'The IT industry is still hiring despite what you hear in the papers'

In the context of the virtual career fair being held by Monster India from 15-19 April, Sanjay Modi, the Managing Director, Monster.com (India/Middle East/ Southeast Asia) evinced a mixed reaction - that of optimism and caution - when queried on current hiring patterns in the IT industry to Dataquest. Its Monster Employment Index India for the IT industry (Hardware, Software) shows a growth index figure from 128 in Feb 2012 to 138 for the month of Feb 2013. However, Software, Hardware, and Telecom put together showed a degrowth of -6% y-o-y for the same period:

"I would say IT industry is still hiring despite what you hear in the papers. But again its a mixed reaction, I would say its optimism with caution. The reason is if your in an export oriented business, the market outside is becoming tighter and competitive. So on big companies, it is putting a lot of pressure, saying how do they manage cost because the same seat that was giving them, let's say 20% margin, today may be giving them 13% margin.

There may be new players coming up like small boutique shops which can go and say, "I can do this job at 40% of the cost", so in that way it is becoming kind of competitive and each company has reached to a point wherein they have to define the next growth phase.  

Everyone is looking at a solution now; everyone is looking at a product so the services business is under pressure and hence the product development is taking the step ahead, that's where the margins are. It is true for any industry per say, so I think IT is going through that, also because of the pressure they are facing from companies from US and Europe.

The same companies, which had that flexibility and the funds, is not available. So the same work at 60-70% of the cost or 80% of the investment, those things you really need to look at. I would say it is that churn wherein things would tend to stabilize in about 6-8 months time. And most of these companies are looking at the domestic market very aggressively because of the kind of projects that are available within the country, which they weren't even looking at 2 years back."

 "The Monster Employment Index India exhibits positive annual growth owing to cautious ‘optimism'. This is reflective of the confidence that employers are showing in the resiliency of the Indian economy," adds Modi.  As per the Index, Chandigarh registers the strongest annual growth, Kolkata and Chennai are the strongest annual gainers among major metro-markets