpreted the law in various ways. The Supreme Court in its judgment in the RK Panda vs Steel Authority of India case said workers continuing in employment for 10 years should be absorbed as regular employees. But in a separate case, Steel Authority of India vs National Water Front Workers, the court ruled there was no provision in the law implying absorption of contract workers.

Experts say the archaic law forces many companies to subvert it, denying adequate legal protection to contract workers. “When this law was made, only the bipartisan nature of negotiation was kept in mind. It has to change in the current scenario,” says Rituparna Chakraborty, senior vice-president of staffing company TeamLease.

Moreover, the process of hiring contract workers is a tedious one. An organisation with offices across the country has to seek registration by declaring the number of vendors who supply contract workers in each office, based on which forms are issued by separate states. Every vendor in every premise has to seek a licence on that basis. Many companies find ways to subvert the law by hiring contract workers through third-party agents. “The government should make licensing for staffing firms compulsory to weed out fly-by-night operators,” says Chakraborty.

The government is waking up to the reality of flexi-staffing. It recently allowed temporary workers in the garment industry. The decision to set the minimum wage of 110,000 a month for contract workers is another step in that direction. “Contract work is now a reality; the government understands that, and is working towards facilitating it,” noted Shankar Agarwal, secretary in the labour and employment ministry.

FOR MORE EFFECTIVE LAW

  • Industry wants simplification of the Act for easy compliance
  • Register staffing firms to weed out fly-by-night operators
  • Labour unions want pay parity between regular and contract workers
  • Amendment of the Act to remove the word “abolition”

This article was published in Business Standard

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Rituparna Chakraborty

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Vocational courses: Maharashtra sees 7.5% rise in demand in 2016, says report

An article in Indian Express, talks about signaling value report by TeamLease; along with inputs from Rituparna Chakraborty.

The report further says that skills education accounts for 4 percent of the overall education industry market size in terms of revenue.

VOCATIONAL COURSES saw a 7.5 percent rise in demand across the state this year, even as more than 1.17 lakh students were admitted to Industrial Training Institutes (ITI), a report by TeamLease, a human resource consultant, has said. Around 92 per cent seats have been filled in government-run ITIs, as against private ITIs which saw fewer takers with 77.4 per cent seats filled.

While there has been a rise in demand, the degree may not correspond to the requirement for skilled labour force in the country, the report says. Only 2 percent of the labour force is formally trained and 8 percent acquire skills on the job. The demand supply gap is stark with 12.8 million people entering the workforce every year, stated the report.

The report further says that skills education accounts for 4 percent of the overall education industry market size in terms of revenue.

The report blames ‘low-status’ stigma attached to vocational courses for the low enrollment statistics. It says that those with degrees are preferred by industries over those with ITI certificates.

“Students joining ITIs don’t see the benefit of a vocational course in their professions, especially when compared to mainstream degrees such as engineering,” said Rituparna Chakraborty, co-founder and Executive Vice-President of TeamLease.

Chakraborty said the outdated and archaic curriculum was to blame. “There is a need to overhaul the entire syllabus at ITIs,” she said.
Meanwhile Nitin More, a former ITI student union member, said ITI certificate holders are technically sounder than their engineering counterparts owing to the practical training.

He said ITI certificate courses are a way out for those who want to earn a living even while studying.

The TeamLease report said short-term skill development courses are the way forward — ‘courses that are focused on specific, job-relevant skills and which take between two and six months for a candidate to complete.’

This article was published in Indian Express

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Have a failed startup? Let it shine on your CV

An article in Hindustan Times talks about how candidates are mentioning their failed startup ventures on their resumes; along with inputs from Rituparna Chakraborty.

Four years ago, Suyog Agrawal quit his job as a research analyst to launch his own food startup, Zodiac Foods. However, reaching break-even seemed a distant dream in spite of all the effort he could make and investment he could muster.

“Considering my personal responsibilities, I decided to find a job,” says Agrawal. In no time he found one with Genpact. “A reference in my resume to the startup that failed did not subject me to embarrassing or demeaning questions,” Agrawal says.

