A fresh look at the job market

Employability training seems to be the next big thing.

2011-07-27T21:46:00.000-07:00

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

2011-01-31T19:42:00.000-08:00

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?

2010-07-24T01:27:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-10T07:22:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-04-27T05:40:00.000-07:00

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

2009-12-21T03:03:00.000-08:00

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

2009-09-29T04:41:00.000-07:00

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.

Speed interviewing works

2009-09-07T20:58:00.000-07:00

I am sure you have heard of speed dating. This is a process in which a lot of men and women looking for dates come together in a hall and each man/woman "dates" every other woman/man for 1-2 minutes. The idea behind this is the belief that it takes a person only a minute or two to decide whether another person is compatible to them or not. While many people were sceptical about this concept, other scientific studies have shown that we as human beings are actually very quick at judging other people, and quite accurately at that.

Malcolm Gladwell talks about this in his book Blink, where he tells us how intuition, sixth sense, impulse or whatever you may want to call it, is a highly evolved brain function that helps you make quick decisions.

Recently Seth Godin has written about how speed interviewing works. What he says rings true, because in my experience, I have always been able to judge the suitability of a person within the first 3 - 5 minutes (even though I ended up stretching the interview for half an hour).

So next time you are interviewing a bunch of people, give speed interviewing a try. And let me know what you think.

Job applicants lie for financial jobs in the depths of the recession

2009-08-12T05:02:00.000-07:00

Job applicants are attempting to deceive firms in the financial services more and more. And those turning to lies and embellishments to land jobs are the youngest applicants.
Read more about it here.
Relevant news from elsewhere on the web.

The fickle Indians

2009-08-05T21:38:00.001-07:00

Last week, I visited a private arts and science college on the outskirts of Chennai to inaugurate their computer science association.

They have three courses related to computer science - BSc(Computer Science),B.C.A, and BSc (Information Technology). Since inception, these courses have been growing in demand, so much so that from the intial one batch they had, they have now grown to 3 batches each year in order to accommodate all the students opting for these courses!

Except this year. This year, due to the negative publicity that the IT industry has received, thanks to the economic downturn and the Satyam fiasco, there have been very few takers for these software related courses! This behaviour has been seen in other colleges also. Even reputed engineering colleges such as Guindy Engineering College and the IITs have not been spared. All these colleges have a few computer science seats still unfilled! Unheard of, since the dot com burst, of course!

This is one more symptom of the malais in the Indian psyche, culture and the education system. Most students seem to choose their courses not based on their interests but based on what is in the greatest demand in the job market.
This results in a skewed educated work force leading to myriad problems including

Intense competition for some courses leading to tension and stress among students
Lack of growth in some areas which are not as "job friendly"
A low diversity work force, making the economy dependent on the flourishing of a few industries and highly susceptible to any downturn in those industries
Complete lack of excellence in any industry
Lack of manpower in other areas of engineering, not to mention pure sciences.

All this leads to India remaining merely a labour force rather than a country aspiring to push the envelop of science and technology.

Will this ever change?

UIDAI

2009-07-26T06:39:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

I don't usually write about non-job market related stuff on this blog. But every once in a while, I need to express my views on other issues. One such issue is the Unique Identification project headed by Nandan Nilekani. I believe that, though this is not directly connected with the job market now, soon the Unique Identification will be playing a major role in every aspect of our lives including our professional one, so in a way, I guess this subject is not entirely off-topic.

I am planning to keep a close watch on how the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is progressing and give unsolicited advice every now and then. Please feel free to voice your thoughts as comments to this post.

The first task that the UIDAI is planning to embark on is to create a database of the 1.17 Billion Indian population. Apparently, the database will help in the issuance of identification cards for every person in India.

I already have two issues to raise here:

The first is about the database. While I hope they use the existing databases for a start, for the UID to really work where the others have failed, they have to ensure that the large portions of the population that have always fallen through the cracks are covered this time. One example of such a population is the Bihari population that has migrated to all parts of India in search of work. Take for instance the Biharis who have moved to Chennai who form a large portion of the labour force that is working on the MRTS projects. They have completely uprooted themselves from their native land and have moved to Chennai, lock-stock-and-barrel. They have no home address, many times no homes at all (living under the partially constructed MRTS), and have precious little by way of unique identification.

Can we take two or three such clearly identifiable "problem" populations and see if the envisaged solutions work?
Some questions we should be able to answer clearly include
1. How can they uniquely identify themselves?
2. How can they register under the PDS scheme?
3. How can they ensure that their children get admissions in the nearest public schools?
4. How can these people enroll under the NREGS, NREGA schemes and avail the benefits?
5. How can we provide them with (and track) the basic health coverage that they require?

I hope we do not just concentrate on the low-hanging, easily identifiable, middle class, urban population.

My second issue is even more fundamental - is providing an identity card workable?
Given that a fair number of people don't have homes, or even pockets (Remember, Sarees have no pockets), will people be able to hold on to these cards for long periods?
How ruggedized can these cards be?
What percentage of these cards are expected to be lost on an annual basis?
How long will it be before people report missing or stolen cards?
What will it take to provide replacement cards?
Will one need to go to a police station and file an FIR to get a replacement card?
What identity proof does one need to provide to get a replacement card?

I am sure we can think of a million other issues that are specific to poor nations such as ours, that are non-issues in more advanced countries which have these identity cards. So here is my fundamental question - Do we need to provide cards at all? What if we record into our database the finger prints (of all 10 finger, if you will) and the retina prints of every citizen? Anytime we need to identify ourselves uniquely, we have all that is required right there with us. Would that work? what are the problems?

Please do leave your thoughts in the comments section.

Advice for participants of the Virtual Pool Program at Satyam

2009-07-26T05:37:00.000-07:00

As you know, Satyam, or Mahindra Satyam as it is called now, has created a virtual pool program(VPP) for over 7500 of its employees. As part of the program, the employees will remain on the rolls of Satyam for another 4 months. During this period they will be paid a reduced salary, but would not have to attend office. If during the next 4 months, there are openings in Satyam, then these employees belonging to the VPP will be given first preference and reinstated in their old position. If, however, no openings materialize, then at the end of the four months period, the VPP members may have to resign and find other employment.

While this is not a satisfactory situation for anyone - employees or company, it is one of the few options that Satyam has had given the market and company situation. In my mind, I am pretty sure that a majority of the people in the VPP will not get reinstated unless the global economy dramatically improves, which is quite unlikely, though there are signs of recovery.

So, I thought it may be a good thing to list down some of the things that Satyam employees reading this blog could do to help themselves.

First, realize the following:
1. That you come from a company that has been one of the top 5 delivery organizations.
2. The Raju fiasco and the downturn in the market has resulted in this situation and not your performance.
3. Satyam, the company is also not entirely to blame for this situation.
4. As a trained Satyamite, you are probably one of the better software engineers in India.
5. Given a choice between an ex-Satyam candidate and any other candidate, most software services companies would still prefer an ex-Satyam-ite.
6. There are always opportunities for good candidate in any market.
7. The market will definitely improve.

Now, do the following:
1. Build your network now.
2. Start looking out for opportunities.
3. Call and tell your friends that you are looking for openings.
4. Get your paper work in order [Your joining letter, service letter, recommendations from your boss,...]
5. Request your company to provide you with a copy of the credential verification report that they would have procured when you were hired.
6. Build your profile with all the details of the projects you have done.
7. Keep an eye out for all the job openings within Satyam, so that you can quickly identify those that you are suitable for.
8. Join thousands of your fellow VPP members on jobsbyref.com and dramatically improve your chances of finding your next job.
All the best.

Your resume database is your enemy

2009-06-29T04:09:00.000-07:00

A lot of companies (and placement agencies) collect and maintain their own database of resumes, in the mistaken belief that this will help them identify the right talent faster. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Let me illustrate this with an analogy.

Assume you are running a pharmacy (drugstore/apothecary), and 75% of your stock is past its use by date. Assume also that you add your new stock into this same inventory and mix it up. Now tell me, do you think your shop will meet the demands of your customers, be profitable, or efficient?

Answer's very clear, isn't it? So how come you don't believe the same is true with your resume database. Each resume is equivalent to say, a capsule of medicine. It ages, obviously, because the resume is a static document which is nothing but a snapshot of the profile of a person at the time it was written. Its typical use by date is three months from the time it was written. Now if you have a steady stream of resumes being added to your database and you maintain these resumes for exactly 1 year in your database, that means that at any given time 75% of your database is outdated!

Collecting fast expiring resumes and storing them locally is the worst thing you can do. It's like hoarding perishables!

Now you may ask "what's the alternative? I still want to keep the list of people interested in joining my company and I need ready access to their skills and competencies".

Lucky you, there is an alternative. It's called Live Resumes and it's available on jobsbyref.com. Simply put, a live resume is a resume in your database that is accessible to and maintained by the candidate. Did I hear you just say "Wow! Why didn't anyone think of this before"?

And that's just one of the features that makes jobsbyref.com unique. If you are a placement agency or an employer, check out jobsbyref.com. You will never need another site for any of your talent identification and acquisition needs.

My interview in Bangalore Mirror

2009-06-04T22:47:00.000-07:00

Bangalore Mirror has carried my interview today in the business section (5th June 2009). You can check it out here.

Demand more pay - get fired sooner

2009-05-26T03:25:00.000-07:00

Many people used the last boom period to vastly inflate their salaries - by hard bargaining, threats, and strategically timed and frequent jumps. Today, when companies are looking to cut costs, these people stick out like white elephants and are invariably the first to get the boot.

Here is something I've been advising people for a long time. When you negotiate your salary, have a realistic idea of what you are worth to the organization and aim for that.

In order to arrive at your realistic worth, take the following into consideration:

1. Market price
Find out what people like you are generally getting. Ask around, check with your peers, class mates, and professional recruiters. Read industry reports. Don't go by heresay. The hike your friend's friend's neighbour's son is supposed to have got has no bearing on what you should realistically expect.
2. The current demand for people like you
Is there a great demand for people with your qualification and background? Is this temporary or do expect sustained demand?
3. The current supply of people like you
Are there many people like you available in the market? Are your skills easy to learn? Can people be trained quickly and inexpensively to do your job?
4. The value you will directly bring to your employer
Wherever possible, this should be in terms of direct revenue.
5. What the future holds
Does the market for people like you fluctuate in your domain? Is this a temporary phenomenon? Remember, nothing remains the same for ever.

