75 percent Indian engineers unemployable: Nasscom

Indian IT firms reject 90 percent of college graduates and 75 percent of engineers who apply for jobs because they are not good enough to be trained, according to Nasscom.

Wipro employs 95,000, Infosys 1,05,000 and TCS 1,43,000. Of the Fortune 500, only Wal-Mart in America adds more people annually than either Infosys or TCS.

Last year Infosys hired 28,231 people, including 18,000 graduates paid Rs.3 lakh a year. This year they will hire 20,000 at Rs3.25 lakh. Infosys is hiring though there isn't enough business. Currently, 30,000 people at Infosys are 'benched'.

Why are they still hiring and raising salaries? Because they cannot find competent people and due to this reason, this year Infosys increased its training of employees to 29 weeks. That's seven months of training. Why do they need so much training? And why is the quality of applicants so poor?

Infosys spends twice as much as its American competitors on training, four percent of revenue. Nine half-literates are produced by our colleges, by Nasscom's numbers, for every graduate of passable quality. What is Nasscom?s solution to this? It wants government to boost college enrolment from 10 percent of those in secondary school, to 25 percent. Nasscom knows that this will only increase the number of job applicants, not the quality, but there's no other solution.

India produces three million graduates, but Nasscom says that next year it will see a shortage of 500,000 graduates, because incompetents will swamp the rest.

Aricent, Sapient to hire 1500

Aricent, a global innovation, technology and services company, and Sapient, a business and IT consulting company are planning to hire around 1500 professionals in the next three to nine months. While Sapient will hire around 800 professionals, Aricent plans to hire at least 700.

 

Mid-tier and niche technology companies are returning to the employment orbit as they plan to take in 25,000 to 30,000 experienced hands in the next three to nine months, reports Economic Times. The renewed demand has been spurred by a spurt in outsourcing, better order positions and companies expanding their India operations and moving up the value chain. Other companies on the lookout for trained hands are GlobalLogic India, MindTree, CPA Global, Symphony Services, Citrix, Adobe, Persistent Solutions, nVidia, Amazon, Agilent and Vertex.

"Customers are stretching their dollars, and outsourcing helps them do that. That's what's driving demand for fresh talent at present," says Prashant Bhatnagar, Director-hiring, Sapient. "Lateral hiring is back and there's plenty of demand for those with three to eight years experience," adds Rishi Das, CEO, CareerNet Consulting, a Bangalore-based headhunter which recruits for over 200 technology companies.

Many companies which are now hiring, had no bench staff or have increased their utilization and hence now need more staff as more work is being offshored. "It's like a food chain. Mid-level companies which have invested in niche skills and started with basic tasks like technology support are now capable of delivering complex work like product design," says another Mumbai-based Head Hunter, who did not wish to be named due to client sensitivity.

"Offshoring complex work helps global customers cut costs significantly. That's driving the current demand for experienced professionals."

Companies like Applied Materials, Volvo, Boeing, Bank of America, Amazon, the United Health Group and Societe Generale have farmed out work for new enterprise applications development, R&D, engineering services and professional services - like customised software development - among others, driving demand.

Who’s Responsible for Quality of Hire?

Over the past few months I've been describing a new approach for determining quality of hire, and using changes in this to justify any new expenditures on an ROI basis. While the methodology is pretty slick, the pushback is coming not from the process, but from the idea that HR/recruiting is responsible for quality of hire at all.

If not HR/recruiting, then who?

Most HR/recruiting execs would suggest hiring managers themselves as the likely assignee. Others would contend that HR/recruiting is responsible for the quality of the candidates, but managers are responsible for the quality of hire. Others would suggest there are too many variables to assign it to anyone.

Further confusing the issue is determining when quality of hire should be measured. If you do it before the person starts, you're measuring the sourcing and selection process. After the hire, you're measuring the hiring manager's management and leadership abilities as much as you are the candidate's ability to perform the job needs. Compounding the time variable is the measurement standard. If you use a different measurement technique for before and after, then you're left with a comparison between oranges and cell phones, or more likely, experience and qualifications vs. performance.

It's because of these complex issues that I believe that HR/recruiting must take responsibility for quality of hire. If not HR/recruiting, then who?

Here's my rationale behind the nomination.

