Sunrise and Growth industries focus and how staffing industries will evolve?

Ms. Bhavna Udernani feels that this is a temporary phase, and all the industries will bounce back in New Normal and have its own space. The demand and supply might be slightly affected. Growth has been observed in e-commerce, logistics and IT industry, and they have been focusing currently on them.

World has been getting back to normalcy, major manufacturing units have started working full-fledged even in cities which are under major lockdown. Apart from some problems in manpower and demand, things are getting back to normal.

How has the market responded to HRTech in terms of Staffing Industry as a whole?

Mr. Paras Gupta shared his perspective, where he said that the lockdown is getting diminished on a weekly basis and is expected to be completely diminished by the end of the quarter. The companies will run in the market in full terms; however there will be cognizance to keep the costs lower. This sentiment might lead to large companies outsourcing their workforce. Of late there has been a report that Naukri.Com has launched a live tracker, where 1700 companies are hiring for 19000 positions. Keywords like Information Technology, Network Security have seen a surge of double usage in comparison to the same month last year. One deduction might be that companies are looking at enabling their employees to work from home, which is leading to job opportunities in these domains. New unprecedented jobs like academic counselors in edtech platforms, executives for keeping a check on quarantined patients are observed. So in totality I have a positive outlook on growth of this sector.

HRTech will work as an enabler as well as an acquisition tool for this sector. It can help in process optimization as well as help the industries stand out from the crowd in a highly competitive market.

Business Outcomes can be categorized in three brackets:

• Impact on Top Line
• Impact on BottomLine – how can HRTech Software help in fixing revenue leakages?
• Regular process optimization which HR Software Solutions  can bring into processes. It could be enabling the workforce, doing things on mobility.

Lastly, it can help the organizations to make data driven decisions.

Rise in Gig Economy and will there be any changes in the Sunrise and Growth Industries in 2020-21?

Mr. Aamir Ajmal shared his thoughts, where he feels all the industries will come back to normal, but some will rise up quicker as compared to others. Agreeing to Ms. Bhavna’s perspective, he said that this phase is temporary, and New Normal might go back to normalcy. This might be of benefit as everyone will start using technology. Talking about industries, he said along with e-commerce, FMCG is also coming up; with a dent that they have got, they will come back with a bigger force in the market to make up for the losses. Essential services have been doing well even during the lockdown, but the impacted industries will come back with a bigger force post lockdown.

He also touched upon usage of technology in recruitment, where earlier 99% people opted for manual options. But the pandemic has taught us that digitization and technology are the future in this New Normal.

Will investment in digitization increase in Staffing companies compared to before? What technologies will be used in perspective of outcomes?

Mr. Kunal Gupta was of the opinion that digitization needs to increase, and processes need to be automated wherever possible. With margins getting thinner and efficiencies demanded being stronger and harder, digitization will definitely go up. A slight fall in job site usages has been observed, usage and more automation on the job site is going to increase. The Core High Tech sector is already making use of Chatbots for interviews, this might go further up. There might be an increase in assessment tools. Faster replacement is a very important point especially in staffing.

From a payroll point of view, many staffing organizations had been using only payroll management software. In his opinion, many more areas around productivity would be automated.

Emotional AI which started in western countries around 2 years back can also take a prominence in this sector.

How can HRTech solutions help the Staffing industry in Top Line and Bottom Line outcomes?

Mr. Kunal Gupta mentioned that one of the larger areas surrounding HRTech has got a large to do with NLP. Considerable advances in this area have been observed in the past few years. Tools like Amazon or Google Alexa provide a very high level of precision in conversion of instructions. One essential tool for company branding and homogeneous selection is definitely Robotic Interviews and Digital Staffing.

Digital Hiring will take prominence for two reasons; speed and quality of hiring.

There have been developments around learning, but before that there needs to be a solution on skill-mapping which includes workforce planning, competency mapping. These are the current gaps in digital staffing.

From a Bottom Line perspective, you need to have standards as in what work is expected from people and automate as much work management as possible.

Technology upgradation, measurable outcomes from Staffing and Facility Management point of view

Mr. Manish Newatia shared his opinion, in the Staffing industry the major work is to ensure that most of the workforce is live and active; and tools are required to monitor the same. Today when the majority of the workforce is working from home, it is essential for us to give insights to our customers on who all are working and who are not, for allocation of jobs to these resources.

Modules like talent acquisition software, on-boarding software, attendance management software which are more mobile and device friendly in nature are required to be implemented and used in this sector. Apart from them, some level of integration with customer staffing tools is needed to check which resources are able to perform better while working remotely; else it will become difficult for the resources to work on multiple platforms.

There are many organizations that want the staffing agency to report back to them on resource productivity. So it is essential that solutions have the mechanism to capture these details which can be shared across as and when required.

Rise of the Gig Economy, outcome based products which can give Top Line and Bottom Line Productivity

Mr. Arun Kumar Thuyamani had a perspective that the Gig Economy will flourish. In Indian market, many companies reach out to them for new ways of labor cost optimization. While from a compliance point, Gig is not the best way to do it, we have done research to check how Gig can help in both employee and employer perspective. Compliances are very strong in India, the main reason why many companies prefer having partners rather than employees. How do we make an employee work in a Gig concept is something that we are working on. From an Indian market perspective, we are working on the idea of blending both the worlds of traditional employee-employer and Gig employee who is more considered as a partner.

