India's largest lender, State Bank of India (SBI), is looking to hire freshers from campuses for "entry-level jobs on a contract basis", said chairperson Arundhati Bhattacharya on Saturday.
To overcome the problems in offering "market-linked salaries" by the state-owned lender, "we try to explain even if they go to other banks their propensity of changing (jobs) is quite high", Bhattacharya said. "If they get 5 years or 6 years with SBI or SBICap, it offers a good training for them," NDTV Profit quoted her as saying.
As a huge number of officers and staff will retire at the major public sector banks over the next two years, nearly 80,000 vacancies are expected to come up.
"Being a government-owned bank, SBI is facing several human resource challenges," Bhattacharya said.
One of the main problems faced by the bank in human resource management is "poaching of its staff" by private sector banks, especially at the middle level, she said.
SBI is also making efforts to employ the staff recruited by its subsidiaries, which give higher pay packages.
"We are trying to see if our subsidiaries can recruit and depute to us. For example, in respect to cash management product we have a total range of people who are actually recruited by our subsidiaries and deputed to us so that we have market-linked salaries for them," she said.
Alloting employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) to senior staff in order to retain them for a longer period is also under consideration, she said.
The SBI chief said "its inability to offer market-linked salaries at higher level is hurting the bank".