I am not saying don't take advantage of a situation, just don't take undue advantage. I can't spell out the distinction between advantage and undue advantage, but like the Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart once said about porn, "I know it when I see it"

Proliferation of my profile

2009-05-08T07:22:00.000-07:00

Image by frankdasilva via Flickr

Today my social profile is distributed and duplicated across multiple social networking sites - facebook, myspace, twitter, orkut, xing,... the list is endless. I don't think I will be able to keep them all synchronized and up to date. However, it is still only my social profile, so I guess it is not earth-shattering.

But imagine how it would be if the same were true about my professional profile. If a potential employer sees different versions of my resume (which is the same as my professional profile, or should be, in my opinion) on different sites, what would she think?

What I need is a place to store my single definitive professional profile and a way to control access to it tightly. I must be able to say "Here is my latest resume. You will be able to use this link for the next 3 days to see it. By the way, I have hidden some of the information that is not relevant at this stage, so if you need any other information, let me know". I must be able to pull the plug on the link even earlier if I want to, or I should be able to show more information under the same link, or even have it password protected. That's the kind of control I would like to have over my resume, to start with.

What do you think?

On alternate careers - An interview with eminent photographer G. Venket Ram

2009-04-20T20:03:00.000-07:00

My interview with advertising photographer G. Venket Ram has just been published in the career advice section on JobsByRef.com. Really inspiring.

Go here to read it.

Using technology to improve referrals

2009-04-19T06:28:00.000-07:00

In the previous post, I promised to show how technology can make the referral process even more effective. So here goes. Instead of the usual wordy blog post, I have decided to use some diagrams, for a change.

First, let's look at the standard referral process.

In addition, using his network, the active candidate can identify and enlist the help of the right referrer from within the potential employer's organization.

And finally, when a candidate applies directly, the company can use the network of its employees to find the employee closest to the candidate and enlist that employee's support in sussing out the candidate before making the offer or even taking the recruitment process forward.

As you can see, technology can be used to dramatically improve the performance of referral based recruiting by making the already active participants, that is the company and the candidate, push the passive actor perform his role as the referrer.

Simple!

What is needed of a referral based job site.

2009-04-19T04:39:00.000-07:00

In the previous post, we saw why many of the referral based job sites have not succeeded. In this post, let us see what a good referral based site needs to provide in order to be effective.

Mandatory:

The ability for the company to inform its employees about job openings within the company
A facility for the employees to forward the job opening to their friends
Support for the candidates to apply for the job opening through a selected employee(referrer)
The ability for the company to track which employee has referred which candidate, so that referral bonuses can be properly disbursed.
The ability for the company to collect, aggregate and easily filter through all the candidate so as to be able to identify the right candidates.
All other facilities of a job site, including the ability for companies to search for candidates, and for candidate, to be able to apply for a job directly.

Nice to have:

A facility by which all members (of the site) can bring their network on line so as to enable themselves and their friends to find the right referrers.
A site that is not just a job site (where people register only to look for a job) but is a comprehensive career related networking site that ensures that companies are also ready to have their employees registered (as their presence on the site helps in the referral process).
An ability to find referrals through the network of friends' friends.

Rather straight forward and simple, don't you think? Well, this is all that is required to technology-enable the existing manual referral process. But with technology on our side, it would be very sad to if we were to just limit ourselves to duplicating a manual procedure.

In the next post, we shall look at how technology can be used to make the traditional referral process work even better.

Why referral based job sites are failing

2009-04-16T08:05:00.000-07:00

In the last post we saw how and why referral works. We realized that in order for referrals to work:
1. An employee of the company has to be involved.
2. A disincentive for recommending incompatible, unqualified people must be in place.
3. A monetary incentive is not mandatory but can help in making more people participate actively.

Let's now evaluate the current online referral based job sites on the above three criteria.

1. Do they mandate employee involvement?
Most sites do not. They give everyone an option to apply for a job or forward the job to a friend.

2. Are there disincentives for recommending a non-qualified candidate?
Typically not. Since the referrer is not part of the company, his reputation is not adversely affected if the referred candidate is sub par. This also means that there is no incentive for the referrer to do any pre-qualification of the candidate.

3. Is there a monetary incentive?
Yes.

That's one out of three, at best! No wonder most online referral sites don't work!

Lesson learnt: An additional "refer a friend" button does not maketh a referral jobsite.

Next post, we'll look at what is required to make a good referral site.

How and why do referrals work?

2009-04-14T04:15:00.000-07:00

In my previous post, I asked why online referral based job sites are failing. In this post, let's go back to the basics and try and understand why referrals work.

Referrals work when a person (say, your employee) brings two parties she knows reasonably well, namely your company and a potential candidate, together because she believes that the two of you are compatible.

The operative phrase here is "she knows reasonably well". This knowledge of both the parties is what allows her to decide who to refer. Typically, before referring a candidate, she answers the following few questions to herself:

Will referring him adversely affect my reputation within my organization?
Is this guy good enough?
Are his credentials genuine?
Will he be thankful of getting this opportunity in the long run, or will he curse me? and
Are there roles for him here that match his talent and capabilities?

If you notice, questions 1 and 4 are not so much about the company or the candidate and more about the repercussions of making this referral on her own career/friendship. Obviously then, the decision to refer is well thought through and hence the chances of compatibility between the two parties is very high.

It's how most arranged marriages happen in India (or anywhere else in the world where arranged marriages are prevalent). A relative of the bride/groom knows somebody very well who knows somebody who knows the family of a potential groom/bride. The credibility and strength of each of the connection help in bringing two families together. At every stage, the people doing the connecting know that they will face a lot of flak if the marriage does not work. And if the marriage works, the result is the reward!

In the case of employee referrals, over and above the result being the reward, is the monetary incentive promised by the company. However, if you really analyze this, the incentive that the company promises is not so much a reward for success as a mechanism to make their employees think of and evaluate each of their close friends (and their friends' friends) as potential candidates. The real reward continues to be the good feeling of helping two parties.

A disproportionately large reward would backfire because your employees may throw caution to the winds and start referring even strangers in the hope of hitting the jackpot. Similarly, if there are no disincentives to making bad referrals, the referral success ratio would seriously plummet.

Ah-a! Now we are getting a hint of why some online referral based sites have not worked very well. Let's explore this further in the next post.

Yellojobs going down?

2009-04-11T22:25:00.000-07:00

A few months ago techtribe.com, a IT specific employment referral site closed down because their model was not working. Earlier this week, we heard from WATBlog.com that yellojobs.com may be shutting down.

Yesterday, I was talking to the head of HR of a large multinational and he tells me over 40% of their new employees are recruited through internal referrals. Last month, I talked to a HR manager of one of the top 3 IT companies in India and I believe over 35% of their new employees come through various referral schemes!

We all know that new employees that come through referral schemes fit in, work well, and stay longer with the organization.

So if referrals are a HR's best friend, why are referral based job sites faring so badly?

Watch this space...

Mallika Sarabhai - Gandhinagar Constituency

2009-04-06T08:24:00.000-07:00

Mallika Sarabhai, the daughter of eminent scientist Vikram Sarabhai and reputed dancer Mrinalini Sarabhai is standing for MP from Gandhinagar in Gujarat.

Did you know she has an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA) and a PhD in Organisational Behaviour?

See the complete profile of Mallika Sarabhai here.

Know Your Politician

2009-04-05T03:09:00.001-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

As a contribution from our side to the Jaago Re! campaign, we have collected details of some of our eminent Indian politicians so that you can Know Your Politician. We have just added a few to start with and will be adding more in the days to come. If your favourite politician's resume is missing, leave a comment and we will add it as soon as possible!

Don't forget to go and vote!

A series on alternate employment avenues

2009-03-23T02:30:00.000-07:00

In India, we are obsessed with our children following a well beaten track when it comes to career and employment. I still remember when I passed out of school, everyone around was asking me, "Do you want to be a Doctor or an Engineer?", as though those were the only options available. It's been more than 20 years since then and things have not changed that much. We still want our children to do whatever is bringing in the best moolah today. We dont want them to experiment with or explore other possible avenues. When they show interest in other fields, we chastise them for not being realistic. As parents we do all that we can to stifle any passion that the children may have in areas that do not have a clear track record of regular fat paychecks.

But, the most passionate, successful and happy people I have met in my life have been those that have followed their heart and done what they believe is their reason for existence. Their list of options, it seems, was not limited to Engineering, Medicine, Law, Accounting, and Teaching .

When I wrote the post Are you gearing up for the next boom?, I realized that it may be time to write a series of articles on people who have succeeded in non-traditional areas of employment. We need our youth to find something that they can be passionate about, where they can chase their dreams, have a shot at happiness and get to change the world for the better.

The basic idea behind these articles is to show that one can go down a new career path and still make a comfortable living. So, while success for most of the people we are going to meet in this column may not be defined in terms of money alone, my articles will concentrate a bit more in that area, as I find most parents in India today understand that language better.

The articles will appear starting later this week on the career advice section of jobsbyref.com.

Good guys deserve to stand out!

2009-03-17T06:47:00.000-07:00

The title of this post is one of the slogans used by an up-and-coming job site to promote their resume writing service. This is a service provided by most of the leading job sites today.

While I understand the compulsions of a company to create new services and revenue streams, I cannot understand how "resume writing" can be considered a service for anybody. A resume writing service on a job site is like a photo enhancement service on a matrimonial site!

Till about ten years ago, as an employer, I used to form a part of my opinion about the candidate based on how he has presented himself on the resume. I used to be able to get insights into the candidate's written communication skills, clarity of thought, language skills and other "soft" skills based on how well the resume was crafted. Mind you, I never cared for the aesthetics of the resume and have always been skeptical about the overly flamboyant and flowery ones.