Genpact, a modern company and one of the pioneers of the business process outsourcing revolution in India, is not alone in valuing people with failed startups on their resume. Dabur, Book My Show, Paytm, Godrej and RPG Group are hunting for ex-entrepreneurs, whom they find to be highly-skilled, self-motivated, and creative, with good salesmanship and networking skills.

These companies say they receive 10 to 15 resumes every quarter from candidates with failed startups on their resumes. They do not need to hide the failure because recruiters have come to realise they transformed a concept into reality, and would have learned something along the way.

“Personally, I am fond of such candidates. They are mature, and the best thing is they know what not to do,” says Supratik Bhattacharyya, vice-president, talent management, at RPG Enterprises.

Multinational technology giant IBM seeks out these candidates. It just hired one whose firm was working on internet and analytics solutions using open-source technology. “We were looking for a senior executive with domain strength in analytics. His entrepreneurial experience made him the apt choice for this role,” says Dilpreet Singh, vice-president, HR, at IBM India and South Asia.

Then, of course, there are startups that are keen to hire people with failed startups. And it is not just about the brotherhood of entrepreneurship. The hiring startups believe the failure would have taught critical lessons in what not to do.

Ankur Anand, who heads experience and marketing at co-working space provider InstaOffice, had failed twice as an entrepreneur, first with a B2B marketplace for coffee, and then a travel startup. Says Vikas Lakhani, co-founder, InstaOffice: “Ankur had underestimated the need for resources, which hampered his ability to execute. But he had developed a knack for deconstructing problems and defining a solution into a list of actionable items. It’s critical for us to be able to maintain a certain level of standardisation in the experience across our spaces.”

Even a company like Deoitte, an audit and consulting firm that values specialisation, likes entrepreneurs, even failed ones, for their felicity with mixed roles. “I have hired several entrepreneurs who failed. They are like sharks in fish tanks. These guys, by nature, are disruptive and flexible, and have strong communication skills. People around startup guys in a traditional organisation get to learn a lot from them,” says SV Nathan, chief talent officer at Deloitte India.

All these companies hire failed entrepreneurs knowing that they may not hang around for long. Once they have tasted entrepreneurship, they are likely to try it again. But while they are around, they teach others the value of resources, and leave behind invaluable ideas. The challenge for the employer is to match their aspirations. “We are predisposed towards such employees, but it also involves the risk of losing them as they always have the desire to build a great company on their own,” says a spokesperson for Paytm.

However, it is not all rosy for failed entrepreneurs. For all the attractiveness of their maturity and their ideas, employers are stingy in paying them. “Most of the organisations hire them at their existing salaries, with average increments ranging between zero to 10%,” says Rituparna Chakraborty, co-founder of Teamlease Services, the staffing firm.

 

This article was publisshed in Hindustan Times

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Rituparna Chakraborty

Co-Founder & EVP
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Despite pink slips, job prospects not all that bad: Experts

An article in Business Standard highlights HR experts views on the recent layoffs in startups and IT companies; along with inputs from Rituparna Chakraborty.
Reports of layoffs in Start-ups and IT sector notwithstanding, HR experts believe these pink slips are due to a mix of non-performance and margin pressure and the overall outlook is not that bleak, with medium and high skilled jobs likely to see continued growth.

Layoffs are becoming pretty common these days as there were recent reports of job loss in Flipkart, Askme, Ola and Infosys, among others. But experts feel that layoffs help companies survive and trim costs.

They added that employees need to upgrade their skills on a regular basis.

“Layoffs are largely triggered by three developments – redundancies, termination of projects and automation of L1 roles,” said Rituparna Chakraborty, TeamLease Services Co-founder and Senior Vice-President.

She predicted that there will be immediate job cuts of people with redundant skills and underperformers.

For L1 (level 1) roles, more non-engineers are likely to be hired or some of the activities could be automated, she said, adding that it will trigger need for constant skill upgrades.

