Ford Global Business Services and Ford India are looking to hire 700 people in the country in the year 2012. This move is due to the fact that the company still needs to bolster its workforce despite hiring 90 graduates from business school and 45 trainees with engineering background. However, the domestic division of the American manufacturer remains unconcerned by the employee attrition, in spite of the strike at its Chennai plant, ever-increasing competition in the market and a slump in sales across the industry in recent times.
According to Dhananjay Nair, General Manager, Human Resources, Ford India, "Retaining the workforce is not an issue. Our attrition rate at 6% is less than 50% of the market rate." The company's plant at Sanand, Gujarat, where it plans to operate from the first quarter of 2014, has received an investment of about Rs. 4,000 crores. In order to increase the staff at this plant, which already has a 10,000-strong workforce, by 50 per cent, the car maker is planning to hire 5,000 direct employees.
A significant number of the employees out of the 45 engineering graduates hired this year will be serving at the new plant in Gujarat. The rest of the hired graduates will be placed in various other departments like HR, finance, purchasing and IT. Nair stated that, "The Ford employer brand is very strong in Chennai. We have to test it out in Sanand." With this, he hinted that the Chennai plant may act as a talent pool for the Sanand factory.
The company is also banking on the currently-available global opportunities to train and place personnel for its new projects. According to Nair, "Ford launched a plant in Thailand this month and a lot of managers from India were there to support this launch. We are making sure that our employees and managers get experience from other plants that have been launched globally."