Over a period, I noticed that the opinions I was forming based on the resume were getting more and more inaccurate. I soon realized that this was because somebody else was writing the resume. During this phase, because the resumes were of such good quality in terms of language and presentation, the real candidate would almost always fall short of expectation and hence be rejected [In retrospect, some of the candidates may have been selected had they not added additional baggage by way of setting my expectations high]. Going back to my matrimonial site analogy, if in your photo you looked like Aishwarya Rai, as a prospective groom, be sure that I would be sorely disappointed when I see you in person!

Once an interviewer feels cheated, there is very little you, as a candidate, can do to change the opinion of the potential employer in the available time. If the resume has been done by somebody else, how accurate is the data therein? How factually accurate are the accomplishments listed? Have they also been embellished? Your credibility is lost and your chances disappear even before the interview is half-way through!

Instead of providing services that give the best chance for both candidate and company to find the right match, these resume writing services end up as a dis-service to both parties.

Good guys definitely deserve to stand out. Just not through getting your resumes written by somebody else. There are many legitimate ways by which genuine candidates can stand out and distance themselves from the fakers. Check out JobsByRef.com to find out how. Read more about it here.

Remember, if you can write a fantastic resume yourself, there is no need to use a resume writing service. If you can't write one, getting somebody else to write one is almost always seen as a deception by the interviewer. Either way, outsourced resume writing is a service you don't want.

Are you gearing up for the next boom?

2009-03-11T09:29:00.000-07:00

I know that the market conditions are looking rather bleak now, but sooner or later, things are going to pick up and then eventually we are going to get into a boom period. It may be later this year, next year or maybe even later, but it is bound to happen.

So what are you doing to be ready for the next boom? Do you have spare time now? Here are some of the things you can do instead of agonizing over the present situation:

Learn a new skill or a language. Some of these skills will come in handy when things get better.
Take up a hobby. You will learn to relax and gain some expertise
Build your network. A network built without the requirement for immediate gratification/profit is almost always stronger.
Set your house in order. Plan your future. Revaluate your priorities. You will have a clearer idea of the way forward when doors open.
Get involved in some charity that you never had time for before.
Maybe even start a new company.

The possibilities are endless. You have time on your hands now, use it wisely. The good times will come, as surely as the day follows the night.

Are you gearing up for the next boom? Write in and tell me what you plan to do.

How to spot a fake resume

2009-02-27T20:53:00.000-08:00

Here are somethings you need to look for to ensure that you are not being hoodwinked into recruiting someone with fake credentials.

The information that is most often faked are the following:
1. Skills
2. Projects
3. Salary details
4. Employment records
5. Educaton records

There are reasonably easy ways to get to the truth, though they are not completely foolproof.

Skills
The fake resume exponent knows that companies search for candidates on job sites using keywords. They also know that to end up in the top 2 - 3 pages, they need to match as many keywords as possible. So in their resume, they add all skills that are commonly searched for by companies, whether they possess the skill or not.

The way to defeat this is to ask all candidates to send in their updated profiles with the following details for each of their skills
Have you just heard about it, or have you undergone training, or do you have hands-on experience?
If you have undergone training, state when and for how long?
If you have hands-on experience, what is the length of the experience and when was the last time you used it?

This forces them to cull down their list to those that they are comfortable with because they know that now they cannot just say "Oh! I have heard about it and hence I added it to my skill set" and get away with it.

Projects
Clipboard, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V or to the tech-uninitiated, Copy & Paste. That is what has led to a lot of the same projects floating around in different resumes. This is not very easy to identify during the resume scanning stage itself. However, you can do somethings to prepare yourself.

Search the job site database as well as your own database of resumes to see if anybody else has done similar work from the same company. If you find that similar projects have been done by people in some other larger company, then there are two possibilities - either it is faked or this candidate was on a sub-contract to the larger company.
At the time of the interview, remember to grill the candidate on projects where nobody else around this person has done similar work. Ask specifically for details such as the team size, her exact role, platform was it developed on, when was the first version released, who is using it, and similar details that only someone who has actually worked on the project will know.

Salary details
Outright faking and embellishment are both quite common. Especially sales people, they tend to add their fixed salary, their sales based incentives, including potential incentives that would have been theoritically due to them if they had met some highly improbable sales goals(which they never did) into their "Current salary".

Ask specifically for fixed salary, take home, incentives and other variable components. Don't ask for the CTC (Cost to company). In many cases a CTC, even when genuinely reproduced by the candidate, can be misleading. This is because many companies add a lot of variables, sometimes even those the candidate may not always be eligible for, into the CTC in order to make the salary package appear more appealing to the candidate.

Employment records
Did you know that there are many companies in India whose sole revenue model is to provide people with a ficticious employment record. Hyderabad and more recently Bangalore are notorious for this. Ameerpet in Hyderabad is a well known locality where new companies constantly crop up. Keep an eye out for companies with buzz words like tech, info, infocom, etc. from these areas. If you have not heard about the company before, check the ROC (Registrar of Companies) records - they are online - and see if these companies are actually registered at all.

At the time of interview, ask about which office they worked in, the address, the way to get there, how many people work in that company, the name and phone number of the immediate project manager (If it is a 100+ people company and he gives the name of the CEO for everything, watch out).

Just checking to see if he has a complete set of documents including offer letter, service letter, relieveing letter and last payslip is not enough because these are part of the package that the fake company provides. Checking if an official website exists is also not enough because most fake companies cover that angle also. And calling them to check if the guy actually worked there is no good either. You can ask if Mother Theresa worked there and they will say yes, because that is part of the package too!

Education record
Not as common as the others, this is still prevalent enough to get a mention. At one time, maybe even now, degrees from Osmania University were notorious for being fudged. In fact, the US Embassy had a blanket ban on seeing anyone with an Osmania University degree!
Ask for contact details of classmates at the time of interview if you have doubts and call them immediately and ask them where they studied, what degree they pursued and when and cross check with the information that the candidate has given.

Alternately, you can ask these candidates to register on JobsByRef.com and build their credibility before applying. That should take care of most of your problems. You can read more about the credibility score here.

2009 - A year of fake resumes

2009-02-19T03:36:00.000-08:00

Every time there is a downturn(or a steep upward swing) in the job market, the number of fake resumes increase. Happened in 1998-2000 during the Y2K boom and again in 2004 during the DotCom bust. Inevitable that it will happen again this year.

Here's why:

First reason is obvious - there are more candidates than there are job openings. So more competition and hence more desperation and consequently more faking.

The second reason is less obvious.
Many of the college graduates passing out this year(2009) will not find employment because of the prevalent conditions. Let us follow the life of one such student, say S and see what may happen.

S passes out of college in the top ten percentile of his class. He is also one of the handful of students to have got an offer while in Campus, though the joining date has not been specified yet. He waits for a couple of months hoping for the confirmation letter, but nothing materializes. Enquiries with the company result in standard and vague responses such as "Wait, we will get back to you" or "Call back in 2 weeks". A few more months go by and after losing hope of ever getting into his "dream" company, S starts looking out for other opportunities.
But the market is still down and there are no takers for freshers. His resume drowns in those of thousands of others in the same boat. Tension starts building up at home.

Nearly a year goes by. Market shows signs of recovery. There is renewed hope. Companies start looking for freshers again. The campus recruitment begins for the new batches. The 2010 students pass out. Now the 2009 batch and 2010 batch start competing for the same jobs. As always, companies looking for fresh graduates show a bias towards freshly passed out candidates. They prefer the 2010 freshers over the 2009 freshers. After all, if he has not found a job for over a year, maybe he is not good enough, they think.

S still has not found his job and it is nearly two years since he passed out. The longer his employment record remains empty, the more remote his chances of landing a job. Problems about conflicts in seniority in age vs. experience, imagined or otherwise, crop up during the few interview he manages to wrangle.

Pressure at home is intolerable. Parents think S is just lazy and make sure they tell him at every opportunity. S, in desperation, is driven to a company in Hyderabad that promises to give him an employment record for a fee. He coughs up the money and buys two years of experience and a matching set of documents including a well crafted resume, an offer letter, a service letter, a relieving letter and even a last payslip.

Now he no longer has to compete with the freshers. S has got 2 years of experience now. He hopes that nobody will find out that the company he is supposed to have worked for doesn't even exist. He is a fugitive for the rest of his life, not knowing when justice will catch up.

The people who fake their resumes because of the first reason are just plain criminals. They probably would have done it anyway! I hope companies find out in time and avoid recruiting them.

However, the second set is driven to crime (and faking a resume is a crime, whatever you may say!) and some of my sympathies, I must confess, are with them.

If, as companies, we all decide, it will be quite easy to make sure that the the story I have told does not end that way. All we have to do is make sure we give the 2009 batch candidates at least the same priority as those in the 2010 batch. After all, it is not their fault that the market tanked now!

If there are company heads reading this, please, please, please, don't forget the 2009 batch. They are every bit as smart as the other batches and deserve all the chances we can give them.

The resume is dead. Long live the resume!

2009-02-17T02:57:00.000-08:00

Here's a suggestion. Take all your resumes - I am sure there are many versions, mostly outdated in your harddisk - and delete them. You don't need them anymore. Resumes in the form of Word documents and .pdfs are passe.

What you need is a LIVE resume. Something that remains alive, current and grows with you. Something that is immediately available to the potential employers you wish to approach. Something that is constantly working to find a great job and career for you.

And you've got it. Go to JobsByRef.com, register and fill in your details - for the last time in your life. More about it here.

While there, check out the different ways to utilize as well as help your network of friends, colleagues and classmates.

Tough days ahead for the 2009 batch - but there is hope

2009-02-07T05:57:00.000-08:00

Let's have no illusions. The students passing out this year are going to be seriously affected by the current downturn.

Very little campus recruitment
To start with, campus recruitment has dried up. While, last year companies were competing the be the first to reach the campus, this year very few companies seem interested in conducting campus interviews.

Delayed joining dates
Even when campus recruitment has been conducted, the tentative joining dates are way out into the future (tentative being the operative word here). Some may never be asked to join, or they may be asked to take up roles that they may not want (Wipro recently gave freshers, recruited for their software divisions, the option of joining the BPO wing).

