MUMBAI, INDIA – Searching for senior-level positions in India’s technology industry is not easy, says a confident, curly-haired woman in her early 30s in Mumbai, India’s most populous city. She has been searching and interviewing for senior-level positions for user experience design for the past few months with no results, despite 12 years of experience.
She requests anonymity because she fears her comments may discourage employers from hiring her.
“I hope to get a job soon, as recently I had got a few offers,” she says. “But, unfortunately, later they did not materialize.”
This is not the first time she has struggled to find a senior-level position. She left her job in 2012 for personal reasons and remained unemployed for a frustrating seven months.
So when a company offered her a six-month contract position, she took it. After the contract ended, the company offered her a permanent job, but for a lower salary.
When she refused the offer, the company did not renew her contract. Later, she learned that the company hired two less-experienced designers for lower salaries to fill the role.
But the company’s strategy to hire less-experienced professionals to save money hampers the design quality, she says.
“The people within the company who hire such people don’t know the importance of hiring a person with a qualified designing background,” she says, “and also that such people can’t deliver a great, quality design, whereas an experienced designer can deliver a great, quality design.”
Experienced technology professionals in India say they are struggling to find senior-level positions because a stagnant economy is pushing companies to hire less-experienced employees for lower salaries. Companies also prefer to train current employees for more senior positions, instead of hiring from outside.
The country’s economic growth rate has declined by nearly half – from 9 percent in the 2007 to 2008 fiscal year to 5 percent currently, according to the monthly economic reports from the Ministry of Finance.
India’s labor force participation rate was 53 percent from July 2010 until July 2011, according to the Employment and Unemployment Survey.
The Indian rupee also declined from its peak at the end of 2007 at 39.11 to the U.S. dollar to 58.87 to the dollar as of June 2013, according to XE, a world currency site.
The Indian market has slowed because the euro and U.S. dollar rates are both down, so few new businesses are entering India, says Manish Sinha, 35, a human resources professional at a multinational corporation in Bangalore, a city in southern India and the country's hub for information technology.
As a result, companies hire younger professionals with less experience for higher-level positions and less pay, says Rajeshwary Vijan, owner of Empower Recruitments, a recruiting company in Mumbai that places senior professionals.
“Age is one of the factors impacting the recruitment of skilled professionals,” she says.
Sometimes, senior professionals have to compromise on salaries or other factors to get a job, she says.
Medha, a woman in her early 40s in Mumbai who has spent more than a decade in the information technology industry, says she is searching for a senior-level position. She requests that her last name remain anonymous so it does not hurt her job search.
“It is becoming difficult to retain jobs at [a] high level,” Medha says.
Businesses prefer young professionals because they work for lower salaries, Medha says. This makes it difficult for experienced employees in the industry to secure senior positions.
Sinha says that employees, including senior-level professionals, leave their jobs for many reasons, including dissatisfactory compensation, poor management relationships or unchallenging work. Some outgrow their positions, which have become stagnant.
“It is not the company but the role which is stagnating,” he says. “Every role has an expiry date.”
Sinha says companies should promote employees from within rather than recruiting new ones, even if external candidates have more experience. Hiring new employees also poses risks to the company because businesses have different work cultures, Sinha says. Workers who perform well at one company are not always successful at another.
“Charismatic people extremely successful in previous companies are utter failures in [a] new organization,” Sinha says.
That is why multinational corporations groom employees for positions months or even years in advance, he says.
“We look at grooming our people to take on the next role,” he says. “We design development plan[s] for them for six months to three years.”
Employees in higher positions work closely for years with the people who will take their places, he says. Companies need to have a succession plan to identify reliable replacements for senior employees.
Meanwhile, people searching for senior-level positions can become more marketable candidates while they remain unemployed, says the job hunter in Mumbai. She advises them to continue to improve their skill sets and to learn about the latest industry trends to maintain their credentials for senior-level positions.
“Our industry is very vast,” she says, “and things change very fast, and new things also keep coming. So we have to constantly stay updated with the latest in our profession.”
She is now learning how to design for mobile technology so she can search for jobs in that market as well.
“Designing for mobile is [the] most happening trend these days,” she says.
She is optimistic she will find a job soon.
“I am hopeful also because I am learning new technologies and getting myself updated with the latest trends in my industry,” she says.
She says she also hopes that employers in India’s technology industry realize the benefit of recruiting experienced employees rather than hiring inexpensive but inexperienced workers.
“[I] wonder what business benefit it has, but I certainly feel that the quality of work is far more refined when senior professionals give their expertise,” she says. “[I] hope the companies recognize the worthiness of the seniors. [I] hope they get the work, which they truly deserve in terms of salary and other terms.”
