Happy New Year!

Hi There,

Wishing you and your Family a Very Happy New Year (2009). God bless this year of the Bull with peace & prosperity to your Kith and Kin and everybody around the globe.

Regards,
Viral Thaker

P Consider the environment. Please don't print this e-mail unless you really need to.

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The Top 25 Signs of a Dysfunctional Workplace

Throughout time, people everywhere have engaged in the great tradition of complaining about the workplace. But as a boss or an HR manager, how do you know when job complaints are general venting and when there is really something wrong? Part of your job is to make sure that employees are happy and productive, and that can't happen in a dysfunctional environment.

If you're having a hard time separating hyperbole from legitimate complaints, it may be worth reviewing the top 25 signs of a dysfunctional workplace. Note that all the examples below — listed in no particular order — are taken from my recent real-world work experiences and situations, no matter how unlikely they might seem.

1. Nothing can get done without the boss's approval. Sure, the boss has the final say, but work should be delegated, with employees taking responsibility for tasks that do not require the boss's personal time and attention. The organization will be much more productive and empowered if the top dog doesn't have to sign off on every little thing.

2. Nothing can get done unless employees go behind the boss's back. It's one thing if the boss is overly involved, but it's a serious problem if the boss is actually a roadblock to getting work done. It may be time to call in the consultants.

3. No one is sure who the boss really is. The titles may be clear, but so many people are jostling for the top post that employees aren't sure who actually makes the final decisions. This can cause more than a little frustration.

4. No one is getting paid on time — or at all. This is very obvious sign that things are going poorly. Even at startups, employees need to be clear about their pay schedule to feel secure.

5. Cubicle mates IM (instant message) each other but never talk. It's nice to have a quiet office, but some topics require face-to-face discussion. As with email, it's difficult to express tone via IM, opening the door to misunderstandings.

6. No one contributes in meeting because everyone is busy IM-ing or giving a "YES" chorus to boss's ideas. Meetings are for brainstorming ideas and discussing important topics, not for secret, snarky IM conversations about how boring the meeting is. Pull the plug.

7. Too many pointless meetings/concalls are being held. If a meeting has no set agenda or is just being held to rehash previous discussions, axe it.

8. There's more than one "secret couple" on staff. It makes sense that a lot of couples meet each other at work because that's where they spend a lot of their time. However, having "secret" couples on staff (some of which involve people that may be having an extramarital affair) can lead to workplace tension and drama.

9. Attorneys outnumber staff. Perhaps your business practices should be re-examined?

10. Reward system? What reward system? You can't have a stick and no carrot.

11. The IT head gets arrested for hosting porn on company servers. This is a clear case of lack of supervision and not being in tune with what's going on with the staff.

12. IT rules are so strict that you're not allowed to know your own computer login. It's important to have IT security policies, but if the rules are too strict, employees can feel distrusted.

13. Your boss — an eccentric Internet millionaire — offers to pay your monthly salary in gold coins because "gold is more stable than the dollar." Although management and entry-level employees rarely live the same lifestyle, management should at least show some understanding about employees' financial needs.

14. Your manager was hired because she listed "whiskey" as a hobby on her résumé. Sure, having quirky staff members can liven up the workplace, but it's not a good idea to hire someone just because they'd make a good drinking buddy or golf partner.

15. Your co-worker decides to show, not tell, the visiting U.K. executive what a "wedgie" is at an office holiday party. Even at office parties, there should be some sense of workplace propriety. Getting drunk at an office event and misusing the photocopy machine is a similar sign of workplace dysfunction.

16. The boss takes pride in his "wall of shame," where employee mistakes are posted and circled in red for the entire world to see. Rewards can be public, but chastisement should be kept private.

17. The boss screams at the assistant when there's skim milk instead of half-and-half in the coffee. Just because the boss is in a position of authority doesn't mean that he or she can use that power to bully or intimidate employees.

18. Emergency drills are conducted without employees being told that it's a drill. In general, the more information you share with your staff, the more they will feel like a contributing member of a team. Hiding crucial information can lead to distrust and a depleted sense of value.

19. At least once per week, you hear quiet sobbing from an adjacent cubicle. One unhappy employee can ruin the morale of the entire office. Try to immediately address any employee issues before they spread.

20. Entire departments go to lunch together every day, leaving parts of the company completely unmanned for hours at a time. Workplace camaraderie is great, except when the network goes down and there's no one left in the IT department to fix it.

21. What matters is not what you've accomplished in a day, but how many hours you were seen "working." We all know at least one person who hangs around until everyone else goes home or shows up at 7 a.m. just to make a good impression with the boss. However, odds are they are only working seven hours of their eight-hour day. Reward productivity, not time spent at the office.

22. The accounting department has accumulated 23 weeks of paid vacation because no one there has ever taken a day off. People are not machines. Encourage staff to take vacations, or they just might walk out one day.

23. Managers are CCd on every company email, even when it's just about where to order lunch. This is called covering your back, and it usually happens when employees are not empowered enough to make decisions within their scope of authority.

