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Electric vehicle makers prefer hiring talent straight out of college

For Gen-Z, startups aren’t the only Day Zero talent shoppers on campus. Hot new success stories in mobility – EV makers – are now lining up to hire fresh college grads.

And these companies don’t seem that keen on talent coming in from traditional automakers.

Staffing firm TeamLease said on average it hires 10 freshers for every one experienced employee for EV companies.

That compares to a ratio of four campus recruits to one experienced hand for conventional automakers. The company has placed over 2,000 people with seven EV manufacturers so far.

“The companies are asking us to send as many freshers as we can, which was really surprising for me too,” Indranil Ghosh, VP & Business Head, TeamLease Services told ET.

The roles range from assembly line workers on the factory floor to sales personnel and even test riders. Graduates from industrial training institutes (ITI) and diploma holders are finding work on factories floors while college graduates are being hired to handle sales, Ghosh said.

Quess Corp, the largest staffing firm in the country, said that EV makers are hiring a few experienced hands and then supplementing them with many more freshers rather than going for a team full of experienced employees.

That makes the teams not just cost-efficient but more effective too. “Because six hands are more productive than two hands,” explained Lohit Bhatia, President – Workforce Management at Quess Corp. “If they (EV makers) were earlier paying an experienced resource compensation of Rs 24 lakh, now they would hire one experienced resource and allocate five-six freshers reporting to them at compensation of Rs 3-3.5 lakh.”

The focus on freshers was also due to a lack of people with the necessary experience in the market, EV being a new industry, manufacturers told ET. People with experience at conventional automakers also must go through a lot of unlearning when joining an EV company, putting them more or less on par with freshers.

“Given that we have the need to go back to the drawing board repeatedly, we have found it easier to work with freshers. They come with fresh perspectives, don't have biases, and are ready to learn quickly,” Sunitha Lal, CHRO at electric scooter maker Ather Energy told ET. The company has about 1,200 employees of which 200 are campus recruits.

“We are an organisation built by two engineering graduates who were fresh out of college. We believe in the power the campus talent brings,” she said.

Rupali Sharma, the chairperson at Okinawa Autotech concurs. “They're like a clean slate, all set to step into the whole new corporate world,” she told ET in an emailed response.

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