Very few jobs in the market
Many of the companies I have talked to in recent days have told me that they have very few or no vacancies, especially at entry and junior levels. The market conditions have to get better, not just here, but in the rest of the developed world as well, for this situation to change.

And even when the market bounces back...
Let's say the market bounces back next year and there are a lot of job opportunities. Most companies, based on their behaviour so far, would be looking to recruit the "freshest" freshers (2010 pass out) ahead of the still experience-less 2009 batch.

What to do?
There are few things that you, as a 2009 student, can do to redeem the situation. First thing to remember is that though things are bad, they are not completely hopeless. There are still jobs out there - they are just not so easy to find anymore. So, this means that you will have to be really enterprising to find job openings first, and then get yourself selected.

So how do you find the job openings?

Exhaust the usual sources first - jobsites, newspapers, college notice boards, etc. Everybody is going to be doing that.
Milk your network. Here is where you can join together with all your classmates and collectively improve your prospects. Let's say you have 30 people in your batch. Let's also assume that you've had 5 batches pass out before you. That means that you have a potential group of 150 alumni that you can tap. Out of this, say, a 100 of them are currently gainfully employed. Conservatively, they may be distributed among 30 companies. The equation is very simple now. If each alumnus can help one fresher into his company, the entire class will get employed. Voila!

You will need the support of your college, the professors, and the alumni association (if there is one), but it is definitely possible.

JobsByRef.com can help you build this network quickly and tap into it. Get all your classmates to register and rope in your alumni too.

All the best!

Dear Michael Arrington

2009-01-28T02:42:00.000-08:00

Dear Michael,
I was deeply shocked to hear about the incident in munich. Though I have never written to you before, I am an avid reader of TechCrunch and your blog posts.

The value you are providing to the start up community is immense. I cannot imagine how a relatively harmless occupation such as your's can generate such vitriolic and violent responses.

Please do not stop doing what you are doing because of a few assholes. For whatever it is worth, my most sincere sympathies are with you.

It is time for the usually silent, moderate masses (such as I) to stand up and make our disgust for such behaviour known.

And whoever you are, who spat on Michael, know that you are worse than SCUM.

The king has left the building

2009-01-19T04:26:00.000-08:00

There is an article in the Times of India today about "Mansions" beginning to empty due to layoffs. For the uninitiated, "mansions" in Chennai are not castles where kings and lords live, but inexpensive, mostly dingy, cramped bachelor pads housing hundreds of men (mostly) working (again, mostly) in the IT and ITES sectors.

What is interesting is that, while there are reports of visible after-effects of layoffs, there is as yet no report on which companies are doing the laying off. Neither companies, it seems, nor the laidoff employees want the world to know that there are layoffs happening!

For companies, it is the worry of political backlash that is stopping them from going public about retrenchment and for the employees it is the social stigma associated with being laid off.

Kind of a strange win-win situation - in reverse! Just like in the case of "Slumdog Millionaire", we seem to have this overpowering desire to deny the obvious and hope that nobody finds out!

Satyam support group

2009-01-08T23:18:00.001-08:00

If you are a Satyam employee looking for a support group, please go to forum.laidoff.in. There is a forum there called Satyam support. Please urge your fellow employees also to participate. We need to support each other in all ways possible.

All the best.

What will happen to Satyam now?

2009-01-08T08:34:00.000-08:00

Image by World Economic Forum via FlickrIt is now beyond a shadow of doubt that the Raju clan will no longer be at the helm of Satyam. And very shortly, the representatives of the Raju clan will also be shunted out. So what does the future hold for this IT major that has won many projects and awards and had a team of over 50,000 talented people working across countries on countless critical projects?

Here is a quick run down of possible options.

1. New board and executive team takes over.
This would probably be the best thing that can happen - for the company, the employees and the clients. Things can go back to normal and the well-oiled project delivery machinery can continue to do what it has done successfully for nearly 20 years.

However, it is not that easy. New leadership has to emerge and should be able to grab the attention and support of the existing employees. More importantly, the new team must find some money, at least working capital, right away. And finally they have to convince the existing clients to stick around and continue to have faith in the company. After all, whatever has happened has not been at the cost of the clients, at least not yet.

The biggest down side is that the new team will have to face all the law suits and class actions that are being filed now, here in India and in the US. Can they manage to revive such a large company and take on all the legal issues at the same time?

2. Get taken over by some other company
This is probably the second best option. Very similar to the first option, except that a new management team, mostly from outside of Satyam will take over and run the show. There will be some collateral damage at the top management level of Satyam where some of the upper management people will be let go. The rest of the employees would be spared as, like in most Indian IT companies, the people are the main asset.

The down side is pretty much the same as in case 1. That is what makes this option unlikely.

3. Individual divisions carved out and sold
This is salvage time folks. This option holds a lot of promise and benefits for the new owners as well as the clients. Already Tech Mahindra is talking about taking the telecom division of Satyam. This will be good for the existing telecom clients of Satyam and for Tech Mahindra which will get a new set of clients and projects as well as a talented team.

However, this option is not so good for the employees. Time and again, we have seen that when this kind of a carve out happens, most of the employees are shown the door. I am sure Tech Mahindra already has very good people and spare resources for the Telecom sector and so, many of the middle management and programmer level resources will be let go.

The beauty of this option is that the company that takes the division(s) only gets the clients and possibly, the employees. The charges of corruption and the cases filed against Satyam will continue to remain with Satyam. All gain, no pain!

4. Close down/bankruptcy
The final option. Not good for anybody. Not even for the competitors - TCS, Infosys, Wipro and others. If this happens, the faith in the entire Indian Software industry will be shaken further. Questions about the auditing and financial practices will come up. Questions like, "who really knows the situation within these companies?" and "Satyam today, who next?"

The optimist that I am, I am hoping for option 1 to materialize. GO Satyam GO!

(No harm in updating your profile though, if you are a Satyam employee - try www.jobsbyref.com)

Why are you not getting responses to your job applications?

2009-01-01T21:49:00.000-08:00

This is a question that is being asked more and more often these days! The answer is not that complicated, if you understand how the online job boards work (or don't).

1. Fake candidates

Bad news -Your application is getting drowned by fakes
Surprised! You shouldn't be. While you are busy building your resume based on facts, there are thousands of candidates building theirs on fake credentials. While you are adding all that you know to your skills list, they are adding all that the companies are searching for into their skills list (even though they have no such skills). While you are entering the factual details of your education and employment records, they are faking theirs. While you are working on your single, definitive resume, they are uploading multiple profiles, under slightly different names.

They are doing it so that they appear high up in all searches made by potential employers. And in the process bury your resume somewhere beyond the 10th page of the search results where no employer ever goes!

Good News - Faking doesn't lead to a job
However, don't for a moment think that the fakers are getting all the jobs - the employers and the interviewers are not dumb. Over 99% of the fakers are caught out during interviews and are disqualified. But, they have already done the damage to you and the company by taking the interview slot that should have rightfully belonged to you. The main point to remember here is that those openings are still unfilled. You just need to find a way to reach them!

Solution - Distance yourself from the fakers
You need to build your credibility. Till recently, there were very few clear and easy ways of doing that. Which is why we started JobsByRef.com. Here is how you can thwart the plans of the fakers - by proving that you are genuine in ways that they cannot.
a. Register on JobsByRef.com and spend some time to update your profile.
b. For every college degree that you have, connect to at least 5 of your classmates.
c. For every employment record, connect to at least 5 of your (past or current)colleagues, preferably including those you reported to.

Very easy to do, if you are a genuine candidate. Not so easy, if you are a faker. On JobsByRef.com, we have built an algorithm that determines how genuine a candidate is based on the nature and diversity of connections.

Once you have built a healthy score, you will start appearing higher up in search results as employers look at resumes with higher credibility first.

Read more about it here and here.

2. Fake job postings

Bad news - Many of the job postings are fake!
Surprised again?! At least now you know. The truth is, for some of the unscrupulous recruitment companies, this is an easy way to collect resumes. Advertise a few nonexistent jobs and collect all the responding candidate resumes.
So that they can show case a large resume database and hope a genuine opportunity comes along.

Good news - There are still good guys around
There are still a lot of genuine job postings by both genuine placement agencies and direct employers. You just need to find out which ones are genuine.

Solution - Check out the credentials
Look at the websites of the recruitment companies, ask your friends, call the recruitment company, write to their support addresses - basically check out the credentials of the recruitment company before you apply. If you are a candidate with less than, say, 5 years of experience, don't stop applying. So what if a few more recruiters have your cv? It will only do you good. Just adjust your expectations and understand that you may not get responses from many of them - that way you will not be disappointed.

3. Market conditions

Bad news - Job openings are limited in today's market condition
Everyone would have told you that this is the main reason why you are not getting responses. Not entirely true. While the number of job openings have come down, they have not come down so drastically. Every day, I hear companies lamenting the lack of good candidates.

Good news - There are always openings for the good guys!
There are always openings for good candidates - even in bad times such as now. Look for openings published by direct employers. There are still many around. Remember, many of the openings are not getting advertised so much (advertising cost a lot and the ad budget is one of the first things that gets chopped in a bad economy).

Solution - Utilize your network
The thing to do is to make sure you are aware of all the job openings that are available, whether advertised or not. The way to do that is to ask your network of connections if there are openings in their companies. Don't have a network? WRONG. If you have started building your credibility, you have started building your network. The people who enhance your credibility (your classmates, friends, and colleagues) are the ones who can spot the right openings for you.

Bottom line
Do not let the fakers stop you from finding your dream job. Use online tools such as jobsbyref.com to control your career. You have the power now.

Register on www.jobsbyref.com today and Make your career move!

On Layoffs - Advice to Indian Companies

2008-12-31T03:50:00.000-08:00

The market conditions are bad now and those of us who want to survive until better times are upon us have to take harsh decisions. Those harsh decisions include cost cutting, and in most Indian companies, this means layoffs. By letting some people go, the company becomes better equipped to protect the rest of the company. That's reality. Now here is how I would like Indian companies to handle layoffs.