24. The only way someone can get promoted is if a senior staff member dies. Hope is a powerful incentive to keep employees motivated and on task. If there is no hope of advancement, quality of work and enthusiasm will suffer.

Happy Diwali.

 

Regards,
Viral Thaker
Join me on LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/in/vrlthaker
Visit my blog The Alchemist

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Logica introduces new facility at Chennai to expand operations

Chennai: UK-based Logica strengthens its foothold in India, by establishing a new facility in the country at Chennai. After rooting itself in Bangalore which houses its first facility in the country, the IT and management consultancy establishes the new facility to accelerate its global delivery model.

The new Chennai center will support the company's future offshore growth providing services in the areas of Business Process Outsourcing, Remote Infrastructure Management, and Application Services. It is spread across 120,000 sq ft with the capacity for 1,500 employees. The company has earmarked an investment of around eight million pounds to accelerate blended delivery and grow its offshore and nearshore centres. It plans to have 8,000 employees in these centers by the end of 2009.

The company expects to expand the facility, to which Abhay Gupte, CEO, Logica India, commented, "Our plan to double the headcount in our offshore and nearshore facilities by the year 2009 reiterates our commitment and dedication to strengthening our operations in India. We aim to partner with the city to ensure we are a good corporate citizen here in Chennai." Andy Green, Global Chief Executive, Logica, also adds on to it saying, "As the centre grows we will build specific competency areas based on client requirements. The investment climate, facilities and talent available in Chennai are excellent."

Currently the Logica facility in Bangalore houses about 3000 employees and provides the full spectrum of system integration and outsourcing services, including System Design, Applications and Product Development, Applications Management, Infrastructure Management and Business Process Outsourcing. India also plays a pivotal role in leading a comprehensive program to design and implement a group-wide innovation strategy.

U.S. based Logica has 39,000 people across 36 countries. It is listed on both the London Stock Exchange and Euronext (Amsterdam)

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By the way, my new email address is <viralthaker@in.com>. Please add this to your address book. If you add me as a friend, you can also send me personal messages on IN.com.

Thanks,
Viral Thaker

Never Stop Recruiting - ABC of Recruiting.

A couple of weeks ago I had penned an article comparing recruiting to dating. I recently had an experience of a different nature. I was on a plane returning from an engagement and a man named Balaji sat down next to me. He spent the next 90 minutes trying to save my soul.

This was a waste of time.

Not that my soul isn’t worth saving. But it was a waste because I am very firm in my religious beliefs and am not about to change them because of a 90-minute conversation with someone.

It was not an unpleasant conversation. He seemed like a delightful man and we laughed at times as we talked. He was not going to change my mind, but I did respect his commitment. His dedication. He did not let go. Our flight took off at 5:45 in the morning and he was in full swing. He started the conversation before he had his seat belt buckled and he kept it up even as people were deplaning.

He was recruiting.

I was impressed with his zeal. Then again, he is recruiting for a very important cause. It occurred to me that he probably started up these conversations whenever he traveled. He was always looking for recruits, and to put this in recruiting parlance, he is frequently looking for “passive candidates.” He never rests in his search, as there are always openings in his organization. Was he effective? Not with me, but I wonder how many people he has successfully recruited. Lots, I would guess, from the extent of his travels. He has been all around the country and all around the world. He finds people wherever they are. That’s his mission, and that’s what his organization needs.

What’s your mission? Professionally speaking, what are you trying to accomplish? There’s a lot we can learn from Balaji. Are you constantly recruiting? Do you strike up conversations with people on planes, in malls, or at events? Are you always trying to meet new people? In the movie “Glengarry Glen Ross” the sales manager says selling is as simple as ABC: Always Be Closing. There are lots of similarities between selling real estate and recruiting, but that’s for another article.

Perhaps we need to create acronyms to remind us how to be successful recruiters. Maybe, if you’ve been finding yourself lax in the networking department, your ABC is “Always be connecting.” If your pipeline is drying up and you’re feeling frustrated, JKL - Just Keep Looking! Or NOP - Never Overlook Possibilities. But don’t compromise your standards. Remember PQR - Persistent Quality Recruiting. But be sure to MNO - Make Numerous Overtures if you’re going to EFGH - Effectively Find Good Hires. OK, I mean, okay, maybe I’m getting carried away, but we do need to remember that candidates don’t always present themselves neatly at our office door. We find them when and where we least expect them.

When I was a consulting human resource generalist for a small startup organization, I used to say that HR people never take off the HR hat. Whether you are at a meeting, on the phone, or at the holiday party, you are always on duty. Same goes for a recruiter. You never know when or where you are going to find that next great candidate. Balaji had no idea about my religious background, my views, or the depth of my belief. That didn’t stop him, and he never lost his good humor as we talked. He did get a little more earnest as we began our final approach because he realized that he had precious little time left to complete his mission.

