New Delhi, May 9 (IANS): The State Bank of India (SBI) is in the process of hiring nearly 12,000 employees who will be trained for various roles, including IT, its Chairman Dinesh Khara said on Thursday.

The country’s largest lender had a total employee strength of 2,32,296 in FY24, down from 2,35,858 in the previous fiscal year.

"Around 11,000 to 12,000 employees are in the hiring process. These are general employees, but we actually are having a system where at our associate level and officers' level, around 85 per cent of them are engineers," Khara said as the bank posted a 24 per cent jump in net profit at Rs 20,698 crore in the fourth quarter of FY24.

He said that the bank will give new hires "some exposure to understand banking and thereafter, we start channelising them into various associate roles and some of them will be channelised in IT".

The SBI declared a dividend of Rs 13.70 per share for FY24. The net NPA fell to 0.57 per cent compared to 0.67 per cent last year. In Q4, total income went up to Rs 1.28 lakh crore from Rs 1.06 lakh crore in the year-ago period.