Macro woes are taking a heavy toll of hiring by the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector, one of the leading recruiters known for hiring up to 1 lakh people a year.
Macro woes are taking a heavy toll of hiring by the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector, one of the leading recruiters known for hiring up to 1 lakh people a year. This fiscal so far, there has been a 30-40% on-year drop in BPO hiring, say experts.
Kamal Karanth, MD of recruitment consultancy Kelly Services India, said players are looking at filling only critical positions.
Hiring has nosedived, especially at the fresher level, he said.
Agreed Amitava Saha, senior vice-president of human resources at Firstsource Solutions, a BPO firm. “Economic slowdown definitely has an impact on the overall business environment and BPOs are not an exception.”
BPOs vary significantly in their employee strength. While large ones such as Serco Global Services have headcounts exceeding 37,000 in India, smaller, rural BPOs such as HarVa employ about 350.
Estimates by US-based advisory firm Tholons Research state that the BPO sector in India directly employs about 1.98 million, much higher than the 4 lakh-strong staff the sector had in 2006.
This year’s drop in hiring, however, does not mean there is a hiring freeze at BPO units.
Rashmi Bhargava, head of academic alliance at the Society for HR Management (SHRM), said there still is a demand for voice process and non-voice related jobs. “With starting salaries between Rs1.2 lakh and Rs1.8 lakh, BPO jobs are up for grabs.”
That’s because BPO firms are increasingly extending their services to fields like transaction processing, consulting, technical support, research and analytics, which “require highly skilled people”, said Manuel D’Souza, chief HR officer at Serco Global Services.
Thus, BPOs nowadays search for not just undergraduates and science, commerce or arts graduates, but also MBAs, engineers, CAs, B Pharms, etc.
Yet, slowdown in business is palpable, especially with regard to UK clients, said Ajay Chaturvedi, founder and chairman of HarVa, which has BPO units in rural Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh and Haryana. “Therefore though we will go ahead and hire, it will be in a moderate manner.”
Chaturvedi said HarVa currently has 350 employees (mostly women) and will hire another 650 by December.
Firstsource will add around 1,000 people every month to take care of their new businesses, said Saha.
D’Souza said Serco’s business will grow around 10-12% in India, in line with the sector’s growth rate, and the firm will hire accordingly.
Unlike the BPOs, the legal process outsourcing (LPO) space, where salaries for law graduates start in the `2-5 lakh range, is seeing far more aggressive growth.
As per data by analytics firm Evalueserve, India’s LPO sector had about 5,000 employees in 2009, and will see its headcount zooming to 17,000 by December 2015.
According to LPO experts, the sector is growing at about 35% every year since the past five years and will continue to grow in a similar vein.
Rohan Dalal, MD of LPO firm MindCrest, said the current scenario has triggered more buyers of outsourced legal services for corporate legal work. “We are looking at growing our headcount by 20-30% by the end of this year from the current 350.”
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