We can follow his lead. It’s easy to get turned off by a candidate. If we stop recruiting at the first “not interested” from our candidates, we’re going to have a lot of short phone calls. Balaji didn’t give up. He made sure to get my business card early in the conversation, so I’ll be very surprised if I don’t hear from him. (Note: before I completed this article I had received e-mails from him.) He sincerely cares about what he’s doing. He’s good at what he does because he has a passion for recruiting. Do you? Do you find yourself getting burned out? Too many candidates, too many openings, or too many rejections?

I remember one time when a friend of mine was returning home from a college-recruiting trip. He did not usually take part in the college visits, as he was primarily an executive recruiter. His focus was management positions. But this trip included a couple of business schools from which his organization hoped to recruit people to be part of the management-trainee program as well as recruiting at other schools. So Krishnan went along for the whole trip. Now he was on his way back. He was tired, he was cranky (he always said that he didn’t care particularly for campus recruiting because it reminded him of how old he was) and he just wanted to put on his headphones, recline his seat, and close his eyes ’till he landed.

Well, you know what happened. The seat next to Krishnan was empty until just before the door closed. Krishnan was anticipating having a little extra elbowroom and then this guy came down the aisle carrying just a briefcase and a trench coat. He looked stressed out. Krishnan assumed it was due to his almost missing the flight. The man stashed his coat and case overhead and flopped into the seat next to Krishnan. Krishnan could sense that he wanted, or perhaps needed, to talk. Fighting every urge to close his eyes and pretend that he was listening to music, Krishnan removed his headphones and asked, “Rough day?” That was all it took.

His name was Raj and he was out of work. He’d been looking for about six months. He’d had a few leads but nothing had panned out and now he was returning home after a trip that he had hoped would result in an offer, but it didn’t look good. He had made this trip at his own expense to follow up on a lead and a phone interview. He thought that by making the effort and covering the expense of the flight, he might impress the company with his interest in the position and commitment to this opportunity. Raj wasn’t keen on relocating. He would rather stay in the Northeast, but he hadn’t been having any luck so he took a chance on casting his net a little further even if it meant uprooting his family.

But the interviews had gone terribly. The person he’d spoken with on the phone was too busy to spend more than a few minutes with him, he had to start from scratch with every person he met (hadn’t they prepared at all?) and several had no idea why they had been called in to meet with him. It was a frustrating day all around, and right now he didn’t have a particularly high opinion of the company he’d visited. He even said at one point, “I was going to pull my daughter out of the school she loves and away from all her friends for a company like this? Seems like this day was a total waste of time and, unfortunately, money too.”

In the fairy tale version of this story, Raj was perfect for a hard-to-fill position that Krishnan was working on. No, that didn’t happen, but they did exchange cards and Krishnan met with him back in New York. Krishnan didn’t have an opening, but he was very impressed with Raj’s strategic approach to finding a job, his clear analysis of the organizations with which he had met, and his insightful manner of summing up a complex situation, looking at it from all perspectives. Krishnan referred him to a colleague who was recruiting for someone with Raj’s skills, and he succeeded in securing a position. Krishnan succeeded as well. Raj always had good things to say about Krishnan’s company. The recruiter to whom Krishnan referred Raj has become a more valuable part of Krishnan’s network, referring several good candidates, a few of whom Krishnan has hired.

There’s a lot we can learn from Balaji, and from Krishnan. Never stop recruiting, wherever you are, no matter how tired you are, no matter what time of day it is. You never know where that next great candidate will be, or who will lead you to that person. Would you have caught the signals that Krishnan picked up on? Guy comes on a plane looking stressed, carrying nothing but a trench coat and briefcase, dressed in a suit appropriate for an interview — this might be a guy worth talking with. Maybe it’s just someone who needs to talk, not someone we can hire or refer. It never hurts to hone our networking skills.

To best serve our organizations we need to be constantly on the lookout for talent, and we can never predict where we’re going to find it, or when. Very often candidates will present themselves when we least expect it. By keeping an open mind we increase our likelihood of success. Maybe not immediate success, but somewhere down the line. Gary Player used to say, “The more I practice, the luckier I get.” I tell people, on both sides of the interview table, that the only way to get good at interviewing is to interview. The best way to keep our recruiting antennae honed is to constantly look for signals and indicators, then to test our assumptions. The more we practice the more we’ll succeed.

And don’t close yourself off the next time someone plops down next to you on a plane. It might be your next great hire, or it might be Balaji. Either way, you’ve got something to learn and possibly a lot to gain.

You may not save a soul, but you may help someone and you may even fill a job. And for a recruiter, that’s a pretty good day.

 

 

Regards,

Viral Thaker

Practice Lead – IT

 

 

Ikya Human Capital Solutions Pvt. Ltd.,

#2, 5th Floor, Alsa Towers

186-187, Poonamalee High Road,

Kilpauk, Chennai - 10 

 

Hand Phone: +91 98403 31171

Office Tel: +9144 4227 4240

www.ikyaglobal.com

 

Join me on LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/in/vrlthaker

For Industry and Manpower related news visit our blog Human Power

 

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PE firms eye BT's stake in TechM

As British Telecom (BT), who has 31 percent stake in Tech Mahindra (TechM), a solution provider in the telecom space, planning to sell its 21 percent stake, many private equity players are now eyeing to acquire those stakes.

