Bank of India plans to recruit about 4,500 personnel both in the officer and clerical cadres in the current year, said Vijayalakshmi R. Iyer, the bank’s Chairperson and Managing Director.

Commenting on non-receipt of call letters by thousands of aspirants who had cleared the bank exams and the interview, she said “there has been a slight delay in the process. They will be getting the letters in due course.”

She said the banks indicate to the Institute of Banking Personnel Selection (IBPS), which is entrusted with the task of selection, the number of officers they need. The question of sending call letter may only be “a small aberration… and I don’t see any other reason for it.”

On reports of many candidates who take up bank jobs only to quit in a short time, Vijayalakshmi Iyer said banks normally recruit about 30 per cent more staff than required to meet such contingencies.

It was possible that the selected candidates might not join a particular bank for some reason. But since they had gone through the entire selection process, it may not be that they did not prefer a banking career.

STAFF Training

M. V. Nair, former CMD of Union Bank of India, said a study by the Khandelwal Committee, of which he was a member, showed that public sector banks alone would need about 700,000 new recruits by 2020 in view of the large number of bank staff retiring and the expansion the sector is witnessing because of financial inclusion. And, training the personnel will, therefore, be a mammoth task.

Nair, who is the Chairman of Banker's Quotient Academy, said he intended to work with “quite a few banks” to initially train some 1,000 bankers at a time in the academy which is coming up on the outskirts of Coimbatore.

He said the academy will be training the staff of Bank of India, Central Bank of India and Corporation Bank and is in talks with three more banks. With regard to private sector banks, he said discussions were on with “two large private sector banks” to customise programmes for them.

yegya.narayanan@thehindu.co.in

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