Corporate recruitment practices and the hierarchy of graduate employability in India

ABSTRACT

Policy and academic circles in India put forth the argument that the country’s demographic dividend puts it in an optimal position to win the race between education and technology across nations by expanding higher education opportunities. This article examines the recruitment practices of 13 leading corporations in high-growth sectors in India. Based on detailed qualitative interviews, it explains why these corporations are unlikely to increase the demand for graduates in ways imagined by policy-makers or proponents of skills-biased technological change. Companies in India are locked into an intense ‘war for talent’, but only for graduates in India’s top-tier universities. We argue that there is a close correspondence between India’s highly elitist university system and corporate talent management strategies, creating a narrow pool of highly mobile Indian corporate elite, but resulting in limited prospects for the wider Indian workforce. In this talent market, the success of the top corporate elite rests on keeping the elitist character of higher education, rather than widening labour market opportunities. This paper also seeks to explain why top corporations in India engage in this ‘war for talent’ when they are not always certain their investments pay off.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education expansion
• corporate talent management
• employability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Based on the three-tier classification system by Trow (2006). Countries with a gross enrolment ratio (GER) in higher education of less than 15% said to be in the elitist stage, countries with a GER of between 15 and 50% to be in the massification stage, and countries with GER in excess of 50% to be in the universalisation stage.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sahara Sadik

Sahara Sadik is Principal Researcher at the Institute for Adult Learning, an autonomous institute of the Singapore University of Social Sciences. She researches on employability amidst changing contexts of work, privileging the comparative method with a focus on the patterns of state-formation, class formation and skill formation to understand how different societies organise themselves with contrasting opportunities for human development. She currently co-leads a research programme on digital transformation and the future of education and skills with Professor Phillip Brown of Cardiff University. She is also pursuing PhD studies at Cardiff University.

Phillip Brown

Phillip Brown is a Distinguished Research Professor in the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University and Distinguished Visiting Professor, Zhengzhou University, China. His publications include 18 books and over 100 academic articles and reports. He has given presentations in over twenty countries and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS) and Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales (FLSW). He recently Chaired an Independent Review for the Welsh Government examining the impact of digital innovation for the economy and the future of work in Wales, UK. He is currently leading a research programme examining digital transformation and the future of education and skills, in collaboration with the Institute of Adult Learning, Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS). His latest book, The Death of Human Capital? (with Hugh Lauder and Sin Yi Cheung), will be published by Oxford University Press in the spring of 2020.