Sources said, "BT is learnt to be keen in retaining 10 percent stake in venture, post transaction, given that it has committed $2 billion in business to TechM."

 

A part sale of 21 percent in the company would value the transaction at over Rs. 1,850 crore at Thursday's closing price of Rs.771.40 on the BSE.

"BT is not looking at a total exist from Tech Mahindra. While Tech Mahindra is no more a strategic investment for BT, it has substantial and long term business interest in the Indian company," sources said to The Economic Times.

Sources also mentioned that the sale will help it at a time when its profitability is on the slide, while also helping it earn a good return on the residual stake when there are limited attractive investment options in the market. By retaining some stake BT would prefer to have board representation.
An industry sources commended that the 20 percent stake on offer makes a strategic investment by any other Indian IT company such as Infosys or Wipro unlikely.

"Even if they get BT's entire stake, the question is whether any of them will be a partner in a JV where the Mahindras have the major stake. In contrast a private equity player could look at it only from a 4-5 year investment horizon," source added.

"Even if they get BT's entire stake, the question is whether any of them will be a partner in a JV where the Mahindras have the major stake. In contrast a private equity player could look at it only from a 4-5 year investment horizon," source added.

The actual transaction is expected to take place in a month. In most joint ventures, the first right of refusal in case of sale is with the other partner. However a company official said, "Our official stance is unchanged. The statement we issued earlier still holds good."

Sanjay Kalra, President, Tech Mahindra said, "As a strategic partner of BT, we have enjoyed a great relationship with BT over many years and will continue delivering on long term contracts and winning new business."

On the other hand, BT says, "India remains a critical market both for BT and our customers, and we expect to continue developing both the operational network and service presence that we have established over years."

Small IT firms outsource marketing

Small and medium IT firms (SMBs) are opting to outsource their key marketing functions like making pitch documents, lead generation and power point presentations. Even reverse outsourcing is taking its course as they are also marketing their products through local agencies in the U.S.

This new trend is becoming popular among the startups who are on the lookout for potential buyers and investors. Apart from the startups, many VCs and PEs are approaching outsourced Chief Marketing Officers for their company portfolios. As reported in Economic Times, Gaurav Gupta of Everest Group, says, "Outsourcing is catching up in telemarketing and analytics, particularly in financial services sector like credit cards, insurance and the like. Even captives of i-banks, for instance, bring to offshore tasks like pitch documents, power points, analytics and marketing support."

 

This has indeed opened a huge business opportunity for the service providers who are targeting small enterprises lacking in bandwidth or the ones who cannot afford a high-cost full time marketing resource. Vinod Harith, chief marketing officer (CMO), Founder, Director of Axis offers to build and run a company's annual marketing calendar. Tracking the same point, Vijay Menon a freelance CMO says, "These enterprises may not be able to derive benefits from hiring a full-time CMO, who may come at a salary level bill of up to Rs.50 lakh per annum."

In the global scenario, demand for outsourcing is seen for companies in the $20 million-$100 million range, and the biggest challenge for these companies would be building a brand. Srini Rajam, CEO, Ittiam Systems, makes a clear distinction between marketing and branding. Marketing becomes the fulcrum of any organization in deciding the road map as well as the genesis of product and services. Some parts of branding activity could be outsourced especially when a product is being taken to the market, he adds.

Wipro to cut 1000 heads for non-performance

Wipro Technologies, an IT solution firm, is screening around 2,400-3000 employees (4-5 percent of the total workforce) on the grounds of non-performance. According to sources, around 1000 employees are being given the pink slips, while about 2000 are allowed to move on.

As per a report in The Economic Times, the company will provide some of the employees with counseling for boosting up their performance. Pratik Kumar, Wipro's Corporate VP (human resources), confirming the move, said, "It's a regular annual exercise. As the appraisal cycle gets over, a multi-layer review happens. Following that, people who have fallen in the lower quadrants of performance are put on watch. Some are asked to pull up and others are asked to move on." It includes all the 60,000 global IT services employees from the senior leadership team down to the person with one-year experience.

On the number of the employees who had been asked to move on, Kumar said the company did not disclose the number. But it was "significantly lower than 2,000" as company sources said about 1,000 employees were being asked to leave.

The employee base in Wipro has also come down from 62,070 to 61,345, as seen in the quarter ended June. But the company refutes it to be related to the slowdown and rather emphasizes it to be industry driven move. Kumar says, "It's not just our view, but the industry's view, that we have to be thoughtful of additions and drive productivity. We took a closer look at our hiring and realized that we did not need to hire more, since there were people on the bench."

