Having witnessed a dip of over 4,500 staff from its headcount in last fiscal, Anil Ambani group's financial services arm Reliance Capital will hire over 3,500 managers for its various businesses this year.
Besides, the company also plans to hire 50,000 insurance agents in the current financial year ending March 2012, Reliance Capital CEO Sam Ghosh told PTI.
The large-scale hiring plans comes on the back of the company witnessing a decline of 4,550 people from its headcount in its insurance, mutual fund and other businesses during the fiscal ended March 31, 2011.
The company's total headcount stood at 18,069 as on March 31, 2011, down from 22,619 employees a year ago on March 31, 2010, as per its financial presentations for the two fiscals.
Reliance Capital now plans to increase its headcount to near 21,000 people in the current fiscal, Ghosh said.
Reliance Capital is the financial services arm of the Anil Ambani group, which also has presence in businesses like telecom, power, infrastructure, media and entertainment.
The group employee strength also dipped by around 10,000 employees between May, 2010 and March, 2011, but latest figures are not available for across-the-group headcount.
As per a Reliance Capital investor presentation in March 2011, ADAG had "120,000 young, trained and motivated people" across its various group companies, as against a figure of "130,000 young, trained and motivated people" mentioned in a previous presentation dated May, 2010.
The sharp decline in Reliance Capital's headcount during 2010-11 was mainly due to life insurance business, while asset management, broking and destribution and general insurance segments also saw their staff strength declining in the year.
Asked about the decline in staff strength, Ghosh said it was largely because of a cyclical movement of people in life insurance business and the company has already started a major hiring drive.
"The fluctuation in headcount last year was predominately on account of cyclical movement of sales managers seen in life insurance business.
We have already started hiring sales managers for our life insurance business and will be crossing the 12,000 headcount mark by July," Ghosh said.
"In addition, we also plan to add 50,000 agents in our insurance business during this fiscal," he added. The insurance agents are not included in the company's headcount.