The IT and start-up industry is in a state of flux, driven by two factors — margin pressures and adaptation of emerging automation and artificial intelligence tools. Hence, constant upgradation of skills is key to success of an employee under this new reality.

“Multiple analyst reports indicate that medium and high skilled jobs are expected to continue to grow at a fast clip in the industry, providing cheer to employees who continue to upgrade their skills,” said Nishith Upadhyaya, SHRM India Head – Advisory and Knowledge.

With salary costs getting close to 70 per cent of the project costs, thin margins result in more scrutiny of non-billable resources, according to Vinu Nair, Managing Partner, Antal International Network, India.

The overall job market outlook though appears bullish, the analysts said.

“The demand for laterals with 5-12 years of experience is on the rise and the key for people in this experience range would be to remain hands-on. Director-level roles will remain a notch below recent years, mainly because net new projects are lower,” Nair said.

The business potential for Indian IT and ITeS companies is huge, but they need to work consistently on innovation service quality and cost to attract the rest of the world to continue to invest in India for their offshore/non-customer interface job centres in India, suggested GlobalHunt MD Sunil Goel.

TeamLease’s Chakraborty further said low-skilled jobs are not aspirational for any economy or country in the long run. As a region prospers through increase in per capita income, low-level jobs are either taken over by people from lesser prosperous regions or get automated.

This article was published in Business Standard:http://goo.gl/EqonBU

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Rituparna Chakraborty

Co-Founder & EVP
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Hot jobs for millennials

Research finds that millennials, born between 1981 and 2000, make for top-notch product designers, store promoters, and research specialists.

Most employers are well aware that the problem isn’t so much attracting Millennials as it is keeping them over a long period of time. To that end, the key is to make it a workplace that is fulfilling to the needs of younger employees; those needs include flexibility in terms of work-life balance, learning & development opportunities, and room for rapid growth.

The list also includes hot jobs for millennials, thanks to the advancements in technology. Many of the jobs on the list didn’t exist a few years ago, jobs like digital marketing manager and web production leads.

Here are the Top 10 Jobs to explore in 2016

1. Web Production Lead: annual median salary 7.5L, Growth Outlook – Positive

Why is it in demand? Complete ownership of the task from start (submitting the task in the queue) to end (till it goes live)

2. Simulation Engineers: annual median salary 4.5L, Growth Outlook – 4%

Why is it in demand: fast product development, lower testing needs, which is highly time consuming, Identify high-value features and technology for simulation products

3. Research Specialist: annual median salary 4.25L, Growth Outlook – 16%

Why is it in demand? Potential Testing skills to research on new drugs, devices and biologics. The tremendous increase in medical technology and information, Improved and streamlined the clinical research programs with most research methodologies in order to shorten the development timelines and control the cost for new product development.

4. Product designer: annual median salary 4.0L, Growth Outlook – Positive

Why is it in demand? India has become the hub for design outsourcing and for foreign corporates and MNCs who are seeking help of Indian design companies to execute quality goods, Indian companies are also increasingly designing their own products, hence recruiting more designers in the sample endeavour.

5. Design Engineer (UniGraphics): annual median salary 3.5L, Growth Outlook – Positive

Why is it in demand – Research new Developments and innovations with original, Turn those research ideas into technical plans, Consider cost, effectiveness and safety of new designs.

6. Sales Executive (PUF Panels): annual median salary 3.2L, Growth Outlook – Positive

Why is it in demand? – Create brand awareness in the market through online & offline Marketing tie-up, initiating various offline activities through corporate tie-ups, Selection and forming alliances with new channel partners.

7. Store Promoter – annual median salary 1.5L, Growth Outlook – Positive

Why is it in demand – Conducting lectures, using films, charts, and/or slide shows, Create a positive image and lead consumers about usage of the product, Distribute product samples, brochures, flyers etc. to source new sales opportunities, Collect real-time feedback, Quick Implementation of Actions on feedback to generate sales.

