The rising value of Indian rupee against US dollar has started hitting the jobs in the technology sector now. According to the reports, the technology sector has put a speedbreaker on the recruitment process in last few months. Some of the industry observers and media analysts have said that the sector has seen at least 50% decline in recruitment advertisements for professionals in technology sector.
The observations said that many tier-1 technological companies that previously advertised 12 times across the country in a quarter have now reduced the frequency of advertisements to five. The several domestic and MNC companies such as TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Satyam, HCL, Patni, IBM, HP and Dell have reportedly applied the “conscious cost-cutting formula as damage control phenomenon.
Accenture was the single company that continued spending much on printing recruitment ads because the company has the plan to increase its India strength soon.
However, some other observers said that the decline in advertisements was actually the result of the plan to utilize the workforce sitting idly waiting for projects. The companies are now showing greater dependence on employee referrals and now almost 1/3rd of the total IT recruitment is being done through this process. Recently, an employer gave one employee a reward of Rs 1 lakh for referring his friend to work
Joydeep Raha, advertising professional, said:
IT firms today are extremely conscious about the utilisation levels of their bench staff to optimize productivity and increase profitability, which has been badly hit by the rupee appreciation. This has significantly brought down the size of the IT recruitment ad market.
An HR manager of a large IT firm gave his own logic behind the reduction of advertisements. He said that quality of talent has always been a problem with recruitment ads but it drives up costs to the company. A single advertisement gives 10,000 resumes at a time but the company finds barely 10 applicants as employable ones. It takes more energy and time but gives almost nothing in result.
Rising value of Indian rupee against US dollar may not be the single cause behind the decline of advertisements and recruitments but it is still the biggest cause behind it because the higher value of Indian currency is hitting the sales and exports hard.
