India Inc takes to 'temping'

Temping or using temporary staff to fill in vacancies or work on short-term projects is fast gaining acceptance in India Inc. Hiring of temporary staff is gaining popularity across all sectors such as infotech, business process outsourcing, financial services, fast moving consumer goods, manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.

Globally, temping is a $140 billion market and nearly 2.5-3 per cent of the workforce in the US work on this model. What more, the largest private sector employer in the US is a staffing company. Though the concept has just begun to gain ground in India, studies have projected that temping in India has a potential to created 8-10 million jobs.

Temping is popular mainly because of the flexibility it offers in deploying employees on a temporary basis in various projects. The leasing firms handle the training, payroll, benefits, appraisal and administrative tasks of the temps. Equipped with economies of scale, leasing/staffing firms help clients reduce opportunity costs and financial costs of employee administration.

"Staffing helps organisations to eliminate human resource related overhead costs, time and complexities and allows them to focus on their core competencies as well as managing and motivating their team," said Rohit Ramani, associate director of EmmayHR.

The rise of the temp has also ushered in a number of staffing companies such as the US-based Manpower, Kelly Services and Adecco with each managing a 100-plus associate bench currently.

Indian companies such as Team Lease and EmmayHR are also addressing the needs of small and medium companies, which do not want to have a full-fledged HR department or very large companies who intend to outsource all their routine HR processes so they can concentrate on their core areas of operation.

Teamlease has a pool of 8,500 associates and is expecting to add another 6,000 on its rolls by March 2005. Its client list includes companies such as Pfizer, BASF, Reliance Industries, Dr Reddy's, IDBI, Bajaj Allianz, ICICI Prudential, HDFC Chubb among others.

"Our talent pool consists of the entire spectrum of employees and though the largest number of people are from the lower-end of the value chain there have been instances where companies have leased temporary CEOs and CFOs either to work on a turnaround strategy, put a process in place or audit a system," said Ashok Reddy, managing director of Teamlease.