3.4 million apply for 11,000 clerical vacancies in SBI!

Chennai, Nov. 6 Clerical jobs, you may think, are out of fashion. Think again. State Bank of India advertised a few months ago for 11,000 clerical vacancies. The response, to put it mildly, has been overwhelming.

SBI received a staggering 3.4 million applications in response to the advertisement, according to its Deputy Managing Director, Mr N. Raja. That’s about 300 applications for every vacancy. “It might even earn us an entry into the Guinness Book of Records!” he quipped.

That might well happen — and for another reason too. Official estimates put the number of unemployed persons in the country at around 10 million. If one takes that at face value, this job advertisement has managed to attract a third of the unemployed in the country!

Last year, when SBI advertised for about 20,000 vacancies, it received about two million applications. Mr Raja explained that the fairly high response in the previous year was because the recruitment then had taken place after a considerable period of time and so there was pent-up demand.

Mammoth exercise

The response this time has been so high that the SBI has been forced to conduct its entrance test spread over six sessions on three Sundays, starting from November 8. The mammoth exercise will see exams conducted in two sessions (morning and afternoon of each Sunday) across 83 centres all over the country. In each city and town, a number of schools and colleges have been roped in to provide basic infrastructure . The exercise is estimated to cost at least Rs 65 crore.

The objective-type tests will evaluate the candidates’ General Awareness, General English, Quantitative Aptitude, Reasoning Ability, Marketing Ability and Computer Knowledge.

For applicants, career prospects are bright given SBI’s growth plans, Mr Raja said. (The bank currently has over 11,500 branches. It added over 1,500 branches in the last two years.) Besides, the Sixth Pay Commission recommendations have also helped raise pay levels to make them competitive with entry-level salaries in other sectors, he added. The starting emoluments for an employee in the clerical cadre would be around Rs 8,000 a month.

And the jobs are not going to be desk-bound. In keeping with the changing profile of bank jobs, the new recruits are expected to “have a flair for marketing, will be required to make customer calls and cross-sell products.”