Finders are keepers

Ramakant Achrekar and the Sharda Vidyamandir’s progeny of cricket geniuses are legendary. So what is it that makes this institute unique? The coach and his ability to spot talent and nurture it. Using communication skills, he instills a real work ethic, so that young kids can achieve that elusive goal of making it big.

When Sachin showed up at the age of 11, Achrekar saw his singular motivation right away and worked with it. “His first, second, and third priorities were to be a top level batsmen,which matched my ambition for him,” Achrekar says.

Corporates could learn something from Achrekar’s talent for finding and nurturing young aspirants. There is no dearth of job aspirants in India and with bulk recruitment a reality of business processes nowadays, spotting the right aspirants and retaining the same is most important.India’s leading recruiting agency, Mafoi Consultants Vice President Subramanian says, “We do recruitment as turnkey solutions for our clients where we would be recruiting 50 and above positions at a time. Mainly IT and IT-enabled services are the sectors recruiting in large numbers. Reliance Infocomm recently utilised our services. Turnkey solutions begin right from publishing creative advertisements calling for candidates, shortlisting the responses, screening tests and the final round of interview. Tests are vetted by our clients who also participate in the final interview.”

The ICICI Bank prefers to hire recruits through various channels. Vaibhav Dalal, HR Manager, ICICI Bank, says, “We normally recruit people by four channels, placement agencies, employee referrals, online through our website and by post for general positions. Specialized jobs still need a little headhunting to be done by agencies.”

Vaibhav says, “Since we have expanded our horizon across the financial sector, right from credit card to auto-finance, we are recruiting professionals from all sectors. So eighty per cent of our new recruits are from non-banking sector. We are not averse to public sector bankers approaching us, but age is a crucial criterion. Since we changed our work policy from 9 to 4 timings to an 8 to 8 shift, we had to take in 900 more new recruits throughout India. Just recently we filled up 85 positions in Karnataka and 35 in Kerala. We rarely advertise since we get so much of response by the four channels. The brand name of ICICI is well established which attracts young talent.”

Bulk recruiting is happening in a major way in the Business Process Outsourcing, be it medical transcription or call centers. The biggest challenge for companies is not only hiring professionals in large numbers, but also ensuring that the short-listed candidates have the right attitude to work in a call centre.

“We want to create a human organisation with loyalty and integrity,” says Elango R, associate vice president, HR & training, Msource India. Even during the ongoing downturn, Elango is one of the busiest HR professionals in Bangalore hiring around 150 people every month. Msource is the call centre subsidiary of Mphasis-BFL with 2,587 employees working across facilities in Bangalore, Pune and Mumbai.

Unlike most call centres where recruitment processes are not very stringent, Msource believes in conveying organisational values during interviews, followed by what Elango describes as “de-selling” the company. “After we have ensured that the person can fit in, we try to ‘de-sell’ Msource by telling him about night shifts, the challenging work atmosphere and other hardships. This takes care of possible lethargy that might creep in if the employee is not happy.

Specialized manufacturing companies like Volvo need a highly skilled blue collar personnel and white collar executives. Since finding such a perfect fit is

difficult, they have evolved a unique recruitment procedure. Emmaneul David, HR Head- Volvo, says, “We did recruiting in mass when we began operations and our recruiting procedure had to be unique. There were pressures on us from all quarters to give representation to local candidates.”

“The average worker profile was standardized, aptitude tests were formulated by psychologists and even practical tests were done. Such tests cleared the suspicion about credibility, brushing aside the pressure to influence the recruitment. To visualise the enormity of our task, we got nearly 10,000 applicants of whom 5,000 went through tests out of whom 1,000 were shortlisted for interview. The fact that there were only 150 posts to fill shows the kind of response we got.”

“Since we were a MNC, we do command respect in the job market and in turn we have to respect the expectation that every candidate had. Actually there was all possibility of violence in our recruitment drive since we were located in a village. Local villagers pressed on for the posts, but we made them undergo tests. We had to counsel the failed candidates about their results and pacify them,” narrates David.

Any new venture has to hire in all positions and has to scout for people with experience who might not be willing to come over to a company with no credentials. All startups have to deal with the issue of balancing intake of the experienced professionals and freshers.

