Companies set to hire 10 lakh in '10-11

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It's official. Jobs are back. The organised sector in India is set to create close to a million new jobs in 2010-2011, according to a Ma Foi Employment Trends Survey. However, hiring intentions of employers are not really loud and clear in the immediate future. Most of them are cautious for the next four months but optimistic about the new financial year.
The focus is on smaller cities like Ahmedabad and Pune. Among the metros, Chennai is leading, followed by Bangalore and Kolkata. Mumbai and Delhi are yet to recover fully from the impact of the slowdown.
The survey was conducted earlier this year among 1,000 companies across 11 industry segments in India — banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), education, energy, health, hospitality & travel, IT, ITeS, real estate & construction, trade, transport and manufacturing. The survey asked these companies on their hiring plans over the next three months and over the next year.
"There seems to be a cautious approach by employers. They want to see if the recovery trends are sustainable since most of their revenue models are based on western economy and in the US and across Europe there are still conflicting signals. So while medium to long term plans look robust, no one wants to get caught on wrong foot," said E Balaji, CEO of Ma Foi Management Consultants.
Balaji is bullish about the employment growth in pharma, healthcare and manufacturing sector (which is expected to generate 68,000 jobs). "In the BFSI sector, where we expect 46,000 new jobs, bulk of them will be generated by PSU banks," he said.
"In the IT\BPO sector, growth will be muted in the near term. Consequently, retail too is likely to lie low for sometime, since those in the IT\BPO sector are their biggest spenders and this time around, these lot of people are likely to be more cautious about their spending habits." However, the IT industry is likely to generate 97,000 jobs. Incidentally, only a couple of days ago, Infosys said the IT industry will create 3 lakh jobs over the next 12 months.
Healthcare is on top of the list expecting to generate 2,95,000 jobs, followed by the hospitality sector (1,37,000). Real estate follows closely with 1,36,000 new jobs.