News: Hiring slumps in telecom sector, firms cutting costs

Talent Acquisition

Hiring slumps in telecom sector, firms cutting costs

As business sentiment across sectors weakens and margins are squeezed, it becomes all the more evident that the employment market is witnessing slowdown
 

Despite an anticipated slowdown forecast by Forrester in the Indian IT sector, TCS and Cognizant, are recruiting in large numbers from campuses

 

As business sentiment across sectors weakens and margins are squeezed, it becomes all the more evident that the employment market is witnessing slowdown. While there is marginal hiring in areas like routers, towers, networks, switches, testing, and product development by companies such as Huawei, Alcatel Lucent, Nokia and Siemens, companies in general are focusing on cost cutting measures. There is an apparent sluggish hiring activity across sectors including telecom sector which for the last three years had hired a lakh people per year. It was their bullishness given their pan-India roll out activities that saw large telecom players like Airtel, Vodafone, Idea, Reliance, Tata Teleservices, and BSNL along with new entrants like Swan, S-Tel, Loop Telecom, Unitech, and MTS emerged as a silver lining when hiring had hit rock bottom in all other sectors. The same set of players despite having spectrum license are unable to roll out their pan-India network due to high cost of infrastructure and margin pressures.

By merging their CDMA and GSM divisions Tatas have rationalized some 750 positions, while Airtel by opting for a comprehensive restructuring have compromised around 2000 jobs. Other telecos such as Reliance, Idea, Aircel, Vodafone and others have frozen their hiring and are not filling their existing vacancies. Estimates suggest that telecom hiring has reduced by 70 percent and companies are either downsizing or redeploying talent.

 ...on the contrary, others ramp up hiring

Despite an anticipated slowdown forecast by Forrester in the Indian IT sector, TCS and Cognizant, are recruiting in large numbers from campuses. While Wipro and Infosys are in the transition mode, the campus hiring by TCS and Cognizant is being seen as an indication that at least the two companies are seemingly not influenced by all the weak macroeconomic cues coming from the US and Europe, and that demand for graduates has not dried up. The tech-titans plan to recruit approximately 2.5 lakh engineering graduates from campuses this year.

Likewise, leading FMCG major HUL has planned at to hire about 1,050 people each year for the next 2-3 years and ICICI Bank has plans to hire 6,000 people this year. For ICICI Bank, most of the recruitment will be at the entry-slevel and will be done either directly or through institutes training graduates in banking and insurance where the bank has tie-ups. Max New York Life, which is due to roll out three new insurance products to fuel its growth, has plans to hire more than 3000 on roll insurance professionals and 20,000 agents this year.

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Topics: Talent Acquisition, #Updates, #Jobs

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