Employability training seems to be the next big thing.

A lot of money is being poured into making graduates and engineers employable. Large portions of the VC and private equity money being invested in the field of education is going into employability training. This is after students (and their parents) have spent lakhs of rupees and four years in colleges that are supposed to make them employable.

The fact that employability training is seen as the next big thing is disturbing for two reasons:

1. The industry appears to have given up hope that our colleges can produce an employable workforce.

2. 4 - 8 weeks of a uniform "employability training" is enough to make every student employable.

The funny part (I would laugh, if it were not so tragic), is that most colleges themselves have a separate 4 - 8 weeks course towards the end of the last year of college called employability training. What, may I ask, was the college doing to the students for the rest of the period?

In most colleges, employability training is a scam aimed at getting some more money out of the students. The college charges the student, dishes out part of the money collected to a third party (usually a relative of the college owner) who then comes in and talks about spoken english and business etiquette - something which does precious little to improve the employability of the student.

It is undeniable that graduates passing out of our colleges are mostly unemployable. When I talk to students, the first thing I realize is that most of them do not understand the context of their journey through college. Even the students undergoing professional courses, do not seem to understand that they are in college to learn something that will help them be useful and earn a living after college. The 4 years they spend in college seems to be viewed as an unpleasant vacation to be endured or improved through devious means!

I believe that the best way to make our students employable is to help them understand why they are in college, what the course will help them become and what they should expect out of a degree (other than a worthless certificate that signifies nothing more than their having spent 4 years avoiding work). This will help them introspect and understand their own strengths ensuring that they bring out the best in themselves.

Only when we treat each student as an individual will we have a diverse, well-qualified, employable workforce coming out of colleges. To just mould all students from all disciplines and streams into one universal shape that the industry demands that year will only lead to disaster.

Traditional Job sites threatened by social recruiting solutions

More and more articles are pitting social networking sites against job boards. They say social networking sites are doing to job boards what job boards did to newspapers in the area of recruiting.

Recent action in this space, coming thick and fast, only confirms this belief.

1. Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi says, “Networking has always been a useful means of connecting people. And it should continue to be.”

2. CNBC asks "Is Social Media scaring Monster worldwide"

3. LinkedIn initiates the process for an IPO filing and its reports show that its biggest revenue stream comes from recruitment related services.

This augers well for companies such as JobVite, JobsByRef and SelectMinds, which are sitting on top of social and professional networks making it easy for companies to utilize the networks of existing employees to find great candidates.

Will sites such as these wipe out traditional job boards? Only time will tell, but the early indications are that it is bound to happen, sooner than we think!

Do you believe there is a glass ceiling for pure technical people in Indian companies?

A lot of IT people returning to India have rich technical experience because they have worked as developers/designers/architects while in the US. Is this technical expertise appreciated in India and can a pure technical person earn as much if not more than a manager?

The reason I pose this question is to start a healthy conversation in this area because I am hearing from quite a few bright experienced tech people interested in returning to India that they are being asked to take on roles in line with their years of experience rather than in areas of their strengths.

As you know, in many projects executed by Indian IT companies, the design and architecture is substandard (I have seen and talked to others who corroborate) and the word "executed" sometimes takes on a completely different meaning!

This is because, as soon as somebody has about 3+ years of experience in a tech role, they get bumped up to become module leaders and soon on to project leader/project manager/account manager etc. These guys end up being neither technically proficient nor capable of managing people/projects/customers. Those of us in the IT industry have seen this time and again over the last 20 years or so.

Today, many of the more proactive IT companies are realizing this and are wooing experienced, technically sound Indians from the US. But the question is will they then allow these tech proficient people to continue being techies and treat them well or will standard business practices and mindsets try and convert them or force them to become "managers" (in order to move up within the company), and thereby continue to relegate design/architecture to sub-three year experienced engineers?

Will the returning engineers have the courage to stand up and fight for the "tech" status so that their contribution to successful projects are duly recognized and rewarding appropriately?

Obviously, I am not saying managers are not required. All I am saying is that seasoned tech architects are also required.

What do you think?

Managing work and time

I spend a lot of time these days talking to IT companies about ways of supercharging employee referral programs and improving the participation levels of their employees.

One common refrain I repeatedly hear is that their employees are already working long hours and thus don't have the bandwidth to think of the right candidates to refer.

While we, at JobsByRef.com, have build systems to help improve employee referrals without taxing the employees (by way of brainwork or time), I cannot but help wonder how an entire population can be continuously overworked.

Obviously, working longer hours does not necessarily mean higher productivity. And some of the snide comments from managers and above clearly illustrates the fact that there is not any significantly higher productivity. So I think it is time for all of us - as individuals as well as companies - to take a look at how we work.

A good debate on this would be illuminating and to start off, I will put forth some of my observations.

1. Many of the employees are bachelors, in the age group of 23 - 27, who are not yet married, and live in bachelor pads. They usually don't have girlfriends/boyfriends, or a interesting life outside of office. No one ever told them to have fun, only to get a good job and work hard.

2. The next category of employees are the recently married ones who are torn between wanting to go home to their spouses early and continuing their well-trained long standing behaviour of staying late. Compounding their dilemma is the fact that the younger group continues to stay longer hours forcing them to leave while (nearly) everyone else is working.

3. The managers also look askance at people leaving early (on time, actually) with conscious or sub-conscious repercussions at appraisals time. The managers themselves cannot leave early for fear that once they leave, the rest would just up-and-leave resulting in productivity loss. So they remain back to lead by example, which is what makes the bachelors stay late in the first place!

With India churning out more and more of the younger generation, the demographics of this crowd is not going to change anytime soon. And today, we have enough data to clearly show that neither productivity nor quality of work (or of life in general for that matter) is improving because of working longer hours.

