While the penetration of staffing in India increased in past 5 years from a low 0.33% to currently over 0.6%, it still remains dismally low in comparison to the world average of 1.8%+. India further benefits from demographic dividend and nearly a million youth enter workforce each year. India’s current density of formal employment, at around 15% is one of the lowest in the world, in formal category. All of the above along with the focus of ISF in supporting the contract workers with dignity, besides exemplary standards of services to customers, will only increase the foothold of ISF in India in coming years.

The Government in the recent past has looked at “ Ease of doing business“ and brought about legislations and regulations to facilitate employment generation while streamlining the processes for staffing in India. It is my belief that in the next few years, the industry will adopt even better practices and receive the government legislation with open arms, improve quality of services and compliances par excellence thus attracting more talent to the staffing industry. Some of the measures like 4 labour codes, national unified labour license will attract more players to the industry to perform and work at national scale from regional and local scale today. Barriers of entry to create scale will be reduced and companies will leverage these advantages of regulations to foster growth of their enterprises and thereby the entire staffing industry. ISF is poised for leading this in the coming years. I have no doubt that we can easily double the count of employees attached to ISF in next 3-4 years. For customers as well the benefits of scale, to mobilize talent, manage payroll, compliances and training services shall provide them with world-class services of outsourcing while focussing on their core operations.

Staffing and its members provide that valuable service to society and India at large.

Though, I feel that the current crisis of Covid 19 is bringing a new set of challenges, it further creates a rationale for outsourcing the non-core function of organizations, as companies with limited time and resources after the lockdown will have to hit ground running to ensure the lost man-days and time is recovered by focus. Leaving all the other allied functions in the rebuild period to staffing partners. Even during the crises staffing partners have stood shoulder to shoulder to ensure that employees are cared for, benefits are remitted timely, and online digital based learnings and trainings provided to the staff in this “WFH“ period. These learnings will also mature the staffing industry and assist in managing any and all future challenges better suited.