Step Into My Parlour

It's a sight for sore eyes and a rare one since 9/11. A headhunter sits in his south Delhi office rubbing his hands in glee. He's just got a call from a big retail house and they want him to do an exclusive search for more than 40 positions. "Last year we had to chase business, this year we are being chased," says this chief consultant of an executive search firm. He's now finding it difficult to deal with the flood of enquiries—after months of twiddling his thumbs waiting for business to turn up.

September 11 blues are finally being erased, with companies slowly but surely moving back from firing to hiring. "Last year, we were looking at the bottom of the barrel. But the worst is over. Most companies are done with downsizing and are now looking at hiring once again," says Dony Kuriakose, director, Edge Executive Search, who feels there's a 50 per cent increase in positions open since six months ago.

Says Rajeev Thakur, chief executive of Grassik Consultants: "Our consultants are today handling between 20-25 clients each, up 50 per cent since March this year. Sometimes requirements are so huge that I have to put two senior consultants on one client." This is in sharp contrast to last year when many headhunters not only had no business but were also finding it hard to extract payment for past jobs done.

Another positive indicator is the home page of popular jobsite naukri.com, where the listings have doubled since December.

Says Jayadev Parthasarthy of executive search firm Footprints: "We are perhaps seeing the end of a business cycle. Companies can't keep firing, they still have to do business and head-count worries are over. So perhaps this is the best time for those without a job to renew the hunt."

So who are the people in a hiring mood, driving this optimism in the job market? Industrial growth, after all, remains very low, though a 2.9 per cent rise in April, as against 2.6 per cent in the corresponding month last year, is already being touted as "cause for cheer". The leaders of the recruitment pack include companies in the IT-enabled services, telecom, retail, software, insurance, paint and chemicals, logistics and distribution, and banking sectors. "Industries which have been deregulated, as well as those in the growth and investment phase, like call centres and telecom, are hiring people," says Sanjeev Bikchandani, CEO, naukri.com, who is targeting a three-fold rise in business this financial year.

The call centre business continues to boom, and with a high attrition rate of over 25 per cent and centres penetrating smaller towns there are huge job opportunities, but largely at entry and junior levels. Demand is so high that people who got retrenched from other jobs find it easy to make Rs 30,000-Rs 40,000 a month solely by placing people in call centres. "I was placed by a consultant who was once a school teacher but gave it up to become a headhunter," says a call centre executive.

The now-fairly deregulated telecom sector is now in the phase where they have to actualise their investments, and beef up sales and marketing staff to focus on profits. Retail activity is also on the up with five retail chains planning to come up on the Delhi-Mehrauli highway alone. Groups like Reliance, Shipra and Ebony are all in hiring mode. The insurance sector is another area where there are suddenly jobs galore as the new private players aggressively pursue customers and marketshare. Some private companies are hiring more than 1,000 agents a month across the country. The private banks, simultaneously consolidating and expanding their network while cooking up a slew of new services, are also hiring, to the tune of sometimes more than 40 people in a city.

Software professionals also seem to be back in business.The industry was the first to go in for lay-offs, but body shoppers are working the phones again now. "There is a big intake of IT professionals and people are now getting placed globally as well. Besides the US, other markets that have opened up include Australia, South East Asia, Japan and the UK," says Vimmy Makar, director, Careerist Management. Kuriakose disagrees that it's basically body-shopping that's powering recruitments here. "Body shopping kind of jobs are out of the window," he says. "Many multinationals have elevated their India centre and made it a part of their global product development and consumer support cycle and are hiring extensively." One international software giant, in India for more than five years now, hired just a couple of people last year but today has 40-odd positions open.

Headhunters are also optimistic about the auto and fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) industries. According to them, every car company is coming out with variants, which means more jobs are being created. "The Cokes and Pepsis have also started hiring. One good monsoon, and we'll see other FMCG majors hiring as well," says an executive search consultant.

There may also be a change in attitudes, from both the employers as well as the candidates. Till around December, most companies either avoided headhunters' calls or asked them to come back after a few months. Even if there was a search on, many headhunters complain that the process took very long and in the meantime, either the position itself got scrapped or was filled up via an internal realignment. Today it's different.

Till about a few months back, if it was difficult to find jobs it was equally difficult to find good candidates for open jobs, because people were afraid to switch employers. Security of the current job was a prime consideration, since many executives felt that the first in could also be the first one out, leading to high risk-averseness. "But now an executive who's done nothing much in an organisation in the last one year, besides surviving the restructuring, is willing to make a change to shore up his job profile," says a consultant.

But although job opportunities have grown, there's still some time to go before industry returns to the days of hefty pay hikes. At best, one can expect a 10-15 per cent increase. Salary cuts are also not uncommon. "Salaries today are realistic, there has been a market correction in that. Today people are more concerned with carry-home rather than stock options. If someone was getting Rs 15 lakh a year, he is now willing to take Rs 10-12 lakh," says Makar.

An indication of the changing mindset is that laid-off IT professionals are still hot. The lay-off tag is not taboo provided you are not a 40-plus "old generation" company executive who's been downsized because the company wanted to clear deadwood. "People who have been downsized are getting jobs, but after reference checks to find out whether it's due to business considerations or inefficiency. But if you are 45-plus, you're a virtual no-hoper. They have a chance only in old Indian family-run companies," says Thakur.

Bikchandani, though, feels that people getting fired are not necessarily the ones getting jobs. "Different people are getting hired and fired." Because the ones fired are frequently over 40, the ideal age group for the job market is considered to be between 25-40. The positions open range from junior to senior but the activity is mostly in the middle management segment. There are lots of jobs in the product development side and in sales and marketing.

As war clouds recede, companies, headhunters and executives are beginning to smile about the future again. But the smile is as yet tentative. The next few months will decide whether they can take the "cautiously" out of "cautiously optimistic".