The world’s largest labour market by 2030 – The CASE India Project

A highly-digitised world of recruitment means recruiters take in applications from a wide variety of countries. This naturally creates challenges around evaluating talent from backgrounds that these recruiters are completely unfamiliar with. While these backgrounds may be too numerous to mention, there is a country where the labour force is growing very strongly and which is not only sending much of its global talent abroad, but is quickly becoming a crucial market for graduate talent: India.

In 1990, India had around 5 million students studying at university; now that figure is approaching 40 million, a development on a completely different scale than many other countries. Considering that its tertiary enrolment ratio (the amount of high school graduates enrolling into universities) currently stands at 25% with many other developing nations reaching up to double this amount, it can be expected that India’s labour market will continue to gain a large degree of importance for global recruitment teams going forward. That is, what is currently 40 million students will soon become 80 million, and 8 million graduates a year will become 16 million.

Many of these graduates are well-educated and incredibly bright, and have had a much tougher time making it through the education system compared to the western world. As such, there is a wealth of potential in unlocking the Indian graduate market, though currently there are a number of barriers which stand in the way. India is a very large and diverse country, with most hiring teams completely unfamiliar with Indian institutions - this coupled with the relative ease of sending an application online means the number of qualified applicants for a given role may be quite low, something which causes many to dismiss Indian applicants.

Through the India Project, CASE strives to overcome these challenges. CASE is developing an international product which compares degrees of Indian universities, giving hiring teams a very simple breakdown of how comparable an Indian institution’s degrees are with degrees of other countries, along with detailed information about the university’s grading standards. The goal of the India Project is to connect this huge amount of untapped potential with international hiring teams looking for bright young talent, and in our own signature way which makes recruitment more contextualised, efficient and data-driven.

For more information, co-founder Dr. Jan Bergerhoff recently spoke about CASE’s India Project during our most recent episode of our Expert Talks webinar series.