1. Do not couch layoffs as your regular performance related terminations.
Not only are you terminating people, you are also making it difficult for them to find other jobs. Who would want to hire someone who has been let go for lack of performance? If that is the genuine reason, do say so by all means, but not if your real reason is cost cutting. With no social or economic support, and a drastically diminished chance of landing another job, what will these people do?

2. Do it at one go.
Don't do your layoffs in bits and pieces. It justs makes the whole organization tense and does not create a management friendly or supportive environment that is required post-layoffs for the company to survive.

3. Don't start a witch-hunt.
Do not start scrutinizing employees' old resumes and expense reports to find minor discrepancies that can give you the opportunity to fire them on disciplinary grounds. If you believe somebody had genuinely cheated the company by falsifying records, fire them - I don't mean to condone such crimes. But not this way!.

4. Help the laid off employees to find new jobs.
Have a job fair. Give them good reports and genuine service letters specifically written by their managers. Introduce them to your trusted placement vendors. Use your network to place them in other offices. Give them open offers so that they get priority when a suitable position reopens again. Write them nice recommendations and help them improve their online credibility - there are sites like jobsbyref.com and linkedIn where you can do that easily. I am sure you can think of many ways to help them find another job soon.

5. Don't shy away from explaining.
Talk to the entire organization. Tell them your layoff plans - the reasons, the actions, the consequences (if you do and if you don't). Talk to those who are being asked to go and to those ones that get to stay. Do all that you can to make everyone understand why you are doing what you are doing.

6. See how you can provide some monetary support to the laidoff people
Can you afford to give more than the mandatory notice period payment? Maybe for an additional month or two? Those that are staying in company accommodation, can you let them stay for a couple of months more till they find their own place to stay? Waive/postpone repayment of any pending loans taken from the company? Double the notice period by halving the salary? Allow them to encash any of their unavailed leave? I am sure we can find ways to help without drastically affecting the company's future.

It would be a real nice New Year if some Indian CEO somewhere takes the lead and tells it like it is. It is time our society and the politicians face the truth. I guess Jet airways tried. Most commendable, but next time do not give in.

Rebooting India

2008-12-27T07:30:00.000-08:00

I have been reading all of James Herriot's books again (for maybe the fourth time!). In one of his stories in the book The lord god made them all, he describes how after the war the students who come to train under him teach him all the new advances and techniques that they have learnt in veternary college. "I found I was learning from them just about as much as they were learning from me", he says.

When was the last time you learnt from a student who came to your organization to do a project or an in-plant training assignment? More often than not, we find students coming out of college don't even know the fundamentals of their chosen discipline.

What could be the reason for this?

Do we need a war to spur development and progress?

Has the standard of education gone down?

Is everyone only working on financial engineering these days and neglecting real engineering like Tom Friedman is saying?

Has the average IQ of people gone down?

Have televisions, cell phones, cutthroat competition, stress, the internet and all the other distractions shortened the attention span of the younger generation to such an extent that learning has become very difficult?

Has the older generation failed to provide any good role models to emulate?

Whatever be the reasons, as Tom Friedman says, it is time to reboot, not just America, but India and the rest of the world as well!

Layoffs by any other name...

2008-12-24T02:18:00.000-08:00

An ex-employee of one of my previous companies called me today. He wanted to know if that company still existed (it does). It has been over 7 - 8 years since he left that company and joined the MNC where he currently works. So the sudden interest in my old company piqued my curiosity.

Apparently, his company(a very large MNC) has suddenly started scrutinizing the profile/resume, including previous employment and education records, of every existing employee . This chap (who has been working in that MNC for the last 7 years!) thinks this is a witch-hunt to layoff people on frivolous grounds. I cannot agree with him more.

And this is not the first (nor the only) company to do so. I am seeing this two-step process more and more often. The process is very simple.
1. Scrutinize the profiles and past data. Kick out people with discrepencies. If layoff number are met, end the exercise. If not proceed to step 2.
2. Scrutinize all expense reports, trip reports, sick leave, blog writings,... Kick out people with discrepencies.
Repeat until numbers are met.

Does this happen in other countries also? I don't mean layoffs - those happen everywhere - I mean disguising layoffs as firings (purportedly due to performance
or conduct).

There is another article in here about the multiple ways in which corporate India is screwing people in this current economic situation. And the cultural and political compulsions that are leading them to do so. Coming soon...

News from Jobsbyref.com

2008-12-23T00:03:00.000-08:00

The employer side functionality has been released. So now companies can register, post jobs and manage respondents.

Registered members can also now search for jobs and apply online. More to come.

Will post more often soon...

Laid off before joining!

2008-12-05T00:52:00.000-08:00

Well over 80% of the fresh graduates who get job offers every year are recruited through campus recruitment drives. This year has been no different. Medium and large companies have gone to all the top tier and second tier colleges and "recruited" thousands of fresh graduates.

Like in recent years, the graduates who have passed the tests and interviews have all been given not offer letters but "letters of intent to induct at an apprpriate time". When the appropriate time will be is anybody's guess.

There is an article in Hindu Business line that talks about candidates given such letters in May (or even earlier) this year who are yet to join. In fact one company alone, which has "recruited" over 13,500 students, has yet to induct over 9000 of them! This company is not the only one. Most of the companies have been slow to induct their "recruits".

For the students, on the threshold of their careers, this is like getting laid off before even joining. Many of them are waiting patiently for the promised letters and hence are not even looking out for other opportunities. The bitter truth is, given the market condition today, many of them may never get their joining letters.

There is no point in blaming companies alone for this situation, for they have their own problems to solve. Not even the biggest and the greatest companies have been spared - why, even google is tightening its belt.

I urge every youngster to start actively looking out for a job now, irrespective of whether you have an offer letter or not.

Another way to avoid getting laid off

2008-11-27T01:55:00.000-08:00

Assume you are hiring someone to do your job. Can you picture your perfect replacement? What would he/she be like?

Now, be that person.

Tip of the hat to Fish Tales!

What would you love to do?

2008-11-19T03:50:00.000-08:00

Image via WikipediaSo, you've had the misfortune of getting laid off? Don't worry, this need not be the end of the world for you. Let's look at how this can be made into a positive event!

First, set aside your worries. Now, tell me, what kind of work would you love to be involved in? Is it in the same area as the last job you were holding? Were there other avenues you would have loved to explore, but did not seem lucrative enough or easy enough? Have you got interests and hobbies that require a high level of skill? Are there activities that you are naturally good at?

The happiest people are those that are doing what they like best - and earning their keep in the bargain! Here is an opportunity to join that elite gang - don't fritter away this chance of a lifetime. Get out there and do what you have always dreamed of doing. There are thousands of "non-traditional", "alternative" vocations that are interesting and can be lucrative.

Do you love to write? Maybe you could become a journalist, or even write a book. Start of with a blog on your favourite subject. This will cost you nothing.

Do you have an area of expertise? Register on squidoo and create your page.

Do you love talking to people? May be you can be a RJ or a show host?

Love taking photographs? Interested in wildlife and conservation? Green jobs are happening all over the place. Go find out how you can save the earth.

Love fashion? The vanity industry is one of the few booming industries now. You could design clothes, and jewellery, or you could be a hairdresser, a makeup artist, or whatever they are called these days.

Love to act/model? Go ahead, get your portfolio done. Meet directors and ad agencies.

Good with numbers, have business acumen? Set up a shop, start a business.

Love to cook? Start a restaurant, run a take-away from home, cook and deliver food in your area.

The opportunities are endless. Go ahead, give it a shot - what have you got to lose?

Support for the laid off

2008-11-18T23:29:00.001-08:00

I have been keeping an eye on how people are finding this blog. Over the last month or so, a whopping 80% have come in through google, searching for "how to avoid getting laid off".

And since the time I wrote about the (lack of) support infrastructure in India for people getting laid off, I have been scouring the web for a place where these people can go to, in order to find online support. Nada! There does not seem to be a single forum or message board available!

So, we've put together a site and a forum quickly using wordpress and phpbb where people can go and share their experiences, find advice and jobs.

I hope you find it useful. May you get your next job soon!

Cost of layoffs

2008-11-16T21:58:00.000-08:00

Here is an article about the recent shooting of top executives of SiPort.

I am really worried about how Indians are going to react to layoffs. If you are planning layoffs in your company, think carefully about how you can support the laid off people in their endeavour to get their next job.

Take care.

Are we geared for layoffs in India?

2008-11-14T01:24:00.000-08:00

Image via WikipediaLayoffs and pink slips are not new to the people of the US. From the time of the great depression, layoffs have been a permanent fixture in their corporate environment. People there understand that getting laid off does not signify the end of the world, nor is it construed as a permanent, personal black mark on their resume.

However, back here in India, layoffs have not been part of the culture so far. To get laid off is still seen in many quarters as a social stigma, a direct reflection of the individual's lack of capability. Not even people such as Karthik Rajaram, who have/had made their lives in the US, have been able to rid themselves of their cultural baggage.

And for the first time in the history of India, it appears that layoffs are inevitable. Everyday, we are hearing rumours of layoffs - in TCS, Wipro, Satyam, Infosys and many other big corporates. Jet Airways has already laid off people (and reinstated them because of government and political pressure). A quick look at google insights shows that India is a close second to the US in the number of searches for the word "layoff", with bangalore, the IT capital of India, leading among the cities.

As a nation are we ready for layoffs? Will the people who get laid off have the necessary support and understanding from their family and friends? Without a dole system or a 401(K)-like plan or some other form of insurance to fall back on, how are people going to manage financially? Will companies induct a laid off person even if (s)he is well qualified, without hesitation?

Are there support groups for recently laid off people? Are there on-line forums and groups available for these people to get advice, share experiences, find an understanding shoulder to lean on, and maybe find their next job?

In a nation where children routinely commit suicide for failing in exams, what are we doing to stop many more Karthik Rajarams?

Be careful

2008-11-13T02:45:00.000-08:00

I just read a blog entry by Seth Godin. I would urge everyone to read it.

