The country’s biggest lender, State Bank of India (SBI), plans to hire around 3,500 officers to bolster its operations and enhance service delivery nationwide.
The bank has recruited 505 Probationary Officers (POs) in June, and the process to fill a similar number of vacancies is on… applications have been received, SBI Deputy Managing Director (HR) & Chief Development Officer (CDO) Kishore Kumar Poludasu told PTI in an interview.
As regards specialist officers, he said, around 1,300 odd officers have already been selected to look after the IT and cybersecurity space. The advertisement for 541 PO vacancies is out. Applications have already been received. The recruitment for POs is through a three-stage process: preliminaries, mains, and a psychometric test and interviews. Additionally, he said, ”around 3,000 circle-based officers are now being considered.
This should get concluded in the current financial year.” Earlier this year, SBI Chairman C S Setty announced that the bank’s total recruitment across categories would be about 18,000. Of which, around 13,500 will be clerical recruitment, and the remaining will be probationary officers and locally based officers. In the first quarter, SBI announced the recruitment of 13,455 junior associates and 505 POs to enhance the customer experience at its branches across the country. Poludasu also said the country’s largest lender has devised a strategy to boost gender diversity, aiming to increase its women workforce to 30 per cent within five years.
"If we talk about frontline staff, women are almost 33 per cent, but as a total, if you see, they account for 27 per cent of the total workforce. So, we will be working towards improving this percentage so that the diversity gets further improved,” he said. The bank is taking measures to bridge the gap and achieve its medium-term goal of 30 per cent women in its workforce, he said. SBI has a total staff strength of more than 2.4 lakh, one of the highest in any organisation in the country and the highest in the banking industry.
He further said that the bank is committed to creating a workplace where women thrive at all levels, and that, through targeted programmes, SBI fosters leadership, work-life balance, and dignity at work. Highlighting some of the women-centric measures undertaken by the bank, Poludasu said the bank provides creche allowance for working mothers, runs a family connect programme, and offers training programmes to assist women employees returning from maternity, sabbatical, or extended sick leave.
In addition, he said, ’Empower Her’ is a flagship initiative to identify, mentor and groom women for leadership through structured leadership labs and coaching sessions to increase female representation in leadership roles and build a strong pipeline of future top women executives.
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