‘IT hiring in 2013-14 to be lower than last year’ Nasscom president Som Mittal speaks to TOI about non-linear growth in the IT industry There have been many issues related to on-boarding of students especially in HCL Tech where students protested in front of their offices. What is your view on this? Educational institutions should work with the industry and see that recruitment period is closer to passing out. In today’s world of uncertainty, it is difficult to estimate requirements. There is a big gap between hiring and deployment. If we give letter say this July, a student will pass out 12 months from now and then he will go another 18 weeks of training. Companies can’t do training for so many students together so for many years companies have been giving joining dates spread over three quarters. That’s why we pushed for 8th semester hiring but then the educational institutions also pushed us back to 7th semester. While this year we have agreed on September for recruitment to begin, the ideal situation would be to recruit post passing out. IIMs don’t allow hiring before so why are engineering colleges doing that. Gone are the days where visibility was higher and we had fast growth on a smaller base. What is the status of on-boarding of candidates hired last year? I have spoken to the larger recruiters in the industry and they said that the majority of onboarding of people who were hired in June last year should be completed by this June. There can be minor differences but overall it should be complete by this time. What is the estimate for hiring next year, which begins this September? We don’t have a cumulative figure but it is going to be less than last year. What do you think about companies giving letters of intent? In HCL’s case, students were told that they will have to join a different division of the firm than the one written in the letter if they wanted to join immediately. If these contracts are not certain, how can students trust these offers? I think in today’s world it cannot be very deterministic. To say that I want this role when we don’t even know, one year from now, which area is work going to be is not correct. I don’t know the specifics of the case but I don’t think anyone can guarantee that you are going to have this role 18 months from now. The new model is the way forward. It says that part of the hiring should be done on campus this year — the number that you are sure of on-boarding and the other part must be done same time next year when freshers can be hired off-campus. Regarding Nasscom’s entrepreneurship initiative, do you have any special focus towards social entrepreneurship? Will you be actively supporting such ventures? We are not working on one sector. We are just promoting entrepreneurship. A large number of new entrepreneurs are looking at the opportunity in Indian market and their services/ products would be addressing this. We won’t be actively supporting one kind of companies over another but our efforts to increase digital literacy should help these entrepreneurs. Is Nasscom considering setting up a fund for very early stage ideas which have been received in significant numbers in the application process? We ourselves debated this but it will create conflicts with our partners which we don’t want. Also, we as Nasscom do not have the capability to asses and disburse funds. However, we have tied up with Angel networks, companies like Microsoft and Google, SIDBI for loans and incubators and accelerators, some of which do funding. A fund also got created called Indian Innovation Fund under the department of science and technology (DST) of Indian government and this is available to incubators, mainly in educational space.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 00:35:42 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015