Bengaluru: Recruiters and headhunters who took advantage of the post-Covid hiring frenzy to resign from their agencies and join HR/talent acquisition teams in companies are now facing challenges as some organisations, particularly in the tech and startup sectors, slow down their hiring efforts in order to cut costs.
Recently, Google laid off hundreds of employees from its recruiting team, explaining that it was “significantly reducing the rate of overall hiring” and had made the “difficult decision to downsize the recruiting team”.
According to industry insiders, many recruitment professionals made the switch from staffing/recruitment/search firms to corporate talent acquisition roles during the hiring boom, with salary increases of up to 40-100%.
However, many of these professionals have been struggling to find work recently, as the slowdown in hiring has left them with little to do. “I am receiving numerous messages from recruiters seeking to join us,” said Viswanath PS, CEO of Randstad. Some professionals who had left Randstad to join corporate teams have now returned, he added. But with the overall hiring market slowing down, many of these professionals are finding it difficult to secure new job opportunities. “This coincides with the fact that while we are still hiring recruiters, we have also slowed down the pace,” said Shiv Agrawal, managing director of ABC Consultants.
“However, we work across various sectors. For some tech companies, hiring has almost come to a standstill,” he added. While recruitment/executive search firms offer fixed and variable components in their salaries, with the latter being significant depending on performance, corporates generally pay a fixed salary to their recruiting staff.
“When hiring was booming post-pandemic, many corporates decided they would build their own recruitment teams, often at a high fixed-cost base,” said K Sudarshan, managing director of EMA Partners.
“Everything goes smoothly during good times. But when there is a hiring slowdown or freeze, recruiters are the first to be affected,” Sudarshan said, noting that many such professionals reach out to him. “Corporates will claim that they expanded their recruitment teams because it was necessary at the time. However, hiring activity fluctuates. If there is a hiring freeze, these professionals, whose core skills are recruitment, will not have a real job in the organization,” Sudarshan explained.
“Corporates will claim that they expanded their recruitment teams because it was necessary at the time. However, hiring activity fluctuates. If there is a hiring freeze, these professionals, whose core skills are recruitment, will not have a real job in the organization,” Sudarshan added.
“Many of them will have to accept pay cuts if they want to transition out of their current positions,” he added.
In addition to big tech and IT/ITeS companies, professionals who left to join recruitment teams in large startups are also feeling the impact as these firms resort to cost-cutting measures.
For example, a unicorn company that is currently facing multiple challenges had hired many recruiters to strengthen its in-house team. However, after several rounds of layoffs, some of those recruiters have been let go, while others are hanging on by a thread and desperately looking for new opportunities, according to senior industry professionals.
“In a recruitment/search firm, if one client slows down on hiring, it’s not the only client you have. You can pivot,” Sudarshan said. “Unlike in a corporate, you haven’t put all your eggs in one basket.”
