Staffing firm looks at manufacturing

Bangalore-based TeamLease, India's biggest staffing firm, is undergoing a paradigm shift.

The firm has discovered a new business opportunity in the manufacturing sector in the Maharashtra's industrial belt of Pune and surrounding areas like Pimpri, Nigadi and Chinchwad.

The region hosts plants of leading automobile firms like Tata Motors, Bajaj Auto and Ford Motor.

The HR firm is now trying to tap the manufacturing sector as it has found that such industrial belts have a huge demand for well-trained and qualified technical personnel.

In the process, TeamLease has also been expanding into the tier 2 and tier 3 cities and sees about 20 to 30 per cent of its associates coming from them in the near future.

Now more and more large firms are looking at outsourcing niche engineering and manufacturing jobs. This is creating a new demand for technical manpower in the tier 2 and tier 3 cities where many of these smaller units are located, even as Maharashtra boasts the highest number of engineering colleges.

As a result of this attempt by TeamLease to plant a flag in manufacturing, there are 25 manufacturing units among its 90 clients in Pune's industrial belt.

"It is a paradigm shift as far as the staffing sector is considered since manufacturing is generally not looked upon as a source of demand for temporary staffing," says Deep Mukherjee, executive vice-president, TeamLease Services Pvt Ltd.

The smaller niche firms with outsourced orders from the large assemblers do not like to spend time and money on acquiring, training and retaining staff. TeamLease is acting as a bridge between these relatively smaller units and the engineering graduates in tier 2 and tier 3 cities.

The latter as 'associates' or temporary staff placed by TeamLease in the smaller units have better prospects of continuous employment in different units compared to what they had when they sought jobs at individual units.

The firms, on their part, are far more willing to hire additional hands when they have a good order position, not having to worry about what to do with them once a bulge in orders is over.

By becoming associates of TeamLease these engineering hands have made a partial move from unorganised employment to more organised employment.