The advice he gives is equally true for job hunters. During times like this, when people are getting laid off and job openings are hard to come by, please be wary of people guaranteeing you jobs in large enterprises. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is!

Every other day, there are news articles about people getting scammed out of thousands of rupees by fly-by-night recruiters who promise jobs, visa, passports, and anything else in demand.

If you have been just laid off or are fresh out of college, remember this is not the end of the world. There are still jobs available in the market. Use all the legitimate avenues available to you including
1. Recruiters who are well established and who don't charge you.
2. Job sites where you can freely upload your resume
3. Career pages of the companies you are interested in.
4. Cold calling the hiring managers
5. Your friends network
6. Your alumni network
7. Your ex-colleagues, relatives, acquaintances, and other people you know well.

Never pay someone who promises you a job for money. These people are the scum of the earth feeding off good people in desperate situations.

Keep your money safe. You'll need it now more than ever!

Keep looking. Your next job may be just around the corner. All the best.

Who to believe?

2008-11-12T07:19:00.000-08:00

There is an article on rediff today that proclaims
IT firms are back and hiring big time!
Says Som Mittal, President, National Association of Software and Services Companies, while reflecting on the economic crisis that has ravaged the entire world:

QUOTE BEGINS:
Do such adjustments mean compromising on salaries?

They do. But then isn't getting a slightly less salary better than being jobless. Also, as I said before, the impact of the slowdown is only temporary. It will pass soon, may be within a couple of years and things would look much brighter then.

Also, let me put on record, IT companies are back at campuses, hiring big time.
QUOTE ENDS.

Follow this link for the original.

No corroboration, no references, no quotes,... is it just to make people feel good? Will it work? Unlikely based on the comments and feedback under the article.

What gives?

JobsByRef.com advertisement

2008-11-09T04:15:00.000-08:00

Mr. Crab goes to office!

Internship

2008-11-08T03:16:00.001-08:00

Most companies look for candidates who already have relevant work experience, especially in a down market. If you have not already been recruited through your college's campus recruitment program, then getting into a company without any work experience can be difficult. You need work experience to get a job and you need a job to gain relevant experience - another typical catch-22 situation. However there is a way to break this mutual dependency - Internship.

Many professional courses earmark a part of the final year of study for gaining work experience - the idea being that when you are out of college, you will come out with at least some real work experience in a professional environment. What you need to do is to find a company that will take you in as an intern. Once you get it, not only do you gain valuable experience, if you perform well, the internship can even transform into an employment opportunity as soon as you successfully complete your degree.

For students studying in tier 2 colleges, getting internship opportunities are still quite difficult. One of the steps you can take to improve your chances of getting an internship is to register on http://www.jobsbyref.com, enter the degree you are currently pursuing and specifying your requirement for an internship. That way, companies searching for interns will be able to find you and reach out to you.

How to avoid getting laid off

2008-10-20T00:53:00.000-07:00

During difficult times like these, layoffs become commonplace. Companies layoff people not only to improve their chances of survival, but also because there is no significant backlash to layoffs at these times.

So, as an employee, what should you do to remain employed?

To start with, work as hard as you can.
No only does this help keep your company afloat, it also makes you a more valuable resource.

Stay where you are.
In many companies, the first people to get laid off are the people who have joined recently. If you have been with a company for a long time, now is not the time to switch, no matter how good the new offer may be.

Don't even look for a new job while still employed.
During these uncertain times, it is tempting to line up a backup plan, just in case. However, there can be unhelpful side effects. For example, if you post your resume on some job site and your current employer comes to know, then when it is time to make the layoff list, they will add your name to it - after all, you were planning to leave anyway, right?

Don't, not even for a moment, think that the thin privacy blanket provided by most online job sites will be sufficient to hide you from your current employer. Employers are a lot smarter than you think and there are a couple of simple methods to find out about your presence on popular jobs sites like naukri, monster and others.
Remember, your resume will not be seen only if your company uses its account to search the database. If your company uses somebody else's account, you will be seen. For example,
1. Many top employers use multiple recruiters to help in acquiring candidates. It is easy for an employer to ask one of the recruiters to check on a regular basis for "All employees from currently updating their resume". The recruiter would be more than happy to oblige.
2. Company HRs are a close-knit group and very often exchange job site account information so that they can see who among their employees is active seeking employment elsewhere.

So, if the job site provides a "complete stealth" mode, continue. Otherwise, the best thing to do is to not touch your profile on job sites, or even delete your account, if possible.

If there is talk of voluntary pay cuts, be ready to volunteer.
Some companies take this route, though it is usually a pre-cursor to layoffs. The best thing to do is to be open to this idea as the chances are pay-cuts and layoffs are in all probability inevitable anyway.

If you are currently unemployed, grab any opportunity that comes along.
This is not the time to be choosy. Some of the opportunities, especially with startups, may be more lucrative in the long run. Interesting times require interesting action.

In summary, if you wish to stay employed, just hunker down and let the current crisis pass.

Lessons from a dung beetle!

2008-10-15T03:28:00.000-07:00

Thought I'd make a "light" video response to Sequoia's 56 slider and other VCs' pronouncements(here, here, here, and here) of impending doom.

I believe that the rules of the game have not changed. The same principles that the dung beetle follows hold good for all of us - in good times and bad times.

1. Work hard
2. Persevere
3. Be innovative
4. Put up a good fight, and
5. Build something of value.

Here's wishing success to all start-ups. May y'all succeed.

If you can't see the video, follow this link: http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=0oQCyBAixEc

A long life or a swift death

2008-10-13T00:48:00.000-07:00

As a start-up founder, I have been keenly following the recent comments and reactions from various quarters including
this from Ron Conway, this from Sequoia, this from Calacanis, and this.

Sounds like crunch-time folks. I don't know about you, but if a long life or a swift death are my only options, I am real glad. Much better than having the additional option of a long lingering death. So if you are a startup like us, be happy that your options have been narrowed down for you.

Now, ask yourself this simple question:
No funding, low valuation, no quick exit - am I ready?

If you believe you are catering to a necessity, have a clear revenue model, and are willing to work passionately to make it happen, your answer should be a resounding YES. Don't worry about what the doom-merchants are saying. Believe that you are in the right place at the right time.

If your answer is NO - find out the shortest route towards a YES. If you can't, cut your losses and make it quick. Closing one door opens another. Who knows - your next avatar may have the right answer.

We may have interesting times thrust on us, but the choices are always ours.

I am choosing a long life. What about you?

JobsByRef.com is in private beta

2008-10-10T09:26:00.000-07:00

I don't know if I blogged about it here already. I don't mind repeating it, though :)
JobsByRef.com is now in private beta. Check it out at www.jobsbyref.com. 70% of the site is ready, though members cannot still apply to jobs or view available job postings. Duh! I know.

But we are almost there. Hopefully, we'll get there before too many people affected by the tanking market are pushed to take desperate measures.

Respondent management

2008-10-03T01:09:00.000-07:00

During the y2k boom time and then again soon after the dot-com bust, every job opening we advertised resulted in literally thousands of responses. I remember once, we had advertised for a VC++ software engineer with 5 years of experience in Hindu's wednesday morning opportunities column. It was only a 3 inch ad. When I reached office at 8:30 AM that morning, our mail box was flooded with over 8000 resumes - all within 2 hrs of publication! By the end of that day, we had received well over 20,000 resumes. Of course, most of the resumes we scanned had no relevance to the job opening we had advertised. If there had been a valid candidate in that pile of resumes, we failed to find it, though I must confess that after having read about a hundred of the received resumes, I gave it up as a bad job.

When I think of the financial and market situation today, and when I read articles like this, I cannot but fear that we may be in for another round of resume overload. Are we prepared for it this time?

How are we going to track responses from multiple sources?
How are we going to separate the grain from the chaff (the 10% good candidates from the 90% of irrelevant respondents)?
How are we going to identify the promising ones out of the 10% of the respondents that are relevant.

The companies that have answers to these questions will be able to attract, find and employ the good candidates who become available in times like these. The others will miss the boat (again) because they will not be able to find the right applicants from among the 1000s of applicants.

At JobsByRef.com, we are launching an intuitive online respondent management system, so that you don't have to read through 1000s of resumes to find the right candidates. No matter where you advertise, be it online on job sites, on in traditional media such as newspapers and journals, we will let you keep track of the responses and provide you with advanced match-scores and analysis options so that you can zoom on to the right candidates everytime.

If you are an employer, you can register here if you are interested in our respondent management system. We will get back to you as soon as we launch (Mid-Q4 2008). Early registrants will get our free introductory 3 month offer.

Some things don't have to happen again and again

2008-09-29T23:13:00.000-07:00

Last week, there was an article in "Times of India", I think, about over 50 people getting cheated by a bogus recruiter who promised them all jobs at the Hyundai facilities in Chennai for a neat sum of money.

Last month another bogus recruiter (same???) cheated hundreds of people after promising them jobs in IBM!

These are just instances in the last month that caught the media attention. We don't even know how many such incidents go unreported.

Why is it so difficult to regularize businesses and stop desperate people from getting cheated? All we need is a site where all recruiters have to be registered. If you are not registered there I won't deal with you. End of story.

Let me illustrate this with what happened to me 2 weeks ago and how I was able to get clarity quickly.

A man from a tamil monthly called "Pothu Nanayam" contacted me over the phone asking for an appointment to interview me for his magazine. After ensuring it was really me he was after, I asked him to come later in the evening.

Promptly at 5:00 PM, a smartly dressed, dignified looking man arrived and introduced himself as Udumalai Chandran, the chief editor of the magazine. He told me that their monthly magazine concentrated on articles about upcoming businesses and business men, especially those who were also involved in service organizations such as the Rotary International.
He told me their circulation was around 26,000 a month and all of their revenues came from advertisements sponsored by the people they interview. So, even before he started the interview, he had made it clear that I would be paying him somewhere between Rs. 1500 to Rs. 4500 depending on the kind of advertisement I chose. He also showed me the last six issues of his magazine, each covering over 40 people, many of whom I recognized as fellow rotarians.

