This was a week marked by many appointments at the senior levels across the industry. D Shivakumar has been named as the new Chairman and CEO of the India region at Pepsico, to fill the position which has been lying vacant since Manu Anand’s departure in June. Cognizant announced that it is looking to hire a new CEO as the existing CEO, Fransisco D’Souza is looking to move out of an active management role. Rajeev Sawhney was appointed as the President of Strategic Business at Mphasis. In addition, Krish Iyer was appointed by Walmart India as the new President and CEO. Besides that, IFCI has a new CEO and MD, Malay Mukherjee and Andhra Bank has a new CMD, CVR Rajendran. At the global scale, the first ever woman CEO of an automobile company was announced by General Motors. Marry Barra takes over from current CEO Dan Ackerson as the head of operations on January 2014.

Many interesting research studies were released across the week, including the People Matters-CareerBuilder hiring trends 2014 study which states that recruiters in the coming months will look for hiring channels that will enable them to build a steady talent pipeline. Job portals still dominate as a recruitment channel across the Indian industry. Another interesting research report worth mentioning is the Monster.com-GFK study on workers beliefs. It states that 85 per cent Indians feel that they are the most hardworking compared to the rest of the world.

The impact of the bad economic climate continues to loom large over Europe. The Aerospace giant, EADS, stated this week that it plans to cut back 5,800 jobs across many European countries to rationalize costs and make operations more synergetic.

The week was also marked by a major employee riot in Singapore by Indian and Bangladeshi workers. Singapore is heavily reliant on Indian and Bangladeshi workers to fill up service professions, including that of maids and laborers.