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NEW DELHI - Headhunter Rajeev Vasudeva doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. Business has never been better but it's getting tougher to find the CEOs and managers his clients want.
"Every quality guy we approach has two other offers in his pocket," says Vasudeva, a partner at top manpower company Egon Zehnder International.
India is known as a land of a billion people and thousands of brutal contradictions. But as its economy moves into top gear, another contradiction is surfacing - a skills shortage that is hitting almost every industry. Vasudeva says: "There's a growing mismatch between what you are looking for and what is available."
To understand what's happening, it's best to look at the infotech industry with shortages from top to bottom. India's top seven hi-tech companies expect to hire 150,000 people this year and expect to double that headcount in the next three years.
The biggest, TCS, will have 89 raw recruits starting every day while Infosys created a record of sorts when it hired 2000 people on one day last June.
Cut to the organised retail sector that's still in its infancy. A handful of conglomerates hope to transform the Indian shopping experience in the next few years by opening department stores and supermarkets around the country.
Where are the experienced staffers to man the cash registers and counters? To put it bluntly: they don't exist. One report says India will need 2.2 million people to man the counters by 2010.
What about the telecom sector, which is adding almost 6 million new phone connections a month? Until the 1990s, the phone networks were government-owned and run by civil servants. Now the private mobile phone networks are expanding to reach remote areas and are constantly adding thousands of people in a non-stop recruitment drive.
If it's tough to hire armies of shop assistants and telecom workers, it's even tougher to find the generals and staff officers to lead them into battle. Vasudeva says: "In the newer industries, the domain knowledge is simply not available in India. So you need to make cross-industry hires."
That's what companies like Nokia have been doing. It has hired from the infotech industry, electronics companies and manufacturing. Older industries such as cement, steel, cars and car parts are also moving into high gear. The Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers says employment will climb five times by 2016. "Everybody knows this is going to be a real challenge," says Dilip Chenoy, society director-general.
What about the supply side of the picture? Each year, about 14 million youngsters enter the job market, though most are unskilled. India's universities turn out about 500,000 engineers a year and about 2 million English-speaking graduates.
That may sound like an army of cheap labour that should never run out - but, sadly, the quality of education is poor and many graduates are basically unemployable. "Only about 40 per cent of the engineers are employable. Some come from the back of beyond and it's difficult to fit them into a structured company," says Vasudeva.
Other human resources professionals believe the scenario is even grimmer. "Some statistics show only 20 per cent to 25 per cent of engineer graduates are employable," says human resources consultant Hema Ravichandar, formerly the global HR head of Infosys.
The result is that corporations are being forced to spend heavily on training programmes that teach everything from the finer points of the English language to corporate systems.
The car industry, meanwhile, is trawling the world for talent.
And its globe-scouring recruitment tactics are paying off.
About 250 such engineers have returned home to senior jobs. Chenoy says: "Everybody's looking at people who might want to come back to India."
The society is also making efforts to update the "old industry" image of the car sector and make it more attractive.
The same shortages exist across the board - from engineers to airline pilots and journalists. As a result, salaries have spiralled. In some industries, they have risen 40 per cent and generous raises and retention bonuses have become the norm. Ravichandar says: "All this has led obviously to the recruitment market being candidate biased and putting an upward pressure on salaries."
What about the future? Things can only get worse. Nasscom (the National Association of Software and Services Companies), which represents the hi-tech sector, says the industry will face shortages of 200,000 people by 2009.
That bodes ill for other sectors. A commentator says: "This level of job creation implies the IT industry will absorb between 80 per cent and 85 per cent of all the employable engineers and 60 per cent of all quality graduates. While this is great for youngsters entering the job market, it highlights the difficulty the rest of corporate India will face trying to hire young professionals."
Some Indian economists predict India will enjoy a "demographic dividend" for the next 25 years before its population starts ageing. What's more, India will be a "young society" when China, its chief competitor in the manpower stakes, will already be greying. But that demographic dividend could turn to ashes if millions of unemployable youngsters can't aspire to the jobs that are theirs for the asking.
