Stock broking houses embark on talent hunt

The stock brokers are not only concentrating on soaring sensex but also busy recruiting personnel to manage their expanding network. Stock broking houses are likely to create over 50,000 job opportunities in next one year for various functions, if unconfirmed reports to be believed.

The broking houses are hunting for people to work in areas such as back office, system maintenance and marketing. They are also in need of customer relationship managers, dealers and analysts. Stock brokers are also looking for sophisticated IT professionals to commission and maintain their offices.

All prominent stock broking houses such as Indiabulls, Anagram Stock Broking, Fortis Securities, Geojit Financial, Apollo Sindhoori Capital Investments and several other local players are expanding their networks. At the same time, increasing trading on commodity exchanges has also fuelled the growth of the markets resulting in demand for more manpower.

The opinion leaders in the sector are of the opinion that educational institute should now focus on introduce focused courses for training students about stock and commodity trading.

Talking to Business Standard, V K Sharma, director at Anagram who is going to recruit about 400 personnel in next 12 months, said, "The demand for the right manpower is increasing very rapidly as almost every small and big stock broking houses are on an expansion mode. We are also witnessing increasing poaching for manpower in the sector. We have plans to increase the size of our team to 1,400 from existing about 1,000 members. Of the 400 new people, 300 will be placed for new opportunities and rest will take over the existing posts that are likely to be vacant on account of poaching from others."

To meet the challenge from poachers, Anagram has decided to pick up bright commerce graduates who have not been able to become chartered accountants and train them. The broking house is hopeful to retain graduates for longer as they usually avoid taking risk and venture out to looking for better prospects due to lack of degree.

Meanwhile, Geojit Finance that recruited over 200 people in last 12 months intends to add 300 more in next 12 to 18 months.

"We are planning about 75 new branches in next 18 months that will require about 300 people. The requirement and salaries of the manpower in the sector has increased at the rate of increase in BSE and NSE indices. We will mainly recruit the graduates and post graduates in commerce and finance who are traditionally known to get into accounting and finance management," said Satish Menon, COO, Geojit Finance.

However, the sector is also facing competition from BPO houses in attracting talent. The outsourcing of financial services has resulted in demand for candidates with commerce and finance background. The outsourcing companies are proving better pay masters for the freshers with right qualification and command over language.

Menon stated that there are number of institutes that are offering training in stock trading but they are not adequate.

Number of institutes should increase that can train manpower for stock trading for the sector, which suddenly has grown very large in just two years, suggested Menon.