However, the companies who have recently adopted the trend of giving off pink slips at anytime, decline it as a move to push through the slowdown era. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the country's largest IT services firm, had given pink slips to 500 non-performers. IBM, too, had asked about 700 employees in India to leave, citing non-performance. In July, Patni Computer Systems had shown the door to 400 employees.

Fuzzy math in Google tool!

Tuesday, August 26, 2008 11:59 AM

News analysis Google's calculator has some trouble handling math with some large numbers, an issue that is not unheard of in computing circles but that might not sit well at a supremely nerdy company that is named after a humongous number.

 

The errors appear, though not consistently, with some very large numbers. For example, 2,999,999,999,999,999 minus 2,999,999,999,999,998 should be 1, but Google calculator shows it as 0.

It is not a simple case of a cutoff where things fall apart, though. 1,999,999,999,999,999 minus 1,999,999,999,999,995 incorrectly equals 0, but 1,999,999,999,999,999 minus 1,999,999,999,999,993 correctly equals 6. And 400,000,000,000,002 minus 400,000,000,000,001 incorrectly equals 0, but 400,000,000,000,002 minus 400,000,000,000,000 correctly equals 2.

Perhaps most amusing for the schadenfreude crowd, Google botches some math involving a googol, which is 1 followed by 100 zeros. The quantity of a googol plus one, minus a googol, equals 0 rather than the correct result, 1.

Cutting Google some slack
To be sure, math is difficult at this scale, where special methods for encoding numbers must be used if fine precision is to be maintained. Happily for those building calculators, though, it is a relatively unusual requirement in the real world: when measuring numbers on the magnitude of the distances between stars, it is rare that precision of a few centimeters can be obtained. And it is also rare that such precision actually is relevant.

Big numbers are often expressed with a two-part floating-point format, with some small number (the mantissa) multiplied by 10 to some power (the exponent). For example, Google's revenue in the second quarter was US$1.25 billion, which also can be expressed as US$1,250,000,000, or as US$1.25 times 10 to the power of 9, or as US$1.25 x 10^9. Floating-point math is good at spanning vast ranges of numbers, but typically the first component only keeps track of limited number of digits, so the small change falls by the wayside.

Precise math on computers is compounded by the fact that computers typically work in binary math, with digits of only 0 or 1, whereas people operate in decimal math, with digits running from 0 through 9. Accuracy is compromised when computers convert numbers into binary for processing, then back to base 10 to show us the results.

Indeed, even with decades of computing technology already under our belts, it was not until IBM's latest flagship Power6 processor that even Big Blue could do actual decimal math without converting into binary and back.

Ordinary calculators quickly run out of steam when trying to deal with large numbers. Sure, Google may have some issues, but most handheld calculators do not even let you type the number 1,999,999,999,999,993 much less do some mathematical operation on it. And there is not a big market for software such as Wolfram Research's Mathematica that can get the math right.

Google acknowledged its math is imperfect. "We are aware that the calculator tool in Google Web search is not working properly for certain calculations, and we are looking into this problem further. We apologize for any problems that this causes our users," the company said in a statement.

So big math is deceptively difficult. Should Google be forgiven for shortchanging us a bit when it comes to significant digits?

No, Google should do better
No. Any company that named itself after a big number must be held to a higher standard.

It might slow down calculations fractionally if Google had to detect when a large but high-precision number was involved, then send that calculation to a different server equipped with a more advanced math algorithm. And Google is rightly focused on server response, since users search more when the search engine is faster. But this issue is part of Google's core culture and image. Google muffing the math is like a politician wrapping himself in a flag that has got an extra couple stars.

After all, this is the company that decided to raise US$2,718,281,828 billion in its IPO, a reference to "e", the base of natural logarithms, and that invited job applicants who could solve a math puzzle.

Ideally, Google could fix the algorithm. That is what Microsoft did with a recent Excel math problem and Intel did--at great expense--with the notorious FDIV bug that afflicted some Pentium processors in the 1990s.

Others have found limits with Google's calculator. For example, 2.00135558564^1023 is interpreted by Google's calculator as 1.79769313 x 10^308. But increase that number by one eensy little amount to 2.00135558565^1023, and Google interprets it as a search, not a math problem.

This leads me to my final thought. In that last example, Google punts on the math and shows a mere search result, which is not likely to lead anyone astray. It is what is called a graceful failure mode. It is better to show no results than bad results. That is especially important given that the very calculations where people would use a calculator are the very ones where, unlike the examples above, people are not going to notice an error.

This article was first published as a blog on CNET News.com.

iGate CFO dies of cardiac arrest

Ramachandran Natesan, the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), of iGate, an integrated technology and operations firm, is announced to be dead. After five years of service as the CFO, the man who was a resident of Bangalore met his end due to sudden cardiac arrest. According to Phaneesh Murthy, CEO of iGATE, "He demonstrated considerable talent, poise, commitment and determination to help iGATE achieve its vision and mission." Moreover, as per company officials, as a member of the iGATE Executive Committee Natesan has been integrally involved in all the key aspects of the company and his sound logic, wisdom, balance and stability have been a large part of iGATE's transformation.