Shampa Kochar, VP-HR-Customer Care of Spice Telecom lists down a few issues faced by a startup company. Lack of visibility into business to be able to forecast resource requirements.Lack of credentials leading to inability in attracting talent. Lack of ability in retaining existing employees. Lack of ability in providing a clearly defined role for employees in an unevolved HR policy. Shampa suggests that for positions with higher responsibility, it is better to go for highly experienced people who can handle multiple functions as and when required. Fresh recruits can be taken for lower roles since they are more flexible and can be re-deployed.

But Subramanian of Mafoi has a different viewpoint. “Recruitment process doesn’t change for a startup firm. Normally we help MNCs or NRIs who come to the city and operate from their hotels to set up companies. We sit with the client and evolve an HR policy based on which we embark on the recruitment drive. Startups hire on an ad hoc basis which isn’t a right policy decision for retaining people.”

Rehiring is happening and it is increasingly accepted in many companies nowadays. “Earlier there was distrust about any worker who left the company. But now they are open-minded about this issue since they find their old employees to be more loyal and responsible in their second innings”, says Subramanian. While David of Volvo opines, “People leave and go abroad and they call back, saying they couldn’t adjust to the work atmosphere and want to come back. We readily take them back if their track record is spotless and they repent their desertion.”

Spice Telecom also echoes the same opinion. “Companies in general hire for the value a person brings to the table. We therefore, re-hire our ex-employees who come back with a richer experience or relevant higher education. But ICICI’s Vaibhav expresses a word of caution. “We do re-hire an ex-employee based only on the referrals of his earlier boss about his/her conduct.”

Employee Referrals are happening and some companies hire most of their personnel through this method. For example Philips Software hires more than 60% of its new recruits through the referral route. This practice has always been there in the banking sector and Vaibhav of ICICI Bank, says it is common procedure. “We get most of the employee referrals at the junior executive level and we do take the person in, if the stipulated criteria are met.” Shampa points out that referrals also reduce the effective cost of hiring even where there are significant rewards for referring.

According to Mafoi Consultants, the market rates are holy. A compensation survey is vital to retain people particularly when they are much sought after by other companies. Normally, the company undertakes a survey jointly for an industry and the cost is shared. Some companies evaluate periodically and some do it during a crisis, that is, when they are drastically losing employees.

According to Volvo sources, compensation surveys are always done to prevent losing people. “Our major focus is on cultural value and job satisfaction. A job should offer challenges to an individual and maintain a cordial senior-junior relationship, “ they say. In Jobstreet the opinion is that HR managers are ready to pay a premium to get well trained experienced personnel!

Estimated at $100 billion worldwide, temporary staffing service or Flexi-staffing is emerging as a premier activity in the recruitment industry. Flexi-staffing normally happens in non-core business activities or on highly specialized jobs.

Flexi-staffing or otherwise called, casual contract, non-core business outsourcing or body shopping happens mainly in telecom, MNCs or software companies. Having visualized this service as one that lowers costs without cutting on productivity, many recruitment agencies have made a successful entry into this new avenue.

Prominent among them are People-one Consulting and Mafoi. Ajit Isaac, Director, People-one Consulting says, “We have a separate division called Flexione Workforce Solutions through which we have placed nearly 2000 people across India. Placements are happening mainly in sales and customer service. Normally we place flexi-staff for a period of 2-4 months or 8-9 months or during peak season, depending upon the client’s requirements. There have been a number of cases where the flexi-staff has been absorbed into the client’s company. Since we provide standard employee benefits, attrition has not been a problem at all.”

While Subramanian of Mafoi claims, “We are the pioneers in flexi-staffing in India and have already placed 5000 employees. The need for flexi-staff crops up during project-based requirements like product launches etc. For example, recently Reliance required lot of help in launching its telecom products for which we hired sales personnel, front office and telemarketing executives, errand boys, etc., All our flexi-staffers are on our permanent rolls and in Bangalore itself we have placed about 1200 on various jobs. They get all benefits that a fulltime employee would get.”

Issue BG27 June03