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Current Trends Within the Indian Recruitment Market

February 15

The hiring market in India has witnessed dramatic changes in the past decade with companies facing an increasing talent crunch. While the number of people joining the workforce is still high, "employable" brains are in short supply. Employees are now calling the shots, with companies ready to offer excellent "benefits" packages that promise superb "work-life balance."

The main sector hit by these changes has been the IT-ITES sector which is also considered to be the most lucrative from an employee's point of view. It has become an ultra-competitive market, with soaring employee turnover and a widening supply-demand gap. This has forced the industry to become very aggressive and made it necessary to try more innovative recruitment tactics.

Job fairs, online talent auctions, talent referral programs, job sites and walk-in tours of employer campuses are just some of the popular means to bring home the best talent being used by various Multi-National Corporations. Private sector firms are also poaching heavily into public sector companies and the armed forces. Given the supply-demand gap in the market, firms are devising multi-prong strategies to beat competition. This includes campus recruitments, internal job postings, employee referrals, availing the services of placement consultants, participating in job fairs and advertising in newspapers and job portals.

Newspaper advertisements were given preference five years' back. For the past few years, however, we are starting to witness a slow but steady shift to web portals to help increase ROI. There has been a significant shift in online recruiting, with the first wave seeing the emergence of job portals such as naukri.com. While job portals continue to play a major role in the recruitment process, the second wave (Web 2.0) has been unleashed by social networking websites such as LinkedIn, Orkut, Facebook, etc. In 2004, the contribution of portals in the recruitment mix was 2% whereas it is now close to 12% and is being done through job portals. However, although this is huge growth in terms of market share in India, this is low compared to the western markets and the print media market in India is still the strongest in the market with a firm grip on the majority share.

Some of the regular strategies used by MNC's in India:

  • Walk-in sessions.
  • Head hunting.
  • E-Recruiting
  • Employee referrals and Internal Job posting
  • Social networking
  • Campus Recruitment
  • Targeting public sector employees, ex-servicemen
  • Hiring housewives, senior citizens, fresh school pass-outs for part-time work
  • Partnering with educational and training institutes
  • Job fairs

If you're interested in learning more about recruiting practices in India, please attend our upcoming Webinar slated for September. The webinar is targeted to TMP multinational customers that have recruiting needs in India to help give a detailed understanding of this growing market. Our goal is to have both corporate customers and their Indian counterparts join the Webinar together.

The webinar will cover some of the following topics:

  • Understanding the complex hiring market in India.
  • Reaching, influencing and converting your target candidates: Effective use of communications, the right media mix, candidate care, etc.
  • Best practice presentations (each topic led by a TMP India team member and a current TMP India customer) on the following topics:
    • Building brand awareness in the Indian market
    • Effective campus recruiting
    • Reaching women and diverse audiences
    • Effective employee referral programs
    • Building a recruitment communications strategy; budgeting and measuring success.
    • Open discussion and Q&A session

The date of the event will be sent to those interested in attending. If you would like to join us for this webinar, please contact gloria.carrasco@tmp.com with your contact information and we will send you a formal invitation to the session.

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