Technology can play a great role in terms of supporting the Gig economy, as it comes from a path where you are able to leverage the skills of an individual and pay them. Irrespective of the industry, if we are able to build a successful model, it will be helpful as the liability between the employee and the employer will not exist.

Change in labor laws for blue collar workforce

Ms. Bhavna Udernani personally feels that there will not be many changes to the labor law, but the way of working in the Staffing Industry will change. People might start looking at the productivity based model in place of regular employment. This will make the contractor the principal employer. But we are unsure of how successful this model will be, as the organization will lose control over the employee and productivity might be impacted.

Insourcing vs. Outsourcing, post Gig Economy, around 6-9 months down the line

According to Ms. Bhavna Udernani, the demand in the IT industry will definitely go down, as they will prefer having people on their payroll. For the blue collar and rest of the industry, in her opinion the numbers will not change, they will go high.

In Mr. Aamir Ajmal’s opinion, we will observe a shift. Definition of outsourcing might change and its original definition might see a brighter side. It will no more be the simple vanilla outsourcing of manpower, but bigger outsourcing. The balance between insourcing and outsourcing will change, and in his opinion, outsourcing will take the front seat. Companies who currently provide only payroll management software solutions might have to get into other services like payroll outsourcing services, claims management, statutory compliances as well. This will be a game changer for everyone.

Mr. Manish Newatia drew from his own experience, where there are many customers who are now changing their work style from B2B to B2C. In his opinion, this will change the focus from outsourcing to insourcing. For instance, many banks are currently reaching out to their clients directly without relying on any channel; so virtually there is no need for a back office or contact centre resource. If this model works for them, they will not change it post Covid.

In Mr. Arun Kumar Thuyamani’s point of view, a combination of multiple things will happen. First will come from the best practices; many countries have reformed their labor laws in past years and seen its multiple benefits. Sodexo for instance has a healthy balance between insourcing and outsourcing, we have multiple partners. This approach is useful especially in Europe where we follow an omni-channel approach. Also while working in multi-country contracts we are able to leverage the benefits of this healthy balance. From a technology perspective, it acts as a connector, as we have a platform Workforce, which is the same for all the employees.

Will companies be cost sensitive in adopting technologies? How important will be analytics or dashboards for Staffing and FMS?

Mr. Manish Newatia mentioned that, in today’s scenario everyone is cost sensitive and careful of where they want to put their eggs. Until and unless there is a great value addition, people will not look at adding any form of costs. Analytics definitely will help depending upon which analytics meet the needs of the business model or industry.

As per Mr. Paras Gupta, there are customers who are using a platform and even their customers are using the same platform. So the comfort level that these customers get is very enticing to see. When insourced and outsourced employees use the same platform, the analytics that you can get are very synchronous. Multiple CXOs are looking at analytics daily to keep a check on their costs. For Staffing, analytics on daily payouts of the Gig workers, paid days, GSTs etc. are some of the essential analytics. Pandemic has opened wider doors for SaaS solutions in India.

In Ms. Bhavna Udernani’s perspective, the adoption of technology will go high, especially in coming times when there will be outsourcing, mapping of competencies, managing attrition and lowering the costs. Analytics will make things easy as today it’s extremely important to have your data ready with you to move forward.

Mr. Aamir Ajmal agreed that data analytics is a key for all leaders. If you cannot see your data in a dashboard in an easy and quick way then it adds to the problems. Analysis needs to be done for technology adoption, in terms of costs and outcomes. Another aspect is correctly utilizing the technology post implementation.

Mr. Arun Kumar Thuyamni correctly mentioned that tech is not just a single solution, but multiple solutions. So the major part is ROI especially in the times when the businesses are not doing very well. But some investments need to be done for us to bounce back. The organization needs to see the value that the solution will add and the solution provider will have to curtail the requirements and show the ROI. Sodexo has started implementing PowerBI globally with multiple platforms like finance system, supply chain, HR and operations. We have built the same view for employees as well as our customers in terms of attrition rate, overtime etc. It helps in maintaining transparency and goes a long way.

What is the outcome post technology adoption that links to the Top Line or Bottom Line?

According to Mr. Manish Newatia, value addition plays an important role, which helps in distinguishing you from the rest. For Top Line it can contribute by telling your customers that you have something different from the rest; Bottom Line in terms of if you have any offering which helps in substantial reduction of costs.

Ms. Bhavna Udernani elaborated on Mr. Manish’s views and mentioned how Covid has changed the way of our working. So value addition and cost factor in her opinion are two most important factors at the moment.

In agreement with both the views, Mr. Aamir Ajmal further said it is equally important to look at the relevancy of the technology adoption at that moment; the need and urgency for it in the system.

As per Mr. Arun Kumar Thuyamani, reach in terms of audience and the tangibility that it will bring to the table are the easy metrics. But putting it in quantifiable metrics is difficult. It is equally important how we put our business case across the table and show revenue benefits.