There is a lot that’s been happening on the employee front in the IT industry. Ever since companies started feeling the need to get employees back in office, employees in the IT sector are at logger heads with their employers on issues related to in office versus hybrid versus remote working. Almost 300 employees have come under the scanner and lost their jobs for Moonlighting. IT giants like Facebook & Microsoft are freezing / slowing down on hiring or issuing warnings on productivity benchmarks to existing employees. And not to forget, according to a recent update freshers have been endlessly waiting for their job onboarding. To help understand the current status of a employment in the IT industry, Amazing Workplaces conducted an email interview with Mr. Prasad Reddy, AVP – IT & HR. Here is an excerpt of our interaction.
Share your inputs on the status of recruitment in the IT industry
The demand for the right talent continues and we expect it to continue at least for another year.
According to the NASSCOM*, there were 500,000 net additions in FY 22 and all subsectors of the IT industry are estimated to have double-digit growth. This in turn will keep the hiring demand as is, if not increased. The hiring frenzy we witnessed during the pandemic is slowly getting normalized or plateaued so to say but remains at a constant %.
What are some of the ways in which IT companies can tackle the problems related to hiring & retention in the industry?
As one would guess, there is no one-fit-all solution or a set of activities that can help. I see hiring and retention as two sides of the same coin, and efforts need to be synchronized. Tapping talent in rural and semi-urban areas is one way to sustain the talent pipeline. Establishing a center of excellence in collaboration with colleges and universities is one way to get the talent supply is always on. On the other side, empathetic decision-making, and people management practices, focusing on employees’ wholesome well-being are the keys to retention. Organizations being empathetic to employees’ needs, wants, and aspirations are no more differentiators but have become minimal for any organization to build a successful retention strategy.
What are the pros and cons of hiring remote talent in your industry?
The biggest advantage with talent sans boundaries is that it helps organizations create a talent pool to tap into and augment the talent supply needs of the organization. It also adds variety to the organization’s talent and will help it become more diverse. On the flip side, the challenge of impersonation, culture impartation, and commitment issues are some of the challenges the industry must deal with.
What is the talent retention strategy of your company, PreludeSys?
Ours is no frills, no fancy stuff, and stick to the basic strategy. PreludeSys operates with a people philosophy framework of respect for people in all interactions, nurture to growth, equal opportunities, and the purpose of making a positive difference with people we connect with, be it, external customers, or internal teams. Sticking ourselves to what we have been known for and reinforcing our belief systems with open communication is helping us to manage and retain our top talent.
What is the future of cloud & digital transformation in the IT industry? How should the industry as a whole resolve the problems related to an increasing gap between the demand for good talent and its supply?
I think the cloud and digital transformation are here to stay. I believe the world is yet to experience the cloud’s full potential. Sectors like agriculture, healthcare, rural development, and transport are yet to get the best out of it. The potential of digital transformation, and the cloud is huge, and it is yet to reach its full potential. That also brings the next question of how we are going to handle the talent needs of this growth phase.
Initiatives like tapping into the talent of rural and semi-urban areas, catching them young approach by reaching out to people when they are in schools, increasing the industry-education institute’s interaction, and creating a hub & spoke talent model are some of the things the industry can think of in handling this shortfall. One major shift I expect soon we will see the term “talent attraction” shifting to “talent nomadic” where organizations will have to go to the places where talent is available and operate a satellite office instead of centralizing in one place and trying to attract the talent.
There is a lot of discussion on the concept of moonlighting in the IT industry. What is your thought on this? Does PreludeSys have a policy around moonlighting? If so please share it with us.
Though almost all of us are talking about moonlighting, I don’t think we have a definite understanding of what falls under moonlighting and what doesn’t. For me, it is unethical from the perspective of having two employments and doing two odd jobs at the same time. I am not talking about doing some other work or pursuing a passion during non-working hours. I am talking about taking two full-time employments. If one signs a contract, one must abide by the contractual terms, here there is no grey to doing something like this. It is always black and white. If one does not breach the contract, it is a fair game. In knowledge-specific industries like IT/ITES, dual employment makes it almost impossible to focus simultaneously, which means one is not entirely at work – this is where it becomes unethical, having committed oneself fully. And in the IT services industry, when companies compete closely to win customers, working for a competition is purely unethical.
