Banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) companies are ramping up entry-level hiring – including campus placements from engineering colleges and B-schools – across functions to support business expansion amid high attrition due to a war for talent within the industry.
There is a significant pick-up in hiring for frontline roles such as sales executives, tele-callers, customer care representatives and collection agents, driven by an increase in retail lending, festival demand, and a huge rural and semi-urban push, industry officials and staffing companies said.
Entry level managerial roles in lending, wholesale banking, treasury, legal, compliance, technology, and cyber security, too, are in high demand, they said.
Axis Bank will hire about 12,000 from campuses this year – four times more than last year – across tier 1, 2 and 3 institutions, its head of HR Rajkamal Vempati said. “For every skill we have a ‘campus feeder’ programme,” she said.
Companies within the sector are all tapping from the same talent pool, poaching from each other and aggressively hiring, industry experts said.
Kartik Narayan, CEO – staffing of executive search firm TeamLease Services, banking services such as home loan, personal loan, and credit card are all booming and companies are actively recruiting in frontline white-collar job roles. “We see a 25-30% increase in hiring in all white-collar functions across BFSI, with a significant increase in hiring especially in the banking sector,” he said.
The average annual attrition in the BFSI industry is around 30-35% with some segments such as broking and distribution, and housing finance facing higher talent exits in the range of 50-70%, industry executives said. In frontline roles, many are switching jobs in less than a month to six months, they added.
Experts attributed this high exit rates to lower frontline wages compared to other industry sectors such as consumer durables, electronics and consumer goods, poaching, and lack of on-job training opportunities.
Campus hiring in the BFSI sector will increase by about 15-20% this year, according to a Ciel HR Services survey across 150 companies conducted exclusively for ET.
“Rise in the capital markets, increased distribution of financial products, and expansion forays of financial sector companies are leading to the talent demand,” said Aditya Narayan Mishra, CEO of Ciel HR Services.
Finance and investment services firm IIFL Finance plans to hire more than 10,000 people in FY24, mostly in its gold loan and microfinance businesses. Nearly half of the new recruits will be freshers from a mix of colleges and skill development programmes, it said.
