Campus recruitment to fall by 38%

The campus recruitment by the IT and ITeS companies is likely to fall by about 38 per cent this year.
“The problem will be seen in the next six months,” said Mr K. Pandia Rajan, Managing Director of Ma Foi Management Consultants, a player in the human resource space. “We have seen companies staggering the joining dates by 2 to 3 months, batch sizes have come down ,” he said at the release of Ma Foi Employment Survey 2008.
Also, as the demand and supply gap increases with the supply on the rise and a fall in demand, campus hiring could be less than 38 per cent, he said.
Elaborating the reason for the trend, Mr Rajan said a depreciating dollar and a possible slowdown in the US economy are the key reasons for measured hiring by the companies.
The sector is also seeing some “downsizing” as “at least two large IT companies have downsized their staff strength,” he said, without naming the companies.
However, he added that with a slowdown in hiring, the attrition rates are also expected to come down by five to six per cent.
The Ma Foi 2008 survey expects an addition of about 74,693 jobs, a rise of 7.31 per cent over last year in the IT sector while ITeS sector will add 56,221 jobs, a rise of 7.2 per cent.
The survey was conducted across 22 key sectors like manufacturing, real estate and construction, hospitality, transport, communications and others.
In terms of percentage of growth in recruitments, the health sector shows the highest growth at 8.9 per cent, followed by IT at 7.3 per cent, ITeS at 7.2 per cent and hospitality at 6.9 per cent.
According to the survey, while the hospitality sector would generate the maximum number of employment in 2008 over last year with over 4.26 lakh jobs, education sector will have highest number of jobs in 2008 (1.42 crore).
Demand for fresh recruits is above 30 per cent in hospitality followed by sectors such as energy generation and supply sector, ITeS, and mining and extraction.