8. Digital marketing Head – annual median salary 30L, Growth Outlook: 70000 Jobs

Why is it in demand – To meet the growing demand amid a sharp increase in the number of people accessing the internet, It is critical for such companies to have the right person to lead the digital marketing team, Companies across sectors are ramping up their digital marketing teams and the job profile is slowly but surely attracting more attention because it’s seen as relatively stable and talent is as yet scarce.

9. Back office – annual median salary 3.0L, Growth Outlook – Positive

Why is it in demand – Handle customer’s call/queries/mails and provide them effective solutions at ground level, support the existing customers in terms of providing the accurate data, guiding them regarding various investment/financial plans.

10. CNC machine engineer – annual median salary 5.15L, Growth Outlook – 17%

Why is it in demand – Engineers can take advantage of the cost savings accrued by using high end machines to turn raw materials into final products with a high level of accuracy and efficiency what most of the other jobs doesn’t suffice the objectives.

The demand for these jobs is gaining enough steam that institutions of higher education are paying attention and developing some course materials.

Author

Kunal Sen

Senior Vice President

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Jobs Jumla: How Technology is Upending Modi’s Monumental Plans to Put India to Work

An article in ‘The Wire’ talks about Automation is deindustrialising India, which is not sufficiently innovative to face up to the threats posed by artificial intelligence, nor equipped to build on its mainstay capabilities in agriculture and other traditional industries; along with inputs from Manish Sabharwal.

Automation is deindustrialising India, which is not sufficiently innovative to face up to the threats posed by artificial intelligence, nor equipped to build on its mainstay capabilities in agriculture and other traditional industries.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi alluded, yet again, to the creation of jobs in his Independence Day speech, an economic priority that he has underscored on almost every occasion, both in speeches and at events over the past two years.

“As the scope of work expands, the possibilities of employment generation also increase… today, we have stressed in that direction,” he claimed, pointing to India’s credentials as the largest manufacturer of vehicles, leading exporter of software and home to the world’s most ambitious public sanitation programme that has purportedly led to the construction of two crore toilets under his regime.

All of this, coupled with investments in new factories that the prime minister seemed to suggest in his speech, has led to employment generation and new job opportunities for India’s 800 million who are under the age of 35.

A granular look at employment trends, however, shows that job creation dropped significantly during Modi’s reign – down from 4.2 lakh incremental jobs created during January-December 2014 to 1.35 lakh in the following year across eight core sectors. Also, a structural shift in India’s labour markets – an increased emphasis on automation across industries and the inability of policy makers in gauging the looming threats posed by mega tech trends – has made an already monumental task of providing jobs to 12 million new market entrants every year over the next two decades, into an exceptionally onerous one for the NDA government.

Disruptive bots

The fact that India lacks the coping mechanisms to deal with large-scale tech disruptions to its labour markets has been put on show by its IT services sector.

The sector has been the solitary engine for job growth in the past two decades – when India was transformed from a largely agrarian nation to a services-driven economy, bypassing the traditional manufacturing-led industrial expansion that could absorb millions of new graduates into the workforce.

However, as machines and robots now undertake the simple, manual tasks that lakhs of engineering graduates traditionally performed, India’s outsourcing job boom has come under threat. Faced with a scenario of rapidly shrinking employment opportunities in the IT sector, it is for the first time since 2009 that campus recruitment for engineering graduates is expected to decline – according to the IT industry body NASSCOM, which predicted a 20% drop in its most recent outlook.

India’s IT companies hire around 2-2.5 lakh of the roughly 14-15 lakh engineering graduates every year. But, as delivery functions are getting automated, a minimum of 10% of the incremental jobs will “disappear”, Mohandas Pai, the former CFO and HR head at Infosys, recently told PTI.

A US-based research firm, HfS Research, has calculated the damage at 6.4 lakh “low-skilled” IT jobs over the next 5 years.

“We’ve deployed an element of automation across all our new projects in the last one year,” said L Ravichandran, the president and chief operating officer of Tech Mahindra, India’s 5th largest IT company that launched its robotics automation and artificial intelligence (AI) framework, AQT, last year. “Not only have we been able to see improved process efficiencies, but also reduce manual errors. [It] saves delivery time, while skilling our hires to do more value tasks”.

