Sunday, October 19, 2008

Attrition coming down to a single digit

First time in the several years, reports have stated that attrition had seen a serious fall from 13% to 8%. This brings in a cheer to the HR community which otherwise struggled for several years with the paper work, resource hunt and a critical match path of the right people for the project needs. HR community also faced a biggest challenge of identifying the right profiles, and over the period of time, became experts to identify fakes certificates and experiences. The wildfire of attrition has stopped in the BPO and IT industry for a while. Major reason being "IT companies stopped hiring". This is a generic statement and there are exceptions like Infosys who are still head hunting. But overall, the market mood is sober and unpredictable.
A year back, the situation was different. Retention was a major concern to organizations with people hopping jobs at the fall of a hat. There were several reasons and major demand across the sector and people took things for granted. Now the Ring of Fire is different. Now it’s the companies which are having a Tea Time. In the sense, that with appraisal cycles round the corner in the last quarter of the year, lot of companies is at the advantage to handle people and their demands in a more passive manner. It would not have been the state a year back. But things are different and people are now backing in form, expecting job security, consistent projects, known environments and loyal atmosphere. This infact is going to bring back the lost loyalty of the people in the organizations. People would now naturally get back to the mode of being connected to the companies they work for. For one reason, they would not like to be detached in such an economy for a job in hand. There is nothing wrong in the change that is going to happen in the mind set of the IT professional, for one reason, that they are seeing such a chain reactions of the economy at a large for the first time after the recession of 2001.
IT companies overall revenue is estimated to be in the range of 40- 65% happening from the Banking, Financial and Insurance industry and related sectors. Travel and hospitality industry also had seen greener days as the IT and BFSI sectors worked towards rapid growth in the last several years. It is time for the ROI for IT companies which have invested on the human capital in terms of training, recruitment, travel, recreation etc. The overall IT spend will be coming down as there are going to be less and less of projects coming from UK and USA at least in the next one to two years. The support, maintenance and operations contracts would still survive. It is going to be very challenging for the sourcing teams who would pursue new projects. Employees also would understand the need to make use of the economies of scale and learning to be contributing to the company cost cuts. The first and foremost responsibility would be for everyone in the organization to feel the need to minimize costs, increase productivity and understand that only the best would survive under such a situation. This paradigm would continue at the current environment where supply is over stripped to the market demand. It’s no more a choice but a nomenclature to live within one's means.

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