Mahindra and Mahindra to hire 600-700 people this year with plans to focus on electric vehicle solutions

While industries such as IT, FMCG, and textile have been witnessing a slump in business, the auto sector has been doing fairly well. In tune, car manufacturer Mahindra and Mahindra is set to hire 300 class of 2018 graduates from various business and engineering colleges. A majority of these 300 recruits will reportedly be engineers who will work on designs and new technologies.

"Among all the teams, we are hiring aggressively for the electric vehicle solutions. This is clearly one of the focus areas in the company," chief people officer Rajeshwar Tripathi told the Economic Times. While the 300 people will be taken on board in the next few months, the carmaker is also likely to take in 600-700 people more from campuses as well as otherwise.

Considering new technologies and automation now play an important part in the industry, Mahindra and Mahindra intends to hire workers who can work with these and add value to the organization.

"To begin with, we are in talks with a few tech companies to design bot for induction and learning programmes. These are the few areas where we were not able to plug gaps for some time and now are taking the help of new technologies to do so," executive vice president Prince Augustin added.

Additionally, among the new recruits, the firm plans to hire 50 percent women employees as it intends to "improve the diversity numbers."

Meanwhile, things do not seem to be looking up for a lot of other sectors. Hiring across industries has seen a dip and leading listed companies have also seen a decline in hiring in the year 2016-17, as compared to the previous years, according to the Indian Express. The daily accessed data on 121 companies and reported that net hiring in these firms dwindled to 730,694 from the previous figure of 742,012.

As per the data, 107 companies saw a consecutive decline in their headcount. While these firms employed 684,452 people at the end of March 2015, the number dipped to 677,296 in March 2016 and 669,784 in March 2017.