Skilled employees at controlled cost

Post economic slowdown, there is a rise in employment opportunities across various verticals and the employment outlook is expected to be good. However, unlike earlier years, this time the demand is especially high for candidates with specialist skills to offer and who can come on-board quickly to start delivering on the huge pipeline of pending projects and meet the targets. “By looking for experienced candidates, who can be productive faster, will help companies save significant costs on the training and grooming the raw manpower and kick-start early generation of revenues and at times, to save on the opportunity cost altogether,” says Mr. Chetan Indap, Founder & CEO, StaffonContract.com

Employable professionals

In fact, the National Skills Development Commission (NSDC) indicates that against a total skilled manpower demand of 83 Million by 2015, the current training capacity is 3 Million. As per FICCI, skill shortage exists across many segments of the industry and economy of the country. So while, we have reached an inflection point where not only the technically qualified professionals in various streams are in short supply but those who are available are at unreasonably high costs and with no guarantee of coming on board. Dilip Chenoy, MD & CEO, NSDC, enumerates the need saying that, “There is shortage of capacity building institutes/training centers. This is giving rise to a gap in demand and supply of skilled and trained manpower. The professionals are educated, but not specifically employable.”

Cutting down the employment cost

 Ironically, while most companies see high economic growth rates, companies want to adopt more cautious approach to increasing their fixed-employee costs. Sunil Gutte, JMD, Sunil Hitech, initially started a training module for his employees. “We trained them, with specific industry related engineering skills that are not taught in colleges. This prepared them to face the field. But we soon realized that this was a common industry worry, also the cost of training a small lot was much higher. So we now have opened the institute for other students, we charge fees for the training, which the students are willing to pay, as the certification will give them better standing in the job markets.” Also NSDC is coming up with various industry specific modules, which are aimed to take the burden off the industry, and use their experience and expertise to train and maintain future manpower without spending an exorbitant amount.

Employee as a Service (EaaS)

Another solution that comes from the StaffonContract.com team is treating employees as service, and outsourcing them, or sharing them on hourly basis. This is a solution to the combined problem of skilled hiring with lesser risks of fixed costs, is giving birth to a new mind-set of Employee as a Service (EaaS) model, akin to the cloud computing, where companies can get skilled professionals on contract basis and pay only on need basis.

“Through contacting, a common talent pool is available to all; there is no fear of recession, price inflation, which the smaller companies are more susceptible to and moreover this creates a secure base for the employees also, and with security of work, they can invest more time and resources in self training and building their knowledge and skill acumen,” explains Sameer Sikka, Director, Xntuate Human Capital Solutions.

Living by the example

One of the sectors that lead the rest of the industries on contract staffing is the IT sector. As per industry estimates, in the IT space, contract staffing is up by as much as 19 per cent in 2010. It is the quality and ease of availability of manpower that is helping the growth of contract staffing in this sector.

“IT Exports is slated to touch $175 billion by 2020. The sector is projected to add over 1.8 million jobs this year alone and about 10 million by 2020. At current state, the contracting is only about 5% of the total IT Full Time Employees (FTEs). This year we are seeing Contract staffing grow to over 15%. Given this growth rate, by 2020, contracting will account for 35% of the 10 Million FTEs,” spoke Chetan Indap, who seemed confident that this trend will surely take on the IT industry and the allied sectors in the SME segment.