1. Maximizing quality of hire is the most important strategic role HR/recruiting can play. Other than maximizing on-the-job performance and retention, there is no more important role for the HR/recruiting department. Not wanting responsibility for this seems odd to an old recruiter like me. All the executives I've placed thrive on this type of challenge. Why would HR/recruiting be reluctant to take on — even demand — this responsibility?
2. The CFO is responsible for the capital acquisition process, so why shouldn't HR/recruiting be responsible for the talent acquisition process? While the financial department doesn't select, install, and run the capital equipment it approves, it still manages the approval process and strongly influences the ultimate decision. This parallels the role HR/recruiting should play in the talent acquisition process.
3. Having responsibility means the process is adhered to, not the decision itself. Developing and monitoring the hiring/selection process is the role of HR/recruiting. This means developing and implementing processes that ensure that the best candidates are seen and hired. There should be an audit process as part of this to ensure that the best decision has been made, and that if it has not been, the process is modified.
4. There is a huge tactical and strategic cost to making mistakes. HR/recruiting needs to deal with all the mistakes, including finding replacements and dealing with the legal and employee relations issues. The opportunity costs of bad hires alone provides the rationale for some type of vigorous and auditable selection process. Who else could possibly lead this type of cross-functional effort?
5. If not HR/recruiting, then who? Hiring managers should police themselves on quality of hire. Some do it, most don't, and even those that do, don't do it well. Regardless, there should be one standardized process that works and is used company-wide. This is the primary reason why hiring managers can only be held responsible for the successful performance of the person hired, not the process used. If some managers want to use their own process, they need to be held 100% responsible for mistakes, including the costs associated with this. This is one way to convince them they should use the approved process.

Of course, if HR/recruiting is given the responsibility for maximizing and measuring quality of hire, there comes some programs that need to be implemented to pull it off. Here are some quick recommendations:

1. Stop using job descriptions to source and select candidates. If you describe the work that needs to be done and assess candidates on this, before and after the hire, you'll solve the dual measurement problem and reduce turnover dramatically. The primary reasons new hires underperform and/or leave is lack of understanding of real job needs and a poor fit with their hiring manager.
2. Develop sourcing programs that target high-quality candidates, rather than eliminating the worst to see who's left. This is not insignificant. It means you must stop asking knockout questions and stop posting boring ads. The only reason companies ask knockout questions is to eliminate weak candidates who apply. If you change the sourcing paradigm to target great candidates, rather than hoping great candidates fall through the cracks, you eliminate the "eliminate the weak candidates" problem at the strategic level.
3. Use a performance-based talent scorecard and evidence-based assessment system to measure pre-hire quality. Competency models and behavioral interviews are too generic and do not measure a candidate's ability and motivation to perform the actual tasks required for success. Instead, candidates should be evaluated across all real jobs, including their ability to work effectively with the hiring manager. Quantifiable evidence of consistent and comparable past performance needs to be the basis of the yes/no decision.

With this type of process in place, HR/recruiting's role then becomes one of ensuring that the process for maximizing quality of hire is being followed — not making the hiring decision. This is comparable to the authority given, or taken, by the CFO, in ensuring that capital expenditures are justified in some reasonable fashion. Maximizing the quality of every single hiring decision is the primary strategic role of the HR/recruiting department. If HR/recruiting wants a seat at the strategic table it should demand this responsibility.

Forward slashes a mistake: 'www' Inventor (Tim Berner - Lee)

Nearly two decades after inventing the World Wide Web (WWW), British Scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee has admitted that 'forward slashes' in Internet addresses 'were a mistake'.

Claiming the // at the front of a web address was pointless and unnecessary, Sir Tim confessed at a recent talk in U.S. that at the time of creating the WWW, he had failed to predict how much effect what he was producing would have on people now.

While speaking at a symposium organized by Finland's Technology Academy Foundation, and hosted in the Finish Embassy in Washington DC, on the future of technology, Berners-Lee said, "When I designed the URL (Uniform Resource Locator), this thing which starts http://, the slash was to indicate we're actually starting at the top, not starting down at the next slash. Really, if you think about it, it doesn't need the //. I could have designed it not to have the //. Boy, now people on the radio are calling it 'backslash backslash."

"People are having to use that finger so much. Look at all the paper and trees that could have been saved if people had not had to write or type out those slashes on paper over the years - not to mention the human labour and time spent typing those two keystrokes countless millions of times in browser address boxes," the media quoted him as saying.

Berners-Lee invented the web while working at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Switzerland 20 years ago. In his spare time, he developed a revolutionary idea of linking pages which he named World Wide Web, and launched the first website in 1991.

IT vendors to change strategy for domestic growth

By    siliconindia news bureau

 

Bangalore: Even though IT investment has started across sectors and India is increasingly becoming a hot bed for large deals, Indian IT vendors need to rework on their business strategy to cater the local market.

 

Enterprises that lagged in IT infrastructure are making investments, and many are matured to the extent of consolidating their IT infrastructure using components such as virtualisation, service-oriented architecture and application integration. However, vendors would have to find way to beat the price consciousness of clients.

 

Analysts at Edelweiss Securities said in a note, "It is possible to make decent margins in India by redefining the cost structure (by questioning what is core and non-core in delivery), applying shared services and linking pricing to transactions and outcomes.

 

Because of being less concerned with exclusivity of resources, the shared services model is suitable for the domestic markets. Referring to Wipro's shared services offering, analysts said that the same resources could be used across multiple projects simultaneously with client approval.