Such benefits have, however, come as a direct cost to job creation, a fact that has openly been acknowledged by India’s tech giants. Tech Mahindra, in fact, has an index that tracks the decrease in manpower needed per project, while Wipro, in an analyst conference call last year, is openly known to have admitted to the fact that automation, through its AI platform Holmes, could reduce its staff count by at least a third.

TCS and Infosys, the other IT bellwethers, who also use their own AI platforms – Ignio and Mana – are rapidly adapting to the new environment to make their companies more productive and increase their revenue per employee.

The effects of this are increasingly becoming more noticeable than ever. India’s top five IT vendors, including Cognizant, reported a 24% year-on-year decline in hiring, as per a recent analysis by Centrum Broking.

There is also a question mark over whether India’s economy has the replacement capacity to take up this pool, barring, as Pai quipped, a driving job with taxi aggregators such as Ola and Uber which have seen a migration of software engineers to them in the recent times.

“There are other areas of absorption in the economy, but it is true that the employment elasticity of growth in IT companies has definitely come down,” said Manish Sabharwal, Chairman and Co-Founder of TeamLease Services, a leading staffing company. “IT companies can clock higher growth numbers with far fewer numbers of people today”.

Man vs machine

This is a great cause of worry for the government. Even more so given that across India’s manufacturing spectrum as well – which is a new thrust area for the Modi government with initiatives like ‘Make in India’ designed specifically to give the sector a fillip – the jobs pledge is sounding increasingly like a day-time reverie.

A trip to Ludhiana’s famed knitwear and textiles cluster points to the anxieties that economists have expressed about modern machinery replacing human toil. At Jyoti Textile Mills – a lungi manufacturing unit with 60 whirring shuttle looms – four new upgraded machines will replace the job of 12 looms and improve production by three times in the coming years.

“Erratic labour conditions and changing trends, which demand a better finish is forcing us to automate,” said Kshitij Ghai, the proprietor of this small scale enterprise.

These ground realities are borne out by wider studies like the one jointly conducted by industry body Texprocil and Ernst & Young, which suggests that even as the market size of textiles grows by 40% to $142 billion in the next five years, industrial automation is likely to hit job creation significantly. The new textiles policy targets one crore new jobs, but the study estimates that realistically, only 29 lakh jobs are likely to be created in the next five years.

Questions are also being raised about how significantly the ‘Make in India’ bogie will contribute to the targeted job growth, which is one of its key stated goals.

While foreign direct investment in India surged to $62 billion between October 2014 and May 2016, a chunk of it has gone to the services sector and what has come into manufacturing under ‘Make in India’ is unlikely to spur job figures, reckon experts.

Reports show how robots have gradually begun taking over functions across an array of automobile plants that are owned by global players such as Volkswagen, Ford and Hyundai in India. There is no reason to believe that the new FDI money that comes in is any less likely to sacrifice the cost and product efficiencies of industrial automation – a global trend – for the altruistic purpose of mass job creation.

Global practices of greenfield investors, in fact, don’t do much to instil confidence on this front. The Taiwanese contract electronics manufacturer, Foxconn, which has signed a pact to invest $5 billion over five years in a semi-conductor facility in Maharashtra – which is amongst the largest single FDI flow into the country – has said that it expects to generate employment for about 50,000 people in the country. But across its other global factories, the Apple and Samsung supplier has replaced 60,000 factory workers with robots in May of this year. It remains to be seen whether things will pan out as planned for Foxconn’s hiring plans back home, particularly given how little has changed in terms of labour reform and the other byzantine regulations that guide large scale industries.

An existential crisis

Modi inherited from the previous government a sorry legacy of what has come to be known as a decade of “jobless growth”. But clearly, as the last two years have shown, his problems have only been compounded by these new existential threats that weren’t entirely unforeseen, but are being rather hugely underestimated as unrealistic job promises are being doled out.

