Top
banking and financial services firms are on a
hiring overdrive across the country’s leading undergraduate and engineering colleges and
business schools on the back of growth across businesses and an increasing push for digitisation in a post-pandemic world.
Apart from jobs in finance, operations, treasury, risk, analytics, research, investment banking and corporate banking, the big focus this year is on technology roles, a post-covid phenomenon where organisations in the BFS space have begun placing much greater emphasis on the need to scale up their digital offerings.
Axis Bank plans to bring in 50% more campus hires than last year; Goldman Sachs’ India campus hiring for 2022 will increase by 27% with over 1,900 hires, including interns; for JP Morgan, the campus intake will go up by 23% for full-time analysts and 38% for interns. Others including Citi, Deutsche Bank and Mastercard are hiring aggressively as well, especially for digital skills.
“For 2022, our campus hires will increase by 43%, 24% and 6% across graduate colleges, engineering colleges and business schools, respectively. This is reflective of our growth across businesses and the availability of world-class talent in India,” says Deepika Banerjee, co-head of Goldman Sachs Services. A key element of the firm’s campus hiring strategy in India is to onboard talent through internship.
For JP Morgan, campus recruitment contributes significantly in meeting increased hiring numbers by bringing in entry-talent talent. “The increase this year is fuelled by growth in hiring requirement across all lines of businesses and primarily for technology and techno-functional roles,” said Gaurav Ahluwalia, head of HR, India Corporate Centers, JP Morgan.
“Citi is committed to staying ahead of digital transformation across geographies and our institutional and corporate banking businesses in India. Talent from India is key to supporting these focus areas,” says Aditya Mittal, interim CHRO for Citi India.
With India having cemented its status as a global technology hub, an additional factor driving the demand for talent is the continued flow of work from global corporations into their global service centres in India, says Madhavi Lall, head HR, Deutsche Bank India. They expect to onboard a few hundred graduates and interns from the class of 2022 from across target institutes.
“We are actively hiring for digital skills, which constitutes the majority of our intake, and we are seeing a fair level of competition for talent in this space,” adds Lall.
The intense competition for talent in this space is not just pushing up salaries, but most firms are adding new campuses this year to the existing ones to expand their hiring pipeline.
Axis Bank has added campuses both in its MBA and engineering hiring programmes as the acceleration of its digital agenda and the strategic transformation of the organisation have also been an impetus. “This year, we are doubling down and increasing our hiring. As we rebound from the pandemic, business demand for talent has increased across both core and new age skills,” says head-HR Rajkamal Vempati.
In the coming year, Mastercard plans to hire around 500 graduates from the batch of 2022 under the Launchers program to fill roles in software development engineering, data engineering, analytics consulting, artificial intelligence and other areas. Campuses such as IIM Ahmedabad are seeing a surge in the number of companies. During the recent summer placements, there was an uptick of 27% in the number of companies that offer investment banking, market research and asset & wealth management roles compared to last year, said Ankur Sinha, chairperson of the placement committee.