The Talent Tangle
How to make sense of the constant struggle for people and make them stick to their seats
By Jamsheed Gandhi
It is 3 a.m., and 24-year-old Ramesh M is just getting off his shift. The KPO where he works is located in the business district of Andheri in Mumbai. During the day, it’s a bustling area filled with noise and never ending traffic jams. In the wee hours of the morning, the entire area is silent. The roads at night have a different look completely. It takes him about twenty minutes to get to his home, a distance which would have taken him over an hour to traverse during the day.
 Life has been good to Ramesh. Having worked for over a year in one of the leading outsourcing entities in the country, he has been able to increase his salary twice by delivering constant performance on his process. He remembers how happy he was when he was recruited for his current job. It redeemed him from the small, nondescript organization that he used to work for, where every month he was on tenterhooks whether or not he would be paid his monthly salary.
Ramesh M is one of hundreds of thousands of technology professionals working in India across industries, who start their careers on simple notions of getting a job and working in reputed or blue chip organizations. Over time, buoyed by a growing economy and demand-supply mismatch for skilled people, they grow more ambitious and look forward to affording more amenities and luxuries in life, besides recognition.
In fact, as Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs kicks in, changing jobs or growing within the company becomes an ongoing mission for them – just as it is becomes a continual struggle for companies to provide long and fruitful careers to people like Ramesh.
Informs Ulhas Aher, Head Human Resources for Datacraft India, “At all levels individuals have a set of different wants and needs which has to be fulfilled. Only then do we feel that we have a value in life, a purpose. At the junior level employees are looking to work with companies that have a brand name in their industry, they want a respectable salary to start their career with; at the middle level, personal recognition and a clear career path is wanted; and executives at the top look for more aspiration values such as what are my contributions to the company, what value addition can I offer to the company.”
Software major Satyam Computer Services, has a workforce of over 50,000 employees and will be looking at adding 20,000 more this year. Informs Vijay Prasad, CIO, Satyam Computer Services, “We think we will be able to hire similar numbers in the coming years as well.” With over 25 years of technical, analytical and management experience, Prasad deals with people issues on a daily basis. His mandate is to manage the three P’s, namely People, Process and Performance to help his company remain agile in delivering growth.
To manage attrition and employee churn, he has developed a model which binds the company to a specific technology for a period of three years. While this duration will help amortize the investment that they have made in, hardware, software or even a service, it also offers him the luxury of ensuring that the people with the required skills will be easily available as the longer a technology is deployed, the easier it is to source candidates who have an reasonable experience in it.
“Our employees are our most important resource and managing them is top most on my list. Dealing with a highly motivated and technologically sound workforce is quite challenging as sometimes our employees are ahead of the curve in understanding and deploying emerging technology.” He adds, “It is exciting and difficult at the same time. I quite enjoy my role as a CIO of a technology company. We use a “Here and Now and Tomorrow” philosophy where we look at technology with the viewpoint of what is in use currently within the company and how we could go about optimizing it, as well as keep a watch on new trends that are emerging, that we could incorporate.”
Prior to joining Datacraft a year and a half ago, Aher was responsible for HR and Administration at accounting and financial solution service provider Compass Development India. His total experience across a variety of industries spread across 20 years. While it is always a challenge across any organization to retain employees, he adds, “The Pareto Principle comes into play in most organizations, where 80 percent of the work is executed by 20 percent of the people. We categorize our employees into experts and leaders, which means either they have domain expertise or they have people management skills which are invaluable to our organization.”
This is pretty much evident by speaking to a few HR heads, Internally, HR departments have codenames for the staff they need to retain. One such company calls its valuable employees “chinkaras” or the black buck which has been made famous by being shot by Bollywood actor Salman Khan.
Recruitment 2.0
Traditionally it has always been the mandate of employee sourcing agencies to sift through resumes and put the relevant candidate based on the requirements of their client. This works extremely well at the entry-level, or for specific domains such as call centers or KPO’s. For finding the right candidates in the mid and senior level, relationships or referrals are always used. It helps when an existing employee of an organization either suggests for new recruits based on their personal equation of them.
Going online, networking solution providers such as Linkedin or techTribe, which is quite popular, in the country are ways through which prospective employees can be selected.
Launched almost a year and a half ago, Rohit Agarwal, one of the co-founder’s of techTribe explains, “The professional networking space is just beginning to see an interest from employees. People do not share knowledge as much as they consume it. Career networking is gaining momentum in India. Employers are seeing the benefits of appointing new people based on referrals from their existing staff.”
In fact, one startup venture found an investor for itself just because the founders had a presence in techTribe, which they used it to their advantage. Although they have never advertised heavily, looking at spreading the word through existing social networking sites such as Orkut (I got my invite as a scrap on my orkut profile). techTribe sees a few thousand users logging on daily and has over 15 companies who are actively using it to recruit.
He adds, “We are seeing tremendous increase in employers looking for quality people, and one way that can be possible is through referrals.”
Agarwal claims to have over 600 senior level people as members, who are not actively looking for changing their current job. They are passive job seekers, who if a good opportunity arises will grasp it, but will not actively go out to get one. A community such as techTribe just does that.
With the recruiting market in the country estimated to be over $1 billion, online job search has a 15 percent share.
To join into the ranks of online job portals is whereismyboss.com, a portal that has incorporated technology from US-based Burning Glass. “To act as a differentiator,” says D.Prem, Chairman, and Aadith Vikram, Vice Chairman & MD of PGC Industries the people behind whereismyboss.com, “this is a resume parsing technology which reads, understands, and analyzes unstructured resumes and job descriptions in most major document formats. This allows for “intelligent” matching of candidates and jobs.”