The government is now faced with a double whammy of a demand destruction in the developed West (which has affected job creating export sectors) met with the rise of machines that is causing a labour market destruction across the economy. It is prematurely deindustrialising a country that is neither sufficiently innovative to face up to the threats posed by artificial intelligence, nor equipped with the strength and willingness to build on its mainstay capabilities in agriculture and other traditional industries.

This has great social and political implications, as Aseem Shrivastava, a Delhi-based economist explains in the Economic & Political Weekly, “the drying up of jobs in the mainstream corporate-led economy means there is suddenly far greater demand for government positions and for caste-based reservations for such jobs.”
It also puts into question the very premise of the argument posited by successive liberal governments and policymakers that, with development, millions of Indians will migrate from occupations such as agriculture to more “productive” and “lucrative” ones in the industrial and services sector.

“This promise is far from being met. However, it exists as a real fantasy in the minds of millions of young Indians… The flood tide of support from urban and urbanising youth, which was crucial in bringing Narendra Modi and the [BJP] to office, is more than likely to turn against him in 2019, unless he achieves the impossible and in fact delivers the promised jobs,” warns Shrivastava. “The data is not on his side.”

This article was published in The Wire

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Manish Sabharwal.

Exec. Vice Chairman & Co-Founder TeamLease Services Ltd

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E-retailers to hire flexi-temp to meet festive rush

An article in Finanical Express talks about how e-retailers will use an additional 50,000 temporary workers this festive season to be able to meet delivery schedules; along with inputs from Sudeep Sen.

E-retailers will use an additional 50,000 temporary workers this festive season to be able to meet delivery schedules, according to Rishi Das, co-founder & CEO, HirePro, a recruitment firm.

The festival season begins in September and goes up to December. While the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) has not estimated the exact scale of transaction that will take place during this period, it expects it to be around 50% of the total sales during the festival season.

However, if one goes by the hiring pattern of temporary workers by the e-commerce companies it seems they expect the sales to be even higher.

Although e-commerce companies have already engage around 90,000 delivery boys between them, the demand for deliveries is expected to pick up 20%, with the festival of Ganpati on September 5, Dussehra on October 10 and Diwali on October 29 and Christmas in December, Das told FE.

Temping will increase during these four months. All e-commerce companies are working on this model of hiring flexi-temp. At least 30% more hiring will happen during this year. “The concept of flexi-temp is still a new concept as far as Indian e-commerce companies are concerned. They started exploring this model only in the last six months,” Das said.

Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal and Roadrunnr, a food delivery company, have sounded out recruitment firms for extra help. A lot of people who buy on e-commerce platforms prefer delivery during the evening hours or on weekends. “E-commerce players, who were employing delivery boys for full day are now rethinking on their delivery strategy by opting to engage temporary workers,” Das said.

They are hiring extra workers on a temporary basis only to meet the additional demand for delivery during the festival season. This will enable them not only to meet the extra delivery schedules but also help them cut costs, he said.

The e-commerce sector as a whole has employed around 20,000 people in technology cum corporate roles, while another 1,00,000 are engaged in the customer support. This excludes people engaged in the packaging and cataloging services. During the current year alone, the sector is set to recruit around 5,000 technical staff.

Online marketplaces like Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal and hyper-local delivery start-up Roadrunnr are among other e-commerce players that have placed orders with staffing companies including HirePro for supply of flexi temps to meet the surge in orders for the upcoming festive season.

Besides HirePro, other staffing companies like TeamLease, Quess Corp are engaged in the supply of professionals to e-commerce sector.
Sudeep Sen, assistant vice president, TeamLease Services also believes that the temporary hiring by e-commerce companies is set to witness 20% jump this year.

“The jobs on offer are at fulfillment centres or warehouses for various jobs in the packing, sorting, pickers, packers, data entry and delivery executives. An estimated 12,000 additional people are being hired for these roles,” he said.