I have always felt that if people had a life outside (a love life, a hobby, active sports, some other time sink), they would plan their work hours better and this will automatically correct the situation. However, culturally all these non-work activities are anathema to us and that has been ingrained into us from a very early age. So to change the behaviour of an entire generation is proabably not going to be feasible.

Instead, what if companies demanded that their employees should not stay beyond 8 hrs and started to penalize their employees for either not completing their work or for staying longer hours. Would this not force people to plan their work day better leading to higher productivity and a better life?

What do you think?

Recruitment firms provide sub-par services.

As part of my job, I meet a lot of HR Heads and talent acquisition managers. Most of them whine about their empanelled recruitment vendors. Yet I can see that most companies rely quite heavily on these placement agencies or recruitment firms to find their talent. It seems to me that companies can't live without them nor live with them.

The feedback from companies is obviously bad because the results clearly show that success rates for each of the vendors is actually abysmally low. However, is the blame squarely on the shoulders of the recruitment firms? I think not. I will explain below what happens day in and day out between companies and their empanelled recruitment firms and you will see that the whole process is completely out of whack. It is a miracle that a few get placed at all out of all this wasted effort.

Here is how it goes:

A large company empanels a few hundred ( between 100 to as high as 500) recruitment firms to help them find candidates. Whenever they have an opening, they inform all the recruitment firms. The recruitment firms immediately login to their respective naukri/monster/timesjobs accounts and search for candidates. As everybody knows any search criteria on these sites results in thousands of matched candidate, thanks to keyword padding employed by most candidate. Obviously no recruiter has the time to go through 100s of resume, leave alone the thousands that are returned. So they look for the candidates who have updated their profile in the last day or so (under the assumption that anybody who has updated their profile recently must be actively looking for a job). This narrows down the results to around about 100 candidates, many of them professional job seekers who update their profile everyday to remain in the top 100 (this is the candidate's version of SEO). Then the recruiter starts calling all these candidates and lines them up for interview.

This exact process is happening simultaneously across all the hundreds of empanelled recruitment firms! Which means that a few hundred recruitment firms are all calling pretty much the same 100 candidates neglecting the remain tens of thousands of relevant candidates who did not feature in the "recently updated" 100 list.

It has been know for a single candidate to fend over a 100 calls from different recruitment agencies about the same job! The candidate says yes to everyone or refuses to answer his phone or feels that there is too much competition for that job or thinks he is in great demand and starts to put up his price.

Each recruitment firm then downloads all these 100-odd resumes and sends them off to the company HR. This is done as soon as possible because if a candidate gets selected, only the recruitment firm that first mailed the resume gets paid. So there is a clear race condition here and many of the empanelled firms would have sent the resume even before calling and verifying with the candidate if he/she is interested at all in the position.

The company which advertised the opening now has 100s of copies of pretty much the same 100-odd resumes, which of course they have to de-duplicate (de-multiplicate actually, if there is such a word) and then find any good ones out of this.

Once you realize that these are not even the top 100 candidates in terms of fitness for purpose (but just the top 100 that had updated their profiles recently), it does not take a rocket scientist to realize that the number candidates chosen will eventually be abysmally low.

And yet, this has been happening for years now and is happening right now all over India. Go figure!

Exploring the underbelly of the recruitment space in India

I recently attended the 4th ERA Convention at Chennai. It was a well-organized half-day affair jam packed with speakers and panel discussions. What was really heartening to see, as an outsider, was the frank and open exchange of views between industry leaders and HR heads on the one side, and CEOs of recruitment firms on the other.

I could easily see that there was little love lost between the two sides. While the results of their business together was clearly not satisfactory to either side, there was however, clear agreement that recruitment firms were an absolute necessity for most companies and that the two parties need to sit down and find ways to work together in a more meaningful and predictable manner.

Easier said than done, because the entire recruitment system, especially here in India is broken in more places than you can shake all your fingers and toes at!

Over the next few posts, I am going to explore the underbelly of the recruitment system where recruitment firms, employers and the candidates dance to different tunes that only they can hear. Today, we will start with how, in the last 20 years (since the advent of the IT boom), people have become more and more commoditized and how this is creating problems for all the parties concerned.

People, in the eyes of most organizations, are merely commodities. Most companies in India, for the bulk of their recruitment are looking for mindless borgs that are cheap and can do their work to a reasonable extent. This is especially true at low to middle levels across industries such as IT, ITES and retail where body count:size of the company as goats:An Arab's status.

With that being the case, recruitment agencies are forced to behave like body shippers rather than talent scouts, thereby leading to recruiters providing low quality resumes like food at an all-you-can-eat for a dollar ninety-nine buffet. Which of course, naturally p*sses off the companies.

Additionally, many of the people thus recruited in bulk have very little by way of career growth (what does a call agent become with experience? What does a retail shop floor attendent become after a few years?), and hence show very little loyalty and constantly jump ship for meagre hikes. This again creates a lot of angst in companies who promptly blame the recruiter for selecting substandard people.

Needless to say, people are also getting a raw deal in all this, with recruiters overselling the job opportunity and employers not explaining clearly enough the actual job description. Plus the fact that many of these people are moving from rural into urban areas means that they feel they have no choice but to accept any job that comes their way.

All adding up to a lose-lose-lose situation. And nothing that can be readily rectified until fundamental attitudes change.

How to look for a job without putting pressure on oneself

Image by Dave-F via Flickr

Looking for a job can be one of the most anxiety inducing activities that one can undertake. Last week I wrote a post about how you can look for a job without unduly stressing yourself.
To read it, go here.