BPOs now hire temporary workers

Third party vendors have also started negotiating with human resource companies.

The outsourcing wave seems to be getting bigger with domestic IT companies now outsourcing their workforce needs to temporary staffing companies.

While captive BPO units like Wipro BPO, Progeon, Accenture and IBM-Daksh have already begun employing temporary employees, third party units have also started negotiating with human resource companies.

The trend, which has picked up in the last six months, shows that while 2 per cent of the current staff of around 8,000 are temporary, HR analysts expect the number to rise to 10 per cent of total BPO workers, or around 50,000 employees. The number of BPO staff too is expected to rise to 5 lakh.

"In the last six months, there has been greater acceptance from the clients of third party vendors to allow temporary staffing and we are negotiating contracts with almost all big third party vendors," said TeamLease Services Vice President Kavitha Reddy.

The company currently has temporary staff strength of around 800 for the BPO sector and will rise to 3,000 by the year end.

Typically, third party vendors are under stricter confidentiality agreements from their clients who are not open to temporary staffing.

"If there is any seasonal variation in our work in the future, the company will explore the option of hiring temporary employees," said Genpact CEO Pramod Bhasin.

Genpact is currently runs a VT (voice training) program where it trains those employees who do not make it to the cut on a temporary basis. These employees, after training, work on a temporary basis for Genpact.

Though the opportunity is much higher in the voice-based business due to the seasonal and short-term nature of the work, even in the financial services segment the employment is much higher during the financial closing of January-March quarter.

"Most low-end work is being outsourced to temporary employees as this reduces variation in the work cycle," said MaFoi Consultants Head (ITeS) Manoj Kumar.

A temporary worker, who is employed for a specific contract for a particular time period, is kept on the payrolls of HR companies like Manpower, or TeamLease and companies hiring these pay a specific markup to the HR companies.

"These workers are typically offered 10-15 per cent higher salaries than what a permanent employee would make," said Manpower Executive Director Tarun Bali.