Nateshan has left behind his wife and two children.

India's growth to be fuelled by 20 cities, says report

India's growth will be driven by 20 cities, according to a report released here Thursday.
These 20 cities together account for 10 percent of India's population, but generate 31 percent of disposable income and in 2007-08 fuelled consumption worth $100 billion, said the report titled "Next Urban Frontier: 20 Cities to Watch".

The report was jointly prepared by economic think-tank National Council of Applied Economic Research and the Future Group's research wing Future Capital Research.

As 379 million people will be added to India's urban spaces over the next 40 years - which is the more than the current population of the US - these cities will be crucial for the economic development and will emerge as the major market for financial services and consumer goods.

The report says more than half the total urban income is generated by these 20 cities and they account for 60 percent of saving of the whole nation.

According to the report, these 20 cities are divided into three categories - mega cities, boom towns and niche cities.

The mega cities are the largest cities in terms of population and overall consumer market.

Boom towns are the next set of big population cities, with high expenditure per household.

Niche cities, which are smaller in terms of overall population but still hit well above weight in spending per household.

The eight mega-cities are all the four metros, along with Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Pune.

The seven boom towns are Surat, Kanpur, Jaipur, Lucknow, Nagpur, Bhopal and Coimbatore.

The five Niche cities are Faridabad, Amritsar, Ludhiana, Chandigarh And Jalandhar.

The report also highlights some interesting findings such as boom towns registering the fastest economic growth.

It also says more than half of the households in the country will be middle-class by 2016, while the high-income segment will triple by that year.

The report highlights that the mega cities households spend the least on an average on education and recreation, and 19 percent of households prefer to keep surplus income at home.

 

Regards,

Viral Thaker

Practice Lead – IT

 

 

Ikya Human Capital Solutions Pvt. Ltd.,

#2, 5th Floor, Alsa Towers

186-187, Poonamalee High Road,

Kilpauk, Chennai - 10 

 

Hand Phone: +91 98403 31171

Office Tel: +9144 4227 4240

www.ikyaglobal.com

 

Join me on LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/in/vrlthaker

For Industry and Manpower related news visit our blog Human Power

 

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i-flex founders to make an exit

After staking their independency for three years, the Oracle acquired i-flex solutions' founders Deeepak Ghaisas, R Ravisankar, and Rajesh Hukku are set to step out of the company. "Now that i-flex has been integrated with Oracle, they don't have the same independence as before. Everything is dictated by Oracle's policies," a source said to Economic Times.

Rajesh Hukku initially was the CEO of i-flex and later managed the firm as its Chairman and Managing Director (MD). Deepak Ghaisas was the CEO of the India operations and the CFO of the company while Ravisankar, who was also a part of the initial founding team, was based in the U.S., overseeing the firm's international operations.

 

Oracle, according to the revised version of 2007, has around 83 percent of stake in i-flex. The software company acquired this Citi group captive through gradual purchasing of stakes through open market purchases after the initial acquiring of the 41 percent of stakes from the venture group.

 

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6 Steps for Hiring the Best Every Time

Over the past 5-plus years, I’ve been involved in hundreds of searches, worked with few dozens of hiring managers, trained 50 to 100 recruiters, and worked closely with dozens of major companies. Following are some of the common threads among the best techniques, processes, and tools that I have seen and used.

Collectively they add up to a business process for hiring top people. While Performance-based Hiring provides a simplified high-level summary of these, it’s in the details and execution that will ultimately determine your personal success.

Following are the six core aspects of hiring top talent. A couple of key themes stand out. First, offer and recruit the best people based on career growth if you want to attract the best on a consistent basis. Second, allow people to just look and explore, rather than require them to apply for a job. This prevents them from opting out before you even see them.

If you can address these two issues, you are well on your way to hiring top people every time.

Six Steps for Hiring the Best People Every Time

1. Offer WOW! Jobs. Traditional job descriptions listing skills, qualifications, and experience are not marketing tools or predictors of job success. These lists must be diminished in importance. In their place, job descriptions must emphasize what the person will do, learn, and become. As part of this, clearly describe the impact the person can make. From a marketing standpoint, don’t use internal, non-descriptive titles. “Not-for Profit CEO – Back to the Future” was a title we used to find the head of a major charity. In the ad, we described the five-year impact the person would have on the inner city. For bank tellers to fill a mid-day shift we added the tagline “Are You a Desperate Housewife?”
   
   
2. Make it about careers, not compensation. The ad copy must clearly emphasize the challenges in the job, the impact the person can make on the company, and some of the growth opportunities. For example, “Help us launch a new Blue Tooth line” is far more compelling than “Must have five years of product marketing experience.” When recruiters first contact candidates – whether they’re active or passive – the emphasis must clearly be on getting the candidate to evaluate your opportunities as career moves, not just as another job for more money or one closer to home. This will help ease the negotiating process and minimize the threat of counter-offers and competitive offers.
   