The interview lasted for over 30 minutes, during which time he asked all the standard questions and jotted down everything in good, chaste, high-quality tamil. Finally he asked for a photo and gave me a receipt for Rs. 1500 (which was all I was willing to pay - that too only because he had come all the way to my office). I told him I'd mail the cheque along with the photo during the course of the week. He thanked me, wished me all the very best for my new venture and left. As he was leaving, I asked him to leave behind the last issue so that I could go through it in leisure.

I mentioned this to a friend later that day and said that I had agreed to pay because I felt guilty for having brought him to my office, but I was not happy since I had never heard of the magazine.

He laughed and said that it would be worthwhile to check them out before paying them. He informed me that there is an organization called the Registrar of Newspaper for India where I could check for the existence of any newspaper or magazine in India. Promptly, I went to that site and searched for "Pothu Nanayam" by name as well as by the registration number given on the back of the magazine "TN/MS (S) 246". No such magazine was registered on that site!

Two days later Mr. Chandran called me for the cheque and I told him that since his paper was not listed in the Registry of Indian newspapers, I was no longer willing to pay him anything. He seemed flustered and sounded surprised at not being listed in the official registry. He briefly thanked me and hung up.

He seemed like such a nice man, but I think I did the right thing. I don't like paying for anything if I am not sure and it took me 2 minutes of guidance and 3 minutes of internet time to find out the antecedents of his "organization".

While I have no way of knowing whether the magazine is real or not, at least I was able to decide for myself based on the information available from authorized sources on the web.

Similarly, in the case of recruiters, there should be an avenue for people to find out the antecedents of people and organizations.

Knowledge = Willingness to check + access to information.
We, especially here in India, need to inculcate the first and provide the second. If we really want to help people, it should not be too difficult, especially if we are moved when we hear or read about poor, desperate people being cheated.

Instead of waiting for the slow moving wheels of the government to spring into action, we at JobsByRef.com have decided that we will provide facilities for recruitment organizations to register themselves along with details of which companies they officially represent. It may not solve the whole problem, but it is still a place to start.

If you have any other suggestions, do write in the comments section. Thanks.

JobsByRef.com is in private beta

2008-09-26T02:54:00.000-07:00

We had a soft launch yesterday. Just for a few close friends and some of the early birds who had registered on our site. All systems fine and responding well.

We are sorry we could not accommodate all the registrants in this first round, but thanks for the overwhelming response. We will send you special invites as soon as possible.

The real launch is expected to be sometime around the end of October '08. It's an aggressive deadline, but we are very keen to meet it.

Look out for that invite.

Cost of experience

2008-09-20T07:20:00.000-07:00

So, what is the cost of experience today? I heard from a past colleague yesterday that it is about Rs. 10,000 for each year of experience. Don't understand?

Let me explain. Let's say a person has not found a job even two years after finishing college. Since he does not have any work experience, he does not get any offers. But he needs a job to get work experience. A classic catch-22.

Enter, a company that is willing to give him a service letter that states that he has worked with them for the last two years – with project descriptions to boot. At a price, though – for each year of experience that he wants the service letter to state, he needs to pay Rs. 10,000.

I have heard short-sighted people say that this is a victim-less crime. "After all, it has improved a person's employment-worthiness", they say.
WELL, I DON'T AGREE.
Not only are people who have worked hard to gain experience deprived of a well deserved opportunity, the employer has also been hoodwinked into employing an experience-less, most probably unqualified, highly UNETHICAL individual. Who knows what he will get up to once he gets hold of confidential information during the course of his work?

Obviously, we need the law enforcement agencies to nail these fraudsters. But, I don't see that as the whole solution. We need to be able to prevent these unethical companies from plying their wares. NOW.

What we need is a decent credibility checking mechanism – for individuals and companies; a way to blacklist companies that are into such unethical practices; a way by which employers can share such information with each other.

Are there any providers of such facilities out there? In India? In the US? Anywhere else in the world?

NSG's impact on the Indian Job Market

2008-09-13T05:01:00.000-07:00

The Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) is a multi-national body that controls the export of fissile material. The group came into being after india detonated an atomic bomb way back in 1974, an event that was called Smiling Buddha. Since then, the members of the NSG have refused to export to India any material that can be used in making nuclear devices.

Earlier this month, the NSG, under pressure from the US, lifted the ban. As part of the deal, India will have to disclose which organizations within India are civilian nuclear establishments and which ones are military in nature.

Civilian establishments, which are/will be predominantly power plants, will in theory get access to enriched uranium required for the production of electricity, while military establishments will need to continue to fend for themselves.

India is expected to spend over USD 40 Billion over the next 15 years in building and running nuclear power plants!

Setting aside my apprehensions about what the future holds for us Indians, I would like to speculate on the effects of the NSG waiver on the Indian job market. Till date, all nuclear related organizations within India have been predominantly military in nature and limited in number. Getting a job in a nuclear power plant has been really difficult because of all the security regulations involved and civilians have had very little opportunities to find jobs in this sector.

However, once the waiver is in place, there are already clear indications that large business houses such as TATA, and Reliance will enter the field and build their own nuclear power plants solely to produce electricity. When that happens, the number of jobs available to civilians in this area is bound to sky-rocket.

And, we are not talking about the need for additional nuclear scientists alone here. We are talking about a whole range of other qualified people and secondary establishments needed for the smooth functioning of these massive power plants.

Nuclear power plants are like super large factories operating in 3 shifts, 24 hours a day, throughtout the year. To start with, we need to build them which means there will be a tremendous increase in the requirement for structural engineers, civil engineers, architects, and other construction related personnel.

Once the power plants are in place, there will be jobs for highly skilled individuals as well as entry level personnel. For probably the first time in India, there will be ample opportunities for people with pure sciences background (A group that has been completely deprived of meaningful employment opportunities in India). Obviously, there will be a need for more nuclear scientists, research assistants, laboratory assistants, power plant operators, computer operators, quality control engineers.

The large power plants will employ thousands of people which will mean that each of these establishments will be like townships leading to a wide variety of indirect employment - from schools and hospitals to transportation services, to restaurants and cinema halls.

Finally we come to the informal and unorganized sector consisting of drivers, house maids, plumbers, electricians, and others required for the smooth functioning of the townships.

I am yet to see any official figures on how many jobs will be created over the next 15 years because of the NSG waiver, but I am sure it will be in the order of hundreds of thousands of jobs and that is good news. Especially when you consider that the number of job openings are coming down in most parts of the world!

One thing I can't help wondering about though is what this 40 Billion dollar budget can do if we were to concentrate on harnessing some clean energy source such as solar energy. We could be pioneers instead of buying outdated, expensive and extremely dangerous technology. There's another blog post itching to get out.

Finding suitable candidates

2008-08-19T07:05:00.000-07:00

When I am recruiting new people, I am almost always looking for people similar to the good ones already working with me.

And the best way to get them, I have found (short of cloning them), is to ask my existing employees to find such people from among their friends. After all, as the adage goes, "birds of a feather, flock together".

Works like a charm - every time! A gazillion points to referrals!

[Don't flame me. This is not the same as wanting people exactly like me. That would be disastrous :(, I know.]

Now, how nice would it be if I could ask a recruiter or a jobsite to "get me someone exactly like this"?

Do you have the same wish? Do you have a blue-print of your new employees in your mind?

A fresh green look at the job market.

2008-08-10T22:09:00.000-07:00

Last week I had a small argument with the check-out guy at the Reliance Fresh shop near my house. The reason - I did not use those ubiquitous thin plastic bags that they provide to segregate different vegetables in the shopping basket.
"You have to put each kind of vegetable into a separate plastic bag, if you want me to bill them", he said and then added, "They are free. You can take as many as you want".

"I know. But using your plastic bags is not very environmentally friendly, is it?" I said. "That's why I have brought my own cloth bag for the vegetables. Here, put the veggies into this, please".

He wasn't very pleased. Started grumbling under his breath. I gave him my customary 2 minutes before I launched into my usual sermon about how, being the much younger of the two, the world was more his than mine. That it is in his best interest that he starts being more environmentally aware. That he should be the one taking the initiative to highlight this to his company. And how, who knows, may be they will appreciate it and even give him a promotion! He continued to grumble but he knew he had lost the battle and I came out without a single plastic bag against my name.

It is amazing that a huge company like Reliance takes such a cavalier attitude towards the environment. All the more strange when you realize that they are in an awesome position to get maximum mileage out of it, in terms of branding and goodwill.

If I were in their position, this is what I would start with:
1. Give discounts for people who come with their own cloth bags.
2. Sell sturdy cloth bags with Reliance Fresh emblazoned on one side and "Real men carry cloth bags to buy vegetables" or something like that on the other side.
3. Quickly phase-out the plastic bags.
4. Talk about the company's commitment to improving the environment in every aspect of their business - from the farms to their retail outlets.

The reason I chose to write about Reliance Fresh, of course is the fact that for them to take this stand seems to be a no-brainer. But if we think about it, almost every company can do a lot to go green. Go ahead, take any industry, any company you can think of. In five minutes, you will be able to come up with cost effective and highly beneficial (to their business also) ways of going green.

Let me take the example of the job site that I am currently working on - JobsByRef.com. At first glance, you might think "how can these guys help the environment?". Just of the top of my head, I can do the following(at hardly any additional cost):

1. Promote the site as the place for your definitive resume. You keep your profile up-to-date on our site and whenever anyone is interested in your candidature, you just send them a link. There is never going to be any need to print your resume, ever. We will provide ways to manage these links so that you can always decide who gets to use them, for long, etc.

2. Provide functionality for conducting remote interviews. That way, candidates do not have to travel in order to attend interviews. We are working on making this happen. I don't want to reveal too much at this stage but we are working on ways to ensure that some of the most common concerns relating to telephonic interviews are taken care of.

3. Promote telecommuting so that it becomes mainstream. We are providing functionality for people to actively search for telecommuting jobs as well as for companies to look for such people.

I am sure we can do a lot more. Can you think of other ways we can help the environment? For example,

1. How can we help companies that are trying to move jobs to rural areas [as against bringing the rural masses to urban areas in search of jobs]?
2. How can we link causes to volunteers and vice-versa?
3. How can we help NGOs and not-for-profit companies find better candidates?
4. How can we help organizations working on conservation projects find committed employees?

