Devarshi Bhat, a fourth year Engineering student from a reputed college in Pune secured a position in a “Product”-based start-up based out of Pune but the recent lay-offs have shaken his confidence to the core. He is re-thinking his career goals and weighing stability as a crucial factor. “Looking at the over-night firings and an unending spate of handing pink slips in reputed companies like Flipkart, StayZilla or SnapDeal, I require a more stable platform to launch my career.” He added.
In Pune City alone and India at large, mass scale hiring and firing are becoming a norm and this largely highlights flawed HR strategy. Most of the start-ups do not focus on building a robust HR-driven culture which leads irrational human resource planning and budgeting. Since the compensation is higher by 40% in some cases, a wrong hiring decision and cost a lot. For instance, not long ago Pune-based Tiny Owl witnessed phenomenal growth and attracted great investor attention but in its pursuit of unrealistic business growth, it got the math incorrect in marketing and sales decisions. The brunt of this was borne employees who were rendered jobless overnight. The irate employees went onto keep the co-founder overnight in the company until the police intervened.
In similar fashion, several start-ups have carried out large scale retrenchments of employees without adequate warning in place. Educational institutions were increasingly getting vary of attracting start-ups in aftermath of Flipkart not honoring its offer letter to IIT Mumbai graduates.
Pune is the city of young energetic youth churning close to 40,000 fresh graduates every year. Pune on an average has attracted more than USD 80MN in funding and the city is dotted with start-ups. Most start-ups employ close to 5 to 20 professionals. This type of recruitment planning and execution requires separate skills and interventions than those in place for established companies. Most recruiters end up depending on the agencies or the referral system to get the work executed at low cost.
Adding to this, the IT industry is facing a slowdown in coming months and hiring has been reduced by close to 40% in campus placements. IT big-shots such as TCS, Wipro, Infosys and Cognizant have implemented automation in most of the entry level coding jobs and are now looking for more specialized skills in potential recruits. Departing from the earlier norm of recruiting thousands in droves, the team is now recruiting in hundreds at most campuses.
On the positive side though, core engineering companies such as Elgi Equipments, Seimens and Tata Technologies, Maruti Suzuki, Continental Automotive, Hyundai, Mahindra & Mahindra have begun hiring at a large scale. The recent Make-in-India Campaign has led to surge in core-jobs making a comeback in next two quarters with adequate support from the government.
The other sector which holds a lot of promise in coming months is Big-Data Analytics. Tools such as R, SPSS, SQL or SAS are attracting great attention from potential recruiters. There is a huge demand in Pune for such professional and an average package offered is about INR 10Lakh upwards for qualified professionals with over two years of work experience. Domestic and international organizations are looking at India to fuel the next stage of growth in this sector with skilled professionals emerging from India. This is the year of observing shifting trends in recruitment scenario in Pune and India at large.