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As tech firms and startups go slow on hiring amid efforts to cut costs, recruiters are now finding themselves in a quandary after jumping ship from hiring agencies to take up talent acquisition roles at corporate firms during the post-Covid 19 hiring spree, according to a report by The Economic Times (ET).
In its latest round of layoffs on August 13, Google gave the pink slip to hundreds from its once nearly 3,000-strong recruiting team. The tech giant said that it "made the hard decision to reduce the size of (our) recruiting team" and was "meaningfully slowing the pace of overall hiring".
According to industry experts, thousands of headhunters had quit their agencies to join HR teams of corporate firms at up to 40-100 per cent salary hikes.
Recruitment agencies such as ABC Consultants, EMA Partners, and Randstad stated that scaling back in hiring leaves the recruiters with little to do. Viswanath PS, CEO of Randstad, stated that his phone is flooded with messages from recruiters wanting to join his firm. Headhunters who quit Randstad to join corporates are now returning, he added.
Due to a slowdown in the hiring market, many recruiters are now finding it difficult to get opportunities. Shiv Agrawal, managing director of ABC Consultants, said that the previous pace of hiring recruiters has slowed down. Our company works across sectors. But for some tech companies, hiring has come to a near-standstill, he added.
K Sudarshan, managing director of EMA Partners, told ET that many corporate firms decided to build their recruitment armies — often at a fixed-cost base, when hiring was booming in the post-pandemic period. However, Hiring activity waxes and wanes. And in the case of a hiring freeze, then for these professionals, whose core skills are recruitment, there is no real job in organisations, he said.
