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Big time recruitment in the last few years seems to have done a world of good to the age profile of State Bank of India's clerical staff.
With India's biggest bank recruiting some 77,500 clerks in the last three years, the average age of the clerical staff has dropped by almost a decade to 41.39 years.
Unlike the clerical staff, SBI's officers' cadre is not that young. Their average age profile at 46.62 years has nudged down just a couple of years by virtue of around 12,200 officers getting inducted in the last three years.
“The officers' age profile is of concern to us,” said a senior official at SBI. “The competition — HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank — has a lower age profile. Also, older people are not that tech savvy.”
Due to the appointment of contractual officers — management trainees, chartered accountants, credit analysts and customer relationship executives — with an average age profile of 36.36 years, the overall age profile of the bank has improved to 44.8 years, against around 47 years, said sources.
The bank is rushing through recruitments as those recruited in the mid-1970s and early 1980s will be superannuating in the coming few years.
Experienced hands
Through the better part of the 1990s and up to early 2000, state-owned banks did not recruit much. They are now faced with the challenge of experienced operations personnel retiring and relatively inexperienced staff filling in their shoes.
It is estimated that almost a fourth of the old guard in public sector banks will be retiring in the coming few years.
Though recruitments have happened at a furious pace in the last few years, fresh blood is no match to experienced officers manning branches, according to Mr G. D. Nadaf, General Secretary, All India State Bank Officers' Federation.
With the bank adding 2,000 branches in the last two years alone, there are many cases where branches are manned by just one officer and support staff, he said. As at March-end 2011, the bank had 13,542 domestic branches and 156 overseas branches/offices.
In FY2011, a 10 per cent drop in profit to Rs 8,265 crore (Rs 9,166 crore in FY2010) coupled with the massive recruitment exercise, which has boosted the workforce from 2,00,299 in 2009-10 to 2,22,933 in 2010-11, dragged down the bank's profit per employee to Rs 3.84 lakh (Rs 4.46 lakh).
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