Another staffing firm Million Minds has specialised in supply of temporary workers who come with their own motorcycles to work as delivery boys. These workers could be either students, government employees or anyone who is willing to work during evening hours or weekends and earn extra income.
Flexi Temp workers are paid up to R1,000 per day depending on the number of deliveries they carry out.

This article was publisshed in Finanical Express

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Students take online route to earn and learn

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Studying, making money and gaining experience, all at once. With a world of jobs and business opportunities opening up online, a number of students are earning and learning simultaneously.

Three years ago, while pursuing a bachelor’s degree, Pune resident Gaurav Jaju, 26, taught science to students at home to earn some money. The experience helped. Now doing a master’s degree in pharmacy, Jaju conducts online lectures for students in his free time. He is registered on a site, through which students and their parents contact him for lessons. Not only is he gaining valuable teaching experience, he earns up to Rs 15,000 a month in this manner.

Mumbai-based management student Tito Idicula, 26, also realised the earning potential of online opportunities early. In 2015, while pursuing his postgraduation, he skipped the chance to do an internship and instead co-founded an edu-tech firm, Programming Hub, with like-minded friends. The startup provides a one-stop solution for learning programming languages.

Tito Idicula, 26, Mumbai. HIS EARNING MOVE: The student of e business co-founded a startup, which has won a mentorship under the Google Launchpad accelerator program. The founders expect to generate around Rs 1 crore from advertising revenue. Idicula divided his time between the startup and studies. In May 2016, the efforts paid off when the startup earned a six-month mentorship under the Google Launchpad Accelerator Program. For Idicula, it has been a dream run. He feels it was a wise decision to start an online venture where the earning potential from advertisements is immense.

Online jobs or business ideas are available to suit the interest, expertise and field of study of students. Says Santanu Paul, CEO and MD of online technology-enabled experiential learning platform TalentSprint: “Online work is critical for Indian students. It is an important way for them to enhance their employability and attractiveness in the job market. It is also a wonderful way to financial independence.”

The earning opportunities include blogging, tutoring, research, surveys, digital marketing, website development, designing, photo editing and selling. Neeti Sharma, Senior VP at human resource outsourcing and staffing firm TeamLease Services says, “You need to pick a suitable job based on your skills, knowledge and aptitude. Keep in mind whatever you do now will shape your career and life after completion of education.”

Take the case of 26 year-old Bibhas Hazari. A student at IIM-Raipur, Hazari’s hobby is photography and photo editing. Now, despite being a full-time student, Hazari makes anything between Rs 2,000 and Rs 6,000 selling his photographs on popular websites. “These websites are one of the best platforms to showcase our talent, create a brand and earn,” he says.

Students looking for assignments and project-based tasks in the information technology, finance or marketing space need to first register on sites like freelancer.in, upwork. com and fiverr.com. “These sites allow students to broadcast their capabilities and skills to a global customer audience and bid for specific assignments and projects where they can make a contribution, while earning valuable pocket money and improving their professional resumes in the process,” says Paul.

Students can create their profiles according to their expertise on the site to gain attention. The advantage of gaining any kind of online job experience is obvious. If an employer has to choose between a fresh graduate with a non-descript resume and a fresh graduate with a resume that shows a track record of freelance work, the latter would have the upper hand.

However, students do need to be careful of frauds. Complaints about fake job sites, nonpayment after completion of project and bank account details compromised abound. Websites seeking a deposit even before offering a job opening need to be avoided. “Before you take up an online job, understand the company that you will be working for. Do your due diligence and talk to people from similar fields to get genuine feedback,” cautions Sharma.

This article was published in Economic Times

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Neeti Sharma

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SMEs attracting women with offers of greater flexibility

An article in Economic Times and Indian Express talks about how SME sector is opening up to hire women across sectors; along with inputs from Kunal Sen.
A mix of greater flexibility, more mentoring and a personalised management style is attracting more and more women, especially those who are restarting their career after a break, to smaller organisations, experts say.