   
3. Implement an early-bird sourcing strategy. It’s a Web 2.0 world and this means a complete understanding of search engine marketing techniques. Part of this is writing compelling jobs ads that are easily found. From a more advanced perspective, recognize that top performers don’t enter the job-hunting market ready to hunt and peck for a job that matches their skills and experience. Instead, they tip-toe into the market, first contacting former associates and doing some top-down industry and company research. If this is fruitless, they then expand their search efforts through aggressive networking and Googling for jobs. Sourcing programs need to target these early entrants by positioning ads in the right places and proactively expanding employee referral programs to ensure that the best people contact your employees first.
   
   
4. Provide candidates multiple opportunities to “just look” rather than buy. Most company hiring processes and career websites are designed based on the premise that candidates are ready to apply for a specific job. This is a flawed premise. The best people, especially the early entrants, are just looking and comparing options. To accommodate these people, recruiters must not push the process too fast, managers must be willing to talk or meet with candidates on an exploratory basis, and career websites need to allow candidates to chat with a recruiter in real time and look at groups of jobs, rather than specific requisitions.
   
   
5. Make the interview your secret weapon. Here’s something that will shock you - the primary purpose of the interview is to recruit the candidate, not assess competency! However, done properly you’ll more accurately assess candidate competency and motivation than ever before, but this is a secondary effect. Part of this means using the interview to look for voids and gaps in the candidate’s background, with the expectation that your job will fulfill them. For example, if the candidate hasn’t managed as large a team, or handled a comparable project, or had the exposure your job provides, these voids become learning opportunities and more important than compensation as reasons to accept your position. Obviously, if the gaps are too big, the candidate is unqualified for the job, and if the gaps aren’t sufficient, the job isn’t a worthy move.
   
   
6. Use a multi-factor decision tool to negotiate the offer, fight off the competition and prevent counter-offers. Recruiting is not something done at the end of the interview, it starts with first contact. Part of this is suggesting to the candidate on first contact that she should evaluate your opportunity as a career move. During the interview this is reinforced by presenting voids in the candidate’s background as potential learning experiences. While it’s important for companies to judge candidates across multiple factors, it’s equally important for candidates to evaluate different job opportunities across multiple factors as well. Some of these include learning, growth opportunities, compensation, quality of the hiring manager and the team, job match, visibility, cultural fit and work/life balance. This can be formalized by sending the candidate a multi-factor decision form comparing your job with all others he’s considering, including his current position. As long as your job represents a positive long term career move, your job will often win out without compensation being the dominant criteria.

Of course, there are more steps to the process than what’s mentioned here. Regardless, the key to making the end-to-end process work is to step back and understand the unique needs of top performers. This high-level view also allows the integration between the steps to be designed into the process at the beginning rather than as after-thoughts.

While converting the hiring process into a scalable business process is no easy task, it’s not nearly as hard as implementing any major companywide business initiative. If hiring the best is a company’s number-one strategic objective, then nothing is more important.

IT attrition seen receding, thanks to slowdown in US

J Padmapriya & P P Thimmaya BANGALORE

The Economic Times.

LOWER attrition has come out as a silver lining for IT companies as they battle recessionary clouds in US markets and an uncertain business environment. Large companies may have been able to arrest attrition by 0.5% to even 2%, in some cases, in the first quarter in the backdrop of an overall depressed recruitment scene.
Employees are getting fewer job calls from headhunters and increments are projected to be ebbing, resulting in lower bargaining power. Besides, companies are being extremely choosy in recruiting numbers in a view to lower operating costs and sport a slimmer bench. Recruitment agencies say, just like water finds its level, perhaps expectations on salaries would be more realistic now besides discouraging the practice of job-hopping.

For most of the large IT services major like TCS, Infosys, Wipro and Satyam attrition rates are hovering somewhere between 11-20%. But anything beyond 25% reveals a danger signal. According to Angel Broking IT analyst Harit Shah, “There has been a general declining trend in attrition for most large companies. Steps like clear career paths have proved to be attractive retention techniques.”

Large companies are also believed to be insisting on signing bonds and taking deposits from rookie engineers to ensure that their huge training spending does not come to naught because of attrition. Most companies have to put their baseline engineers through three to six months of training to make them industryready. So, for that period, these employees do not enter the billable mode. These steps may have contained job-hopping and frequent changes at the fresher levels, an analyst said.

Says Satyam head (HR) S V Krishnan, the company may be able to see a decline of 0.5% in attrition numbers in the first quarter of FY09.

Typically, attrition is also lower during the first two quarters and peaks in third quarter as employees largely tend to factor in their increment levels before deciding on new offers.

The third quarter is also when campus engineers start joining IT companies in large numbers.Now, there has been a consensus that the salary hikes during this fiscal would in the range of 8-13% unlike the previous level of 10-17%.

The pressure on companies in retaining their employees is the highest when there is higher demand for offshoring and outsourcing. By and large, the smaller and medium companies pay a premium to get people from the large firms.

