Full Time IT Employees No Longer Needed? Contractual Hiring Increase By 22% In IT Firms

With more companies reducing bench size, India’s IT industry is renewing its drive for flexible staffing. For many firms, Flexi hiring is becoming the norm. Having a talent for niche skills has become a challenge for It Sectors, resulting in a steady rise in demand. 

According to the policy document, the nature of work has changed as a result of technological advancements, the evolution of new economic activities, organisational structure innovation, and emerging business models.

“The lockdown period also saw the growth of the gig economy and increasing work from home in the organized sector,” the survey tabled in Parliament said on Friday.

 “Agile-based DevOps (software development and IT operations) delivery involves short cycle times, and customers look to meet their needs using Flexi-staffing. Customers prefer to have a core team of full-time employees, but they use contractual staff to be able to ramp up and down based on specific requirements to maximize efficiency,” said Ramesh Alluri Reddy, director of managed services and professional services, Adecco Group India, a global staffing firm.

The Benefit Of a Flexi-Staffing

The increasing role of the gig economy was noticeable during covid-19 induced lockdown. E-Commerce platforms created massive opportunities amid the pandemic, according to the Economic Survey 2020-21. 

According to the study, employers chose ‘work from home’ for their workers throughout the lockdown time, decreasing workforce size and hiring freelancers or outsourcing tasks to minimise overhead costs and recruit professional services.

A gig economy allows flexibility in the employer-employee relationship to both service seeker and service provider. The essence of a gig worker’s job contract is distinct from that of an employer and employee/worker. Flexi-staffing would help both workers and businesses. Employees will work when they like, take a break, and come back. 

Companies, on the other hand, hire only when they are required, rather than keeping a wide bench. Their labour contracts are usually shorter and more focused on the mission or job at hand. Their working status could be contractual and it is not permanent. Pay for employment is more of a piece rate, negotiable, likely as wage or partially as profit/reward than a fixed salary.

With emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Big Data, new skill requirements are in demand. Flexi-staffing is a way to find the best person for the job depending on the project’s needs.

Flexi-staffing also helps companies save costs as they are hired only on a project-basis and can be billed as variable costs. “There is no compulsion of minimum tenure and liability. Core employees invite bench costs when the project is completed, which adds to the overall cost without revenues. It also gets sticky when employees on the bench cannot be placed elsewhere, and this leads to separation and the liabilities for the companies increase,” said Reddy from Adecco.

Shortage Of Talent In Niche And Super-Niche Technologies Is Leading Recruiters Towards Flexi-Staffing.

A Flexi-staffing strategy helps companies hire just-in-time, aligned with their business growth and needs, without having to bench, redeploy or retrain employees, said Lohit Bhatia, president, ISF.

Some of these skills and opportunities like DevOps engineers, UX designers, big data specialists, cloud architects, embedded data scientists, cybersecurity and quantum computing is slowly moving into the gig-economy. 

Opportunities in low-code programming—were little to no coding is required to build applications—and skill sets such as Python, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data engineering, cybersecurity and quantum computing would move more into the gig-economy in future, said Radhakrishnan.

 “When a niche skill is required for a short-term project, organizations can choose to hire a contract employee or gig worker. Flexi-staffing will manage such staffing peaks and troughs and help them scale up easily,” Lohit Bhatia, president, ISF.