SBI attracting job-seekers by the droves

Many young people in the country seem to be coveting a job in the State Bank of India, going by the number of applications the bank received in the last round of recruitment exams conducted between June and August.

India’s largest bank received 18.83 lakh applications for the 1,837 vacancies for probationary officers (POs) or a whopping 1,025 aspirants vying for every slot. As for clerical recruitment, the bank received 23 lakh applications for 5,092 vacancies or about 452 applications for every vacancy.

Besides science, commerce and arts graduates and post-graduates, those with professional qualifications, such as engineering, chartered accountancy and law, too have applied for the posts.

The annual compensation on a cost-to-company basis for POs at Mumbai is around Rs8,40,000 or about Rs70,000 a month. The total starting pay for a clerical cadre employee in a metro like Mumbai is around Rs17,500 a month.

SBI currently has about 78,200 officers and some one lakh clerical staff on its rolls. Including subordinate and watch-and-ward staff, the total number of employees stands at about 2.19 lakh.

SBI Chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya said, “Recruitment earlier was happening in a bunch. We took in people and they would get absorbed over a period, with the numbers going up and down every year.

“From this year what we have decided is that every year, methodically, we would recruit a certain number equivalent to the number that will be retiring.”

She pointed out that this year, for instance, the bank had put out recruitment advertisements for 1,800 POs and 5,800 clerical staff, roughly equivalent to the numbers that are retiring.

In SBI, the number of employees who will retire will go up from around 6,700 or so this year to about 10,000 in each of the next four years.

“Now, beyond retirement also there is a slight fall in employee numbers because people leave and go away... That shortfall, if any, should be made up by productivity gains,” said the SBI chief, who is the only woman in Bloomberg Markets’ fourth annual “50 Most Influential” list.


Source : The Hindu