Though, companies have found that the largest movement of people is in the work experience of one to five years and attrition rate stabilises after that period. At the same time, they are not expecting any major drop in attrition rates as there is still a strong demand for experienced professionals.

As IT companies sneeze, staffing firms catch cold

Shruti Sabharwal & Anirvan Ghosh
BANGALORE

The Economic Times.

IF THE IT/ITeS companies are feeling the heat of the US recession, recruitment companies that service a key need of the sector, appear more than scorched.

Though the severity of the impact has been mainly felt by companies that are involved in entry-level staffing, with some noting a whopping 60% fall in earnings, those that do mid-level staffing are fearing the worst in the days to come.

“The earnings for recruitment consultants have definitely slumped over last six months. The impact on earning from key accounts has dropped up to 60% with further impacts coming on the pricing front,” said TeamLease Services Permanent Staffing VP Sampath Shetty.

“For some individual consultants, the income is down to zero,” he added. This, he says, is the case with those who had all their clients in sectors that have borne the brunt of the recession. Working on a very low client base, some consultants have seen their incomes being almost wiped out.

Typically, a small recruitment firm with 10-15 people and working in entry-level staffing earns around Rs 15 lakh per month where employees work on a lowfixed, high-commission salary.

A 60% fall on such a base could, in some cases, even be life threatening. For every placement at the entry level, the consultant gets an average commission of 8% of the total annual income of the person placed.

That’s not all. IT companies are trying to make their money stretch more as they look for higher value from recruitment agencies. “With the metrics for hiring moving away from quantity to quality with prescribed non-negotiable cost to company for candidates, these expectations are marginalising the recruitment companies’ productivity and pushing for more value adds at similar pricing,” Mr Shetty added. Reports suggest that last fiscal, India’s top six IT companies added 89,868 people. This year, the numbers look bleaker as the companies battle global conditions like an intensifying US recession, ever increasing oil prices and double digit inflation at home.

While some other major recruitment companies say that the impact has not been that large, they are, nevertheless, expecting the growth rate to be much lower than last year.

Of course, they are also keeping their fingers crossed, hoping the crisis will blow over soon. “Companies will not grow at 30-40% like they did last year and getting new businesses will be tougher. Though right now we are not facing such a big problem since we work with mostly senior level executives, if things go on like this till October, it will be a serious challenge,” said ABC Consultants business development leader Yogesh Sehgal.

But there is another reason why times are tough even for those who place people at higher echelons. “At the senior level it is becoming tougher to find people who are willing to move, unlike before. These employees are in a comfortable position with perks like ESOPs and they do not want to take chances now,” said Mr GC Jayapraksh, principal consultant of Stanton Chase.

In fact, this is a serious issue that recruitment companies are battling. The recent market conditions have put brakes on people movements to some extent. While most do not want to take risks, others have become very choosy while shifting.

Freshers from B-Schools are now more willing than before to join smaller companies, while senior executives are becoming more cautious.

Experts say that IT companies that were hiring through a host of recruitment agencies are now likely to consolidate their hiring through a few key recruitment consultants.

That simply means that the recruitment industry as a whole is likely to see a shake out as some companies fall by the side and others are swallowed by bigger players. “This kind of consolidation is sure to happen over the next three months or so,” Mr Shetty said.

In such a scenario, says Mr Jayaprakash, home grown consultants are likely to sell out as a lot of M&A activity happens either when companies are doing very well or very badly.

Tech staffing consultancies brace for tough days

Shruti Sabharwal & Anirvan Ghosh
BANGALORE

IF IT/ITES companies are feeling the heat of the US slowdown, recruitment companies for the sector appear more than scorched. Though the severity of the impact has been mainly felt by companies in entry-level staffing with some seeing a whopping 60% fall in earnings, mid-level staffing firms are fearing the worst in the days to come.

“Earnings for recruitment consultants have definitely slumped over the last six months. The impact on earning from key accounts has dropped by 60% with further impacts on the pricing front,” said TeamLease Services’ vice-president of permanent staffing, Sampath Shetty. “For some individual consultants, the income is down to zero,” he added. This, he says, is the case with those who had all their clients in sectors that have borne the brunt of the recession. Working on a very low client base, some consultants have seen their incomes almost wiped out.

Typically, a small firm with 10-15 people and working in entry-level staffing earns around Rs 15 lakh per month where employees work on a low-fixed, high-commission salary. A 60% fall on such a base could, in some cases, even be life threatening.

For every placement, the consultant gets an average commission of 8% of the total annual income of the person placed. Entry-level salaries in the ITeS sector range from Rs 1-2 lakh. That’s not all. IT companies are trying to make their money stretch more as they look for higher value from recruitment agencies. “With the metrics for hiring moving away from quantity to quality with prescribed non-negotiable cost to company for candidates, these expectations are marginalising the recruitment companies’ productivity and pushing for more value adds at similar pricing,” Mr Shetty added.