Airtel, Vodafone and TTSL come under pressure as talents moving to Reliance Jio

Of late, around 20 management-level executives of Tata Teleservices’ Kerala operation have joined Reliance Jio Infocomm with a 20-30-per cent hike in salary.

With the Reliance Industries unit in the job market shopping staff for its yet-to-be-launched service, and ecommerce majors fattened by foreign funding always on the lookout for the best talent, telecom companies such as Tata Teleservices are seeing a flight of executives in the marketing, customer service and technology functions. Meanwhile, the heightened activity in the human resources market has also boosted the pay that top performers get in the telecom sector.

Bharti Airtel, Aircel, Vodafone India, and even Jio have lost senior staff over the past few months. Airtel’s Products Head Anand Chandrasekaran and Senior Marketing Executive Govind Rajan have joined Snapdeal, while Aircel’s Chief Financial Officer Anup Vikal is said to be following them to the e-commerce major. Vodafone and Reliance Industries recently lost their human resources heads.

Vodafone’s Ashok Ramachandran is moving to the Aditya Birla Group, while Prabir Jha, who oversaw HR for Jio as well, is joining Cipla as the drug-maker’s global chief people officer.

The fight for talent has led to ugly exchanges between companies. In late June, market leader Bharti Airtel alleged that a former employee had downloaded and copied confidential information before he left the company to join Jio. Jio said it would inquire into the matter and underlined its commitment to ethical conduct of staff. A person said Jio is hiring frontline and circle-specific staff. In each circle, the company estimates it will need 300 to 400 sales staff in the lead up to the launch, expected around December...Read more