HYDERABAD: With talent acquisition in the IT sector picking up pace, tech companies are faced with the massive challenge of finding the right person for roles that require specialised skills. While big firms like TCS and Wipro have been on a hiring spree for the past couple of months, emerging companies and startups are trying innovative ways to woo IT professionals, who are currently in high demand.
"The demand for qualified and skilled resources has grown by 150 per cent this year. People with skills in Cloud, Python, Hadoop and Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies are in great demand," said Rashi Srivastava, executive vice-president of Qentelli.
Since it often gets difficult to find profusely experienced professionals, she says that Qentelli has been encouraging up-skilling and cross-skilling of its IT workforce within the company, even as they handle multiple projects.
"If we need a person to build a Devops pipeline or Amazon Web Services and a quality assurance analyst might be interested in that project, we would encourage them by training them via Udemy and LinkedIn. They may not have the required skill, but if they have a proof of concept, we give them a chance to be in the team. This helps to build a culture of innovation as we encourage our team to have new ideas," she adds.
Emerging companies have actively been establishing research and development centres as well as centres of excellence for this purpose. Managements agree that at present, professionals are attending interviews with multiple offers in hand.
Though pay raises were two times the number of years of experience last year, this year, it has increased to 3.2 to 3.3 times, Rashi observes.To compete with big IT firms in attracting talent, emerging companies are also investing in health programmes for employees.
"In addition to encouraging our employees to up-skill and re-skill, we are also signing them for fitness clubs, yoga and wellness camps. We have also been providing Covid insurance as well as emergency Covid services to our employees," said Srikanth Reddy, the talent acquisition manager of Progress.
Some of the best practices for hiring these days include weekend hiring events, recruitment from colleges (freshers and interns), diversity hiring events and webinars conducted during the hiring process.
Hiring practices
Some of the best practices for hiring these days include weekend hiring events, recruitment from colleges (freshers and interns), diversity hiring events and webinars conducted during the recruitment process