Federal Bank goes hunting for young talent
Worried by the rising average age of its employees, Federal Bank has begun steps to infuse young blood with an obvious eye on the future.
By PK Krishnakumar, TNN |
KOCHI: Worried by the rising average age of its employees, Federal Bank has begun steps to infuse young blood with an obvious eye on the future.
The bank has already made its intentions clear to become a national player by gobbling up Ganesh Bank and making a bid, albeit unsuccessfully, for United Western Bank. It has felt the need for new hands to feed its aggressive expansion drive.
Besides a VRS offer to weed out old hands, it is going in for fresh recruitment after a long time. The average age of its over 6,000-strong staff including 2,500 officers is hovering around 48 now, which is quite high compared to new generation private banks.
The VRS scheme was implemented last month with the package offering a maximum of Rs 10 lakh for the applicants. However, just 180 put in their applications.
Most of the applicants are above 55 years, who reckon that they will get more from the VRS scheme than they could have earned being in service, according to sources. But the bank is not disappointed as there will be lot of retirement in the coming years.
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Meanwhile, the bank is going ahead with the recruitment initiative. “We have begun the process to take 150 new recruits initially from multiple fields like marketing, accountancy and technology,” says M Venugopalan, chairman and CEO of the bank. Federal Bank has 508 branches with 330 branches in Kerala itself. While opening branches outside the state, it is increasingly going for local recruitment for greater flexibility. This serves the purpose of not having to transfer someone from Kerala to look after the operations.
“The practice now is to post someone from Kerala to head the branch outside the state for three years. But it is becoming difficult to accommodate them in a branch when they return,” points out P V Mathew, general secretary of Federal Bank Officers’ Association. Moreover, officers with many years of experience are not keen to go outside the state.
According to Mr Mathew, the bank will see a spate of retirements happening in the next few years, particularly from ’09 to ’15 when over 50% of the existing staff will reach superannuation age.
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