By extracting more than one hundred facts with a high accuracy, it normalizes key data and translates skills to a standardized dictionary. This is delivered in a readily searchable XML format or mapped to a specific database configuration. They already have over 78,000 resumes pumped into their system and will look at going live by September 2008. They have tied up with about 650 companies to whom they are giving a free access.
Employee Retention & Development
Rajiv Singh is a rare exception in today’s age. This 41 year old Vice President of HR at Geometric joined the company when its staff was all of 40 people. Today, employing over 3000 people, the company is making its shift from product specific focus, to services and consulting. His responsibilities cover talent management, acquisition and development, and strategic organization development.
A specialist in providing PLM/ Engineering solutions to the global mechanical design, manufacturing and industrial enterprises, Geometric, has over two decades of experience in the PLM domain.
“I’ve been with the company since 1993, and have been responsible for human resources since one and a half years back. We were focused earlier on skills that were required for product development, and now have started shifting that to services as that is the direction that the company has decided to focus on,” he says.
Responding to customer demand is driving the way employees need to be hired. While hiring quality talent was never an issue with the company, as it enjoys brand recognition as well as stability, it focuses on hiring fresh recruits right out of college and put them through their paces via a rigorous training exercise.
He adds, “We have two levels of training for our new recruits. The first is the Foundation Course, which is for about 2 months. This training focuses on platform specific areas, quality and management. Once this is finished, then depending on which product team the employee will join, the second training is conducted. For a period of one and a half months, the employee is given product specific information which he will need to know on a day to day basis.”
What keeps Rajiv awake at night is resource forecasting. He’s most worried when client’s set a new deliverable, or a new project is about to start, and he needs to go and get people to fulfill it. “In the nineties, there was no debate. You hired people purely on their technology skill set. Techies were interested in working on the latest technology, thriving on challenges. While this parameter still remains the same for techies even today, their role has changed from just writing code to transform into low level consultants, who need to communicate as well as look at technology from a business process perspective.”
Earlier people wanted to be gainfully employed and would not mind sticking to one company or function patiently until their got their chance. But that is not the case today. With people demanding instant gratification and wants getting ahead of needs, it’s such changes to the lifestyle that is determining the way an employee selects jobs and even companies. This kind of urban angst is driving the employees to pick up their bags and travel to different locations to find jobs. Working in different cities or countries gives an employee an edge over others.
To support the expense driven lifestyle, most employers are now going one step ahead than just offering home loans to their employees. Managing to offset ones credit card debt or an already existing personal loan, is being taken into consideration by employers as benefits that can be extended to their employees.
While loads of employers propagate a work/life balance, very few actually practice it. On the current hiring process, the company looks at extra curricular activities of prospective employees in addition to their education qualifications. This gives them an idea of the kind of interests that prospective employees have.
While fudging of experience by prospective job seekers is common, most companies have appointed third party service providers, who look into verifying the accuracy of an employees credentials. Employees are appraised every six months, as well as when the project that they are working on ends.
Personal v/s Professional, where do the employees go?
Transitioning from an owner run enterprise to a professional one can be quite a challenge. Most Indian companies face this issue. While values such as loyalty, dedication and honesty are attributes usually found in owner run companies, employee performance and capability are overlooked. Promotions and growth is not based on any metrics, but on what image the owner has of the employee. While this is ideal to grow a company to a particular size, taking it to the next level to become globally competitive needs the guidance of professional management.
One such case in point is D-Link India, the Indian subsidiary of Taiwan-based D-Link Corporation. Incorporated by current Executive Chairman K R Naik, as the main promoter, since inception, the company has hardly seen any attrition. Most of its top level management has been with it mainly due to the personal equation that each and every one of them shared with Naik. It is a well known fact in the industry that the employees of the company were more of a family than employees.
In mid 2007, the company brought in Jangoo Dalal, as CEO & MD. Dalal, who is known to be a strong driver of performance management systems, came to the company after having spent over 10 years in various capacities at Cisco Systems. To manage the transition of its employee mindset, the company initiated HR Express & Mindcraft. Says Sandra Vijayendran, Vice President - Human Resources, D-Link India, “HR Express & Mindcraft are our initiatives to help employees grow and manage the change. The employees now look at Naik as a father figure, while Dalal is identified as a nurturing leader. They complement each other.”
Vijayendran is not new to the IT industry, as she is a 20 year old HR veteran who has joined the company a year ago. Employees are now segregated into Ivy League and Rising Stars, which categorizes their capabilities and identifies the kind of training they need to improve their productivity. This is executed for all its employees in the country.
Training for tomorrow
In planning for the future lies the current existence of any company. Enabling organizations to close the gap between current talent capability and the skill sets required for the future business environment is Development Dimensions International or DDI. The company designs and implements various selection systems which hasten the recruitment process for people. It also identifies and develops leadership talent which creates a quality workforce.
Says D Rajiv Krishnan, MD, DDI India, “We work with recruiting companies to identify talent and nurture it. Interviewing is rarely done right in our country and people need to be developed in any role. A wrong hire across any level, is the most costly mistake that any company could commit.”
The company though it’s Assessment Center Methodology goes beyond running tests and executes behavior based models.
Conclusion
Abraham Maslow observed healthy and successful people to bring out his observations in A Theory of Human Motivation. The landscape in the country for both employers and employees is fast changing and individual wants has morphed from tangibles such as money to intangibles such as delivering value. A plethora of options has opened up for matchmaking companies with individuals. Will it improve efficiency? Will it deliver individual gratification? The answers are yet to be figured out.
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