Desperate to find software engineers in India, recruitment agencies are forced to adopt the idea of “Speed Dating” in their hiring processes.
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| Source: AFP |
Gautam Sinha, CEO of TVA Infotech, one of 300 recruitment firms based in Bangalore, has even rented a 20,000-seat indoor basketball arena to facilitate meetings between client companies and candidates. Holding their resumes in hand, candidates line up waiting for their turn to be interviewed.
“It’s just like speed dating. In the past, we had six months to hire someone; now we have just six weeks,” Sinha revealed. 400 candidates met with TVA’s clients, with 80 securing jobs ranging from engineering positions at network giant Cisco to specialists at SAP, the world’s largest enterprise software company.
“This is the first time we have implemented this approach, and it clearly paid off,” Sinha said cheerfully.
Such job fairs are booming across Asia, where job seekers come to submit their applications and undergo initial interviews. However, the difference here is that the demand to “fill vacancies” from companies has reached an urgent level, with many candidates receiving job offers on the spot.
Despite initial successes, recruitment firms are still concerned that their matchmaking services will soon face challenges as the number of qualified candidates decreases.
According to data from the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) in India, the country’s outsourcing industry currently employs 700,000 workers and is projected to grow by 40% over the next five years, reaching a revenue of $5.1 billion this year.
However, by 2012, this five-year-old industry will face a shortage of 262,000 professionals, as recent graduates lack the necessary skills to meet employer demands.
The “Speed Train” Battle
The competition to secure the best IT talent is just as fierce. “Today, everything revolves around three words: speed, speed, and speed,” said B.R. Sheaker, CEO of Mind Group, a recruitment firm with clients including Wipro, Google, Yahoo, and Amazon.
As soon as a candidate’s resume lands in Mind Group’s inbox, it is categorized and sent to relevant companies within seconds. The urgency stems from the fact that candidates often apply to multiple recruitment firms simultaneously. To avoid losing potential deals, firms like Mind Group have to book flights for promising candidates to attend interviews and arrange hotel accommodations (essentially a form of isolation) before the interview time.
“If we don’t act quickly, they’ll move on to another offer immediately. That means losing an opportunity. Our clients always give us very concise requests: 100 people in two weeks, and that’s an immense pressure on us,” Sheaker explained.
To stand out among a sea of recruiters, firms like Infosys TVA have launched special websites to attract resumes and conduct interviews in five-star hotels. “Today’s candidates are like ripe fruit, very easy to pick and very likely to spoil if placed in an unsuitable environment,” Sinha noted.
The Recruitment Frenzy
Attracted by the pool of talented engineers willing to work for a salary that is just one-seventh of their counterparts in the United States, major technology companies are flocking to outsource to India.
Recently, Dell announced plans to double its workforce in the country to nearly 20,000 people within the next three years. Meanwhile, technology services firm LogicaCMG will hire around 1,000 employees. Besides Dell, giants like Cisco, IBM, and Accenture have publicly expressed their intent to significantly expand their workforce in India.
For each successful hire, recruitment firms will earn between 50,000 rupees ($1,111) and 150,000 rupees ($3,333). However, in the future, as the hunt for talent becomes more challenging due to candidates lacking necessary skills, recruitment firms will have to take on the additional responsibility of “training” candidates for their roles.
“We have to find every possible way to attract candidates: setting up kiosks in markets, bookstores where young people hang out. We even launched an SMS service for recruiting and receiving resumes. We have reached a point where headhunters must become friendly and savvy salespeople,” Sheaker said.
Tien Yi
