MUMBAI, India (GPI)-- Searching for senior-level positions in India’s technology industry is not easy, says a confident, curly-haired woman in her early 30s in Mumbai, India’s most populous city. She has been searching and interviewing for senior-level positions for user experience design for the past few months with no results, despite 12 years of experience. She requests anonymity because she fears her comments may discourage employers from hiring her. “I hope to get a job soon, as recently I had got a few offers,” she says. “But, unfortunately, later they did not materialize.” This is not the first time she has struggled to find a senior-level position. She left her job in 2012 for personal reasons and remained unemployed for a frustrating seven months. So when a company offered her a six-month contract position, she took it. After the contract ended, the company offered her a permanent job, but for a lower salary. When she refused the offer, the company did not renew her contract. Later, she learned that the company hired two less-experienced designers for lower salaries to fill the role. But the company’s strategy to hire less-experienced professionals to save money hampers the design quality, she says. “The people within the company who hire such people don’t know the importance of hiring a person with a qualified designing background,” she says, “and also that such people can’t deliver a great, quality design, whereas an experienced designer can deliver a great, quality design.” Experienced technology professionals in India say they are struggling to find senior-level positions because a stagnant economy is pushing companies to hire less-experienced employees for lower salaries. Companies also prefer to train current employees for more senior positions, instead of hiring from outside. The country’s economic growth rate has declined by nearly half – from 9 percent in the 2007 to 2008 fiscal year to 5 percent currently, according to the monthly economic reports from the Ministry of Finance. India’s labor force participation rate was 53 percent from July 2010 until July 2011, according to the Employment and Unemployment Survey. The Indian rupee also declined from its peak at the end of 2007 at 39.11 to the U.S. dollar to 58.87 to the dollar as of June 2013, according to XE, a world currency site. The Indian market has slowed because the euro and U.S. dollar rates are both down, so few new businesses are entering India, says Manish Sinha, 35, a human resources professional at a multinational corporation in Bangalore, a city in southern India and the country's hub for information technology. As a result, companies hire younger professionals with less experience for higher-level positions and less pay, says Rajeshwary Vijan, owner of Empower Recruitments, a recruiting company in Mumbai that places senior professionals.
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