Private sector beats PSUs in hires

The likes of State Bank of India and Coal India can be called behemoths among Indian companies, but they fall short of their private sector peers in terms of job creation.

While State Bank of India rationalised its workforce and had a net employee deduction of 8,795 in 2014-15, its much smaller private sector competitor HDFC Bank Ltd had a net employee addition of 8,121 jobs in the same year.

V Suresh, Chief Sales Officer, Naukri.com , says, “Hiring in PSUs happens primarily on account of two major factors: replacement hiring for natural attrition because of VRS and retirements, and new positions created by expansion plans.”

Another expert said that since PSUs are already overstaffed, the hiring process to replace retirees has slowed down. Similarly, Kotak Mahindra Bank had net addition of 2,249 employees. Only ICICI Bank trimmed its workforce by around 4,000.

“Jobs in the banking sector have shown positive momentum over the past few months or so. Though this is primarily driven by the private players, I am cautiously optimistic that the overall macro-economic indicators are positive and we can expect hiring to pick up across banking sectors in the next few quarters or so,” Suresh added.

The information technology sector remains the major job creator. Tata Consultancy Services added over 19,000 jobs in 2014-15 fiscal. Bengaluru-based Infosys had net additions of over 15,000 but if one counts the replacement hirings then the company employed over 53,000 new faces in the fiscal.

Azim Premji-promoted Wipro added 8,857 jobs during the fiscal. The company also has the distinction of having one of the highest number of women employees in its workforce. According to the company’s annual report, nearly 30 per cent of the company’s 1,42,282 employees are women.

Jobs in the core sectors generally remained slow although in some cases the pace was better than last year. Reliance Industries added 1,077 employees in 2014-15 as compared to 334 in the previous fiscal. Aditya Birla Group’s UltraTech Cement’s numerous acquisitions meant that the company added 1,319 to its employee headcount as compared to 457 jobs added in the previous year.

However, hiring was bleak in engineering, procurement and construction major L&T who had a reduction in the workforce of about 10,498 permanent jobs. Anil Agarwal’s Vedanta Ltd also had a reduction of about 9,500 permanent jobs.

Amongst the car makers, Tata Motors was the only one to cut jobs. Tata Motors cut about 1,500 permanent jobs in its India operations. Mahindra & Mahindra added about 400 permanent jobs while India’s largest carmaker Maruti Suzuki also added about 200 jobs.

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