No gloom here, job-seekers are having a field day

DNA Business Bureau

The India story remains robust, as far as human resources go.
The local recruitment and human resource (HR) services industry will post a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of almost 20% in the next five years, says a report by the Executive Recruiters Association (ERA) in association with global consulting firm Ernst & Young (E&Y).

The sectoral size will race to the `55,700 crore milestone, given the rapid growth of the market from a highly fragmented and unorganised sector to a structured and organised industry.
The industry size currently stands at `22,800 crore, dominated by talent acquisition in the form of recruitment, temporary staffing and executive search. The best part is it has been growing at a CAGR of 21% for the last four years — from 2008 to 2011.

Vipul Varma, chairman, ERA, thinks that HR services and recruitment have come of age and may see a wave of consolidation with the entry of multi-national companies (MNCs) and emergence of new models like recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) and managed services.

“HR consultants are now increasingly being viewed as partners in an organisation’s growth strategy rather than just being vendors.

The search market is growing on the back of expansion and diversification plans by domestic and international companies across sectors. This apart, recruitment as a practice is evolving from an unstructured and fragmented ecosystem to players adopting new norms of productivity and efficiency,” said Verma, while marking out key industry growth drivers. ERA is a non-profit chamber of commerce representing Indian executive recruitment consulting firms.

The report also highlighted that more and more companies are pouring into the temporary staff model due to growing business complexity and talent challenges. This approach allows them to go for smaller bench strength to tackle mounting global economic uncertainties.

Amit Zutshi, partner, Ernst & Young Transaction Advisory Services practice, offers some useful insights. He is of the opinion that the Indian economic, social and cultural landscape is in an unprecedented state of flux.

“The need for solutions for complex problems of growth, innovation, and professionalisation is driving the opportunity for the HR solutions industry in a way that has never been seen before,” said Zutshi.

Coming to the professional staffing market in India, IT and engineering sectors, along with increased staffing, may play a decisive role, moving forward. Growth in key user industries such as retail, ITeS and telecom, and large companies shifting to the organised space are likely to add momentum to general staffing.
Reeling off some statistics, Bijou Kurien, president and chief executive, Lifestyle, Reliance Retail, said: “The $450 billion Indian retail sector employs 35 million people across traditional and modern retail. Retail is the second-largest employment generator after agriculture sector and modern trade will create 18 million new jobs by 2022. Approximately, 75% of these people will be required in the front end.”

Pradeep Dhar, CMD, Vitasta Consulting Pvt, feels temporary staffing is getting bigger especially with IT, ITeS and a few other services industries like hotels, food and catering businesses.

“The phenomenon is huge with information technology and IT enabled services as the requirements there are very huge, given the kind of attrition levels at these companies,”said Dhar.
Payroll outsourcing is also picking up big time with domestic and international companies operating in India as it’s considered a complex and non-core activity. The other notable aspect here is attrition. While players in the IT industry put it at 12-13%, the figure actually tends to go up to as high as 20%. Of the whole lot, RPO has been identified as an emerging concept in the Indian recruitment and HR services industry.