“Women have begun working in smaller organisations in order to obtain greater flexibility, more mentoring and a more personalised management style. Small industries are among the first segments to encourage those women who took breaks in careers,” Saundarya Rajesh, Group Founder and President of AVTAR, a talent consulting firm, told PTI here.

The trend is visible in sectors such as accounting services, tax and legal advisory, content writing, e-publishing, small-scale manufacturing in tier II and III cities, small-scale BPOs, jobs, training and tele-marketing, house-keeping, food and catering.

Small organisations, she said, are more flexible when it comes to employing women and not choosy about a particular educational background or experience.

Women in SMEs occupy many different positions, which is typically not the norm with large companies, she said, adding that small organisations are more supportive of women trying out new roles. In larger companies, the process of creating job descriptions follows standardised global principles, which often keeps out talent experimentation, she noted.

According to Saundarya, SMEs are among the first to look at hiring women who are on breaks. “It is often very easy for a woman who has demonstrated good performance to avail of leave, sabbaticals, soft loans and other benefits, which might take a very long and often very bureaucratic process in large organisations,” she added.

“The nimbleness and agility demonstrated by small organisations when it comes to decision-making around people practices serve as a big benefit for women employees.” Echoing her point, GlobalHunt Managing Director Sunil Goel said flexi work hours, work from home, flexible leaves and child care services, besides rejoining flexibility even after a long break, are acting as pull factors.

Smaller organisations, he said, are not only attracting women at mid and junior levels, but witnessing significant contribution by women employees at the helm.

TeamLease Services Senior Vice-President Kunal Sen said the e-commerce boom has led to a number of women becoming entrepreneurs, especially in consumer (fashion) and technology sectors.

Women are perceived to be suited for roles that are either process-oriented or deal in staff functions.

This article was published in Economic Times

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Temporary workers in demand on good rains

An article in Economic Times talks about how plentiful rains this monsoon have boosted the requirement of temporary workers in the country’s agriculture and allied sectors; along with inputs from Sudeep Sen.
Plentiful rains this monsoon have boosted the requirement of temporary workers in the country’s agriculture and allied sectors.

Analysts put the demand for temporary workers at around 1.5-1.6 lakh this year, almost double of the drought-hit 2015. At topnotch companies in the sector, the demand has increased to 7,500-8,000 temp staff, compared with 2,000-2,500 in the past two years.

Companies such as Advanta Seeds, Coromandel International, Rallis India and others are roping in temporary staff more this year with an average salary of 12,000-14,000 a month. Most of the requirement has emerged from Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Karnataka and Odisha that are major producers of kharif paddy.

“After two long years of deficit rains, monsoon seems to be back in India with full vigour. It is expected that yield of kharif crop will be better this year if monsoon behaves properly in the coming months. The better monsoon has given rise to higher requirement of temp staff from agriculture and allied sectors,” Sudeep Sen, assistant vice president of staffing firm TeamLease Services, told ET.

The need for the temp staff in the agri and allied sectors is for six months, starting from June when sowing of crops happens and until November when harvesting is completed.

“The requirement will be more during the harvesting period,” said SP Shukla, an agricultural sector analyst.

The temporary staff work as field assistants in most of the cases. There are some temporary workers who help in logistics and in administrative activities. Those who work as field assistants are generally graduates in agriculture science. “Companies generally want temporary staff from local areas so that they can communicate in the local language,” said Sen, who manages temp staff for a number of companies.

GV Radhakrishna, global HR business partner at Advanta Seeds, expects this year to be a better one compared with the past two years for agri business. “But companies are assessing the manpower needs with microscope and moving very carefully with the new additions … We are also taking a cautious approach,” he said. Advanta Seeds procures temp staff from TeamLease.

“Fluent local language communication skills, ability to convince farmers and the channel partners, learning ability, adaptability and mobility are some of the qualities that we look at while hiring temporary workers. During drought situations, most of the companies have optimised the headcount in both full-time and temp. It has not gone up at a high scale, it is picking up slowly now,” said Radhakrishna

This article was publisshed in Economic Times

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Sudeep Kumar Sen

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