The Hindu Business Line : ICICI Bank may go slow on hiring, promotions

Chennai, April 23 “If the lights go out at ICICI, there may be a few knives out for me,” says Mr K. Ramkumar, ICICI Bank’s Group Head for Human Resources. He made that joke in a lighter vein, when asked to react to reports about cuts in bonus payments, increments and salaries at ICICI Bank. He said that the talk of meagre increments or pay cuts was a canard, but large scale hikes were not given.

He did concede that ICICI Bank would probably go slow on hiring in this fiscal. It would be recruiting about half the numbers that it did last year. In 2006-07, ICICI Bank had recruited about 15,000 people. Mr Ramkumar firmly refuted any linkage between the losses as an offshoot of the sub-prime crisis and the cuts in pay. He said the size of the losses was minuscule when compared to the size of the balance sheet.

“This year, we are reading signs of a slowdown in the growth rate of the economy. When there was high growth during the past few years, we were prepared — by promoting people ahead of time and recruiting ahead of time. Now that there is a slowing down we are taking some defensive measures. We are not going to build inventory (of people) and take the carrying cost, as we did earlier.”

Organisational process

Elaborating further, he said, “Promotions cannot be seen as a right of the employees. It is an organisational process to prepare capacity for growth. Besides, bonus is a discretionary payment with a significant variable component. It is also a signalling device. We are now signalling that for the next 12 months, we have to be cost- prudent.”

Arguing that the 15 per cent growth in wages that was seen during the last few years could not be sustained, he said that if the rest of the companies in the financial services sector did not follow suit, they would find out soon enough.

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