Private life insurance companies, which heavily pruned their headcount last year, are now charting out aggressive hiring plans.
They now see better growth prospects and also have to fill up vacancies arising from natural attrition.
Private insurers reduced their head count by around 33,700 last year to 1,52, 874 as on December 2009, according to data collated by the Life Insurance Council. But the situation has quite dramatically changed.
MetLife Insurance is planning to employ 1,000 sales managers in the next fiscal, which will increase its employee count to 8,300.
“We are planning to open another 80 branches which will increase our total branches to 275. We will need to employ agents and staff to run them,” said Mr Rajesh Relan, CEO, Metlife Insurance.
Kotak Life Insurance has around 6,200 employees and is planning to add another 800 in the next fiscal, said Mr Gaurang Shah, Managing Director.
“We will start hiring from March; the process will run till September-October. However, we are still in the planning process and have not arrived at the final number yet. Since we are an established company, most of our recruitment will be replacement hiring”, said Mr Judhajit Das, Chief-Human Resources, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, adding that the company has around 35,000 employees.
Mr Malay Ghosh, President, Reliance Life Insurance, said: “We have about 17,000 employees in the company. In the coming, years we would be looking to add to our headcount primarily in the sales functions. We are targeting a 15-20 per cent growth in the next fiscal”.
Max New York Life is planning to add 3,000 employees to its current strength of 10,500.