Do you know the best place for companies to hire in India in 2014? Pondicherry!“It has the best employable talent in India,” says Nirmal Singh, founder of Wheebox.com, an online assessment firm. Pondicherry students come on top on virtually all counts. It has the maximum percentage of students who have scored 60% plus in class X, XII and undergraduate programmes. It has the highest percentage of students who have cleared the employability tests. And it also has the highest percentage of students who have cleared the minimum threshold levels in maths, English, computer and behavioural skills. “When you put these search tags and scan the country, Pondicherry has the best set of talent [in the 18-21 years segment] across all streams,” adds Singh.That’s just one of the many interesting insights in the recently released “India Skills Report 2014” about the world of job givers and job seekers. The study, done jointly by HR consultancy firm PeopleStrong, Wheebox.com and industry body CII, captures the hiring and talent trends within the country.

How do companies hire? And where are those recruits coming from? These are big questions for an economy that has the world’s second largest workforce at over 450 million but is creating few jobs and has millions of unemployed and underemployed youth. The report offers some answers to these questions and is based on the assessment of 100,000 students in 28 states and over 100 firms in 10 sectors. “The study reinforces the fact that the labour and education markets are local and we should make labour astate subject.

The 28 chief ministers matter more to India’s talent supply chain and job creation than one prime minister,” says Manish Sabharwal, chairman of Teamlease Services, a staffing firm.According to the study, just 34% of the students assessed were found employable, a fact well known by now. But some streams fared better than others. B Pharma students fared the best, with 55% being employable against 52% for engineers, 47% for ITIs, 19% for BAs and just 12% for polytechnic students. Overall, northern states (surprisingly) fared better than the south.Women (42%) on an average scored better than men (33%). And among the cities, Delhi/NCR emerged as the most preferred city for young men, and Chennai for women, seeking work. Mumbai finds no mention among the top cities.The employers’survey reveals another side of the story. First their monthly hiring outlook, with 2014 projected to be slightly better than the year gone by. Sectors like engineering and infrastructure, hospitality and travel expect a substantial pick-up in hiring. Others like banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), IT and IT-enabled services can expect only a slight pick-up (up to 10%) in hiring. But the real bad news is from the pharma and healthcare sector which is expecting to see a big drop of 24% in hiring.In a fast-changing world, the thrust on domain expertise is weakening as demand for MBAs is rising vis-à-vis engineers, even in sectors like engineering and telecom with a historical bias. The internet is playing a big role in companies’ hiring plans — 34% of them are hiring via job portals and 7% via social media. About 16% of them use consultants to fill strategic positions. And once popular print ads have predictably declined to just 4%.“Companies are clearly moving from a B2B platform [using consultants] to a B2C platform for their people needs. It significantly reduces the time and costs,” says Rumjhum Chatterjee, group MD and head (human capital) of Feedback Infra.According to the report,students from the north fare better than those from the south. Those from northern states — Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, UP — as well as West Bengal are more likely to pass the employable grade (with an overall score of 60%-plus). The southern states Andhra Pradesh (AP), Karnataka, Tamil Nadu — figure among the top nine. (All students were tested on maths, English and computers besides their own domain knowledge and behavioural skills.)Even while assessing the candidates’ knowledge in three core subjects — maths, English and computers — the north Indian states dominate in the top five list. Rajasthan comes on top with its students scoring the best in all the above three core areas, reflecting a better overall education quality in the state. “I am very surprised. This misses out southern states barring one or two. I am not sure of the scope [of the study] and need to see more details,” says Bangalore-based TV Mohandas Pai, chairman of Manipal Global Education.But Pankaj Bansal, co-founder of PeopleStrong, says the result is based on primary data collected from 100,000 students directly. “Sometimes perception and reality may be at variance,” he says.Which states score the best on companies’ hiring plans? Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Delhi and Andhra Pradesh are the top five states for companies on their recruitment list.



Each sector has its own hot destination, and they’re scattered all over the country. For BFSI firms, Maharashtra tops the list. For travel and hospitality firms, it is Delhi. For engineering and infrastructure sectors, it is Gujarat. For manufacturing, it is Tamil Nadu. For BPO and ITeS, it is AP, Karnataka and Maharashtra. For pharma and healthcare, it is Karnataka.

And what are recruiters looking for? For BFSI, hospitality and ITeS, cultural fitment emerges as the most important skill. The infrastructure sector and engineering firms understandably gave maximum weightage to domain knowledge. “What is clear is that all recruiters are today looking for candidates who can learn [new things] quickly, have basic communication skills and have good problem-solving orientation,” says Singh.This rising thrust on generic skills and learning ability is showing up elsewhere. More and more companies — even where they require strong domain knowledge — are looking for MBAs. Some sectors like BPO and ITeS, telecom, engineering and core will see a slight to moderate dip of engineers in their hiring mix between 2013 and 2014. But MBAs will see a continued rise in demand from sectors as diverse as BFSI, BPO & ITES, IT, telecom, automotive and engineering and core.Both the studies — of students and employers — paint a very contradictory world for women in colleges and at workplace. The average employability score of women (42%) is much better than that for men (33%) across the country. And in some states such as Punjab, Tamil Nadu, UP, AP, Delhi, Haryana, Karnataka, Odisha and West Bengal the gap between women and men is wide.But the report from the workplace is grim. The gender ratio is skewed at 76:24 across sectors. Some sectors like manufacturing and engineering fare the worst with women comprising under 20% of the workforce. Even in the much talked about IT sector, women comprise just 29% of the workforce. Pharma/healthcare scores the best with 42% of the workers being women. Some sectors, mostly services, like BFSI, BPO/ITeS, hospitality and travel do well with more than a third of their workforce being women.“The only upside in India’s lopsided development is that service industries are much more conducive to women employment and we expect the recent drop in the women labour force participation to reverse because of that,” says Sabharwal of Teamlease. Pai of Manipal Global Education agrees. “I expect the IT and BFSI to see a good increase in gender ratio,” says Pai.Another area of concern —at least from the employee’s point of view — is the rising incidence of contract workers (workers working for the companies but not on their rolls) across all sectors. While services like BFSI, BPO and IT still have the share of contract staff under 10%, in many sectors like engineering, automobile, pharma and healthcare it could go as high as 40%. The telecom sector scores the worst with up to 60% of its staff on contract.“The high level of contract staff means that labour laws are hurting formal and permanent employment. We need to move from 29% of our labour force in contract employment to 5-10% as it is globally,” says Sabharwal.