 

Analysts said, "Companies need to have dedicated delivery and technical staff for its India business unit. Wipro has a dedicated team of 15,000 professionals catering to the emerging markets, unlike some vendors that borrow resources from the global business units. As international players heighten their focus on India and other emerging markets, they will look at partners and local country affiliates to help them in their go-to-market strategy in various areas such as networking, storage, platform development and enterprise solutions."

 

Currently, IT services are a $12-billion opportunity in India.

We Should Be Ashamed...!!

Top-notch job candidates are tired of the recruiting mess we have created in the recruitment Industry (system to be specific). I would guess that well over half of all recruiting functions are dysfunctional. By that I mean they have no standard process for dealing with candidates, treat some candidates much differently than others, respond sporadically to requests and phone calls, fail to follow through on verbal commitments to candidates, and let themselves be constantly swayed by hiring managers who are unaware of the talent market. The whole system seems to remind me of the phrase "When Rome was burning, Nero was playing a lyre".

 

I say this because I have recently talked to a dozen or more people who I know personally and have been an acquaintance over the years. I can vouch for their skill, professional abilities, and reputation. While they may not be a good fit for the particular job they were seeking, they were worthy of respect and of receiving a consistent and predictable response.

One particular friend of mine recently decided to switch jobs. He was not laid off and was not unhappy. He just felt the longer-term opportunity was better in a different place. Being a educated candidate, and with some advice from me and others, he laid out a plan. He started by asking friends about opportunities and also by choosing a few specific firms he might like to work at and finding LinkedIn friends who worked in those firms. The net result was referrals to a possible four or five potential jobs.

He then decided to check out the corporate websites of these few companies to see if the positions were listed. His first shock was at the poor quality of these sites. Most of them lacked good general information and offered nothing specific about the kind of work he was interested in. Only one of the sites listed the position he knew was open, offered little information about the position except the usual boilerplate, and then asked him to go through a tedious process of uploading a resume. None of them really learned anything about him or his referral. No questions, no interactivity, nothing. He didn't know what they really wanted to know about him, and they certainly weren't providing him much that was useful.

At this point he was already a frustrated potential candidate. While in no hurry to change jobs, he was the borderline passive candidate: sort of looking, interested, easy to recruit to the right situation, and totally unknown. He is also very competent and talented.

He had also given his resume to his friends to submit to the recruiting function and had even helped a friend upload his data into an employee referral site. Yet, after several weeks he had heard nothing at all of meaning. No email, no phone call. He tried to call several times only to receive a voice mail saying they would call back, but no one ever did. He kept checking with his friends and all the positions are still open more than six weeks later.

What is going on?

Here are my thoughts:

Possibility #1: The position is not really open and the recruiting department is just collecting resumes to find out who is out there.

This has a high likelihood of being the case, but is borderline unethical and certainly does nothing to build the brand or create goodwill among people that you might someday really want to hire. There are much better ways of finding these people.

 

Possibility #2: My friend does not have the qualifications that the hiring manager is looking for.

Even if this is the case, he should get the courtesy of an email or phone call letting him know that. On the other hand, if the job description is even close to accurate, he meets and exceeds most of the criteria. He is also referred by a current employee and that should, according to all that we write about on ERE, make him a higher quality candidate than an un-referred one. This also makes not getting back to him worse, and it embarrasses the employee.

 

Possibility #3: The position has been filed and just not taken off the website.

Highly unlikely as he has checked with his internal friends who have told him it is still open and that the hiring manager is frustrated with the lack of good candidates.

 

Possibility #4: The recruiting department is inefficient and lacks good processes and discipline in dealing with candidate flow.

This is the most likely one in my mind and needs to be addressed quickly and firmly. Once this recession has ended (and for high-end jobs it was never really that bad), these poorly treated potential candidates will be hesitant to try you again.

There is really no excuse for not dealing with candidates in a systematic manner. No matter how many apply, your systems should be capable of dealing with the volume or you should remove the job posting until you can handle it. By letting more people apply than you can review and answer, you are creating an irreversible degradation in your reputation, brand, and future ability to hire the best people.

Needless to say as a foundation your department needs a set of protocols and procedures that every recruiter follows. These should lay out enforceable requirements for response time to candidates, how referral candidates are treated, what is communicated, and how shortfalls are explained to people who are declined.

Other procedures should govern how many resumes are received for a position before no more are accepted and how these are reviewed and presented to managers.

Websites need to be clear and should be interactive, interesting, and engaging. They should answer the questions candidates are likely to have with honesty. Your rules and response protocols should be publicly displayed.

Until we respond with the kind of service candidates are accustomed to from retailers and other service providers, we should be prepared for a backlash of anger and disappointment that has only grown louder over the past year.