I am sure you can think of a 100 other ways to go. Do write to me if you have any suggestions or leave a comment on this post.

Thanks in advance.

Power to the team leads

2008-08-06T02:59:00.000-07:00

How many times have you, as a team lead, explained at great length to the HR department about the kind of people you want to recruit for your team, only for them to come back with a “short-list” of a few hundred candidates?

I know this can be frustrating, but for a second, look at it from the HR’s position. If your requirements are very specific, the HR personnel do not find any candidates (because the search criteria used is too narrow) and if you have painted a broad picture, there are thousands of matches.

Obviously, the HR executive is not in the best position to decide which search criteria to relax and which ones not to. So who is in the right position?

YOU.

That’s right! Nobody knows exactly what you are looking for better than you. So, go talk to your company today. Get them to let you choose your own people. Use your contacts and network. In no time, you will have the best team in the company.

Go ahead, make your day!

Have connections. Will use.

2008-07-25T22:28:00.000-07:00

Recently, I read a very interesting article by Aruna Viswanatha on livemint about job hunting and personal references. The article is very much in line with my thinking and though it may be a "plug" for shine.com [Both shine and Mint are owned by HT Media, as clearly mentioned in the article.], it is impartially written.

The gist of the article is that referrals from friends are the number one route to a good job/employee. My own experience and that of countless recruiters and HR professionals that I have talked to, confirms this. And yet, no job site has made a decent attempt to find a way of incorporating a meaningful referral mechanism into their solution.

The existing job sites can be categorized into three distinct classes:

1. Traditional job sites
Sites like naukri.com, monster.com, timesjobs.com, shine.com that are merely repositories of resumes and job postings with superficial variations in functionality.

2. Referral based sites
Earlier, I said, "No job site has made a decent attempt to find a way of incorporating a meaningful referral mechanism into their solution". The operative word is decent. Most referral sites have two buttons next to each other - Apply and Refer. Basically, what they are saying is "Here is a job opening. If you want it apply for it. Otherwise, see if you can refer a friend for it". As an employer, I do not care if some stranger refers some other stranger to me. What I need is a personal referral. In this context, personal means somebody personally known to me - and not some stranger on the other end of the internet.

3. Networking sites
Essentially LinkedIn. Since LinkedIn started as a professional networking site rather than a job site, it is at best just another avenue by which one may find a job and, unless things change drastically, will never be the typical job hunter's first choice for a job site.

When the time is ripe (closer to launch, is what I mean), I will write about how jobsbyref.com, the site we are currently working on, brings together meaningful functionality including the ability to use one's connections to get a better job.

Hold on, it should not be too long now!

Education is our only salvation

2008-07-05T22:23:00.000-07:00

For a change, instead of complaining about the Indian education system and the "irresponsible" corporate world, I have decided to write about a few different things I have heard over the last week or so that show that there is hope for us yet and Corporate Social Responsibility is alive and kicking in India.

This morning, the full front page of Times of India was about their new initiative called "Teach India". It is a truly ambitious plan to get together the educated teaching volunteers and poor students needing tutoring.

Yesterday, people from Ashok Leyland came to my son's school and talked to us about how they plan to create interesting assignments for children that will encourage free thinking as well as engender interest in different fields of engineering.

Earlier in the week, a long-lost friend of mine wrote in about www.lipik.in, a site that has, he says,
"firm focus on the non-english speaking market in india. This new technology facilitates easy and accurate typing in Indian languages. I am sure you will agree that an easy local language data input method is necessary for spreading Internet amongst non English speaking masses of India. The web based service is called Lipik and available at www.lipik.in. It uses an AI module to predict what you want to write based on what has been written so far. This greatly enhances typing speed and accuracy even for users who don't know the language very well. It includes a virtual Indic language keyboard that eliminates the need to know English. It also allows search in the local language and publishing to blogger.

The service is currently available in Hindi, Tamil, Panjabi, Kannada and English and we are working on adding more languages."

My friends at TutorVista and Edurite tutorials need to be mentioned here. They have been around for a while now in the online tutoring world and have fantastic technology that allows teachers and students to work with each other at mutually convenient times no matter where they live in the world. All that is required is that the teacher and the student are connected by the universal umbilical cord - the internet.

Imagine if we could bring together the $100 notebook, TutorVista's technology and teaching staff, vernacular language support from lipik.in, broad based and career focused study material from corporates and the educated volunteer teachers galvanized by Times of India working together to bring education to every corner of India!

Today India. Tomorrow THE WORLD!!!

Job sites and privacy (3)

2008-07-02T03:13:00.000-07:00

When you are using an online job site to find yourself a job, you want potential employers to find you and yet you do not want to be seen [by all and sundry, and especially by your current employer]! A definite conundrum?

Not quite! Suppose you get yourself a front man, say, your own personal career manager to act on your behalf? He could then discreetly (Though not like this!) make sure all potential employers are made aware of the fact that a person of your qualifications and caliber is available for employment. He could also check out these potential employers and give you advice.
Finally, after consultation with you, he could put you in touch with the potential employers of your choice so that you could take the discussion forward.

Now that would give you full privacy without reducing your options!

Why can't job sites do that for you? If they were really interested in making your life better, they should, don't you think?

Will any other company go to CEG for campus recruitment this year?

2008-07-01T05:06:00.000-07:00

CTS has already given offer letters to (all?) 1,100 students at the College of Engineering, Guindy. Read more here and here.

Now tell me, why would any other company go there for campus recruitment this year? So, essentially, the students of CEG now have no choice but to join CTS, whether they like it or not. And they are not the only students affected. At some other college, the first company to visit will be TCS. What do you think they will do? Exactly. They will make offers to all the students there. After all, they need to meet their requirements too. HCL, Satyam, Infosys will all follow suit.

Welcome to the era of one college - one company!

All you students out there, answer me this: Is this a good thing for you?

Now, go to your Dean(placements) and ask him to remove all restrictions regarding the number of interviews you can attend this year in campus. That way, you will still have a choice of where you would like to work.

Not that CTS is a bad place to work, mind you. It's just that you need to have a choice.
Go!

CTS makes record campus offers for Anna University

2008-06-30T03:22:00.000-07:00

On 23-Jun-2008 Cognizant Technology Solutions (CTS) gave offer letters to 1,100 students of College of Engineering, Guindy. link

According to the official website of the college of engineering(CEG), Guindy, their intake of students into undergraduate courses each year is around 800 . Though I cannot find exact figures for the intake of post graduates and research students, I am guessing it would be around 400. Thus, assuming all the students graduate, every year around 1200 students pass out of the college.

Which implies that CTS has given offer letters to practically all the students coming out of CEG next year!

From the point of view of CTS, this is an excellent move, both strategically as well as tactically. Students of CEG are generally very good, both because of the stringent admission criteria (which ensures that only students with excellent academic records gain admission) as well as the quality of their facilities and faculty. So CTS can expect that at least 50% of the students will join and do very well at work. The time and effort to get over 500 good employees in this manner would have been really low.
From a tactical stand point, CTS has ensured that none of the other players (TCS, Infosys, Satyam, etc.) can get anyone from CEG! (Most campus recruitment rules stipulate that if a student has got an offer from one Tier 1 company, he/she cannot appear for any other interview).

As for the college, all their students have gotten placed and that augers well for the future reputation of CEG.

Only when I think of this with the student's interest in mind and that of the country as a whole, do I start to worry.

1. To start with, what CTS has done is to hoard potential employees. In one fell swoop they have reserved all the candidates for themselves and ensured that the students cannot get themselves jobs in any other company through the campus recruitment process. With this kind of control, now the company can delay the sending of appointment letter for as long as it wants without too much risk.
And this happens quite a lot already. I have heard of many a case where the student received the appointment letter (from a very large company) only 8 months after she completed her degree. Even after that, for over 6 months she was not involved in any project. So effectively, for nearly a year and a half, she did not do any work. Of course, from the outside we can all ask why she did not go and find herself a job elsewhere. But, in reality, most students (and their parents) are very reluctant to rock the boat once they have received an offer letter from a large company with a "good" reputation.
While I am not suggesting that CTS will follow this path, given how the market is yo-yo'ing these days, this could very well happen.

2. Of the 1,100 students, only about 10 - 15 % of them have computer science degrees. All the other are from such varied disciplines as Civil, Electrical and Electronics, Communication engineering, mechanical engineering, Industrial engineering, manufacturing engineering, printing technology, mining engineering, material sciences and engineering and agriculture and irrigation engineering. Not only are these students ill-equipped to work in a software engineering environment, by joining a software company, they are also ensuring that all the work they have put in (apart from the efforts put in by the faculty) to learn their discipline goes completely to waste. Where are we going to find the next generation of competent civil engineers? Who is going to help improve the Indian agricultural sector? Who is going to lead us in our competition with China in the manufacturing sector?
Again, I am not suggesting that this problem has only arisen now because of CTS. We have been facing this problem ever since the start of the software revolution in India. It is just that, instead of addressing this problem, the Indian industry seems to be doing things to exacerbate it.

3. Will the 3rd year students who have got the offers continue to study with interest now that they have got a job offer in hand? What incentive is there for students of other disciplines to study when they already have a job offer and the subjects they need to study have no relevance to the work they are going to do! Why cannot these campus interview be conducted at the end of the 4th year (for 4 year degrees) thereby giving the students an additional one year of opportunity to learn and gain interest in their area of expertise.
The power to allow campus interviews only for students in their final academic year is completely in the hands of the colleges. If the guardians of education do not care, who will?

4. Do the students studying disciplines other than computer science have any future in their field of study/interest? Is there any overlap at all between their area of study and their field of interest? If such a overlap exists are we doing anything to sustain and encourage that?

5. What happens to computer science students from other colleges, especially tier 2 colleges which are not able to attract companies to come and conduct campus recruitment? Despite having studied computer science, do they have job openings in their area of expertise?

Has individual, corporate and collective greed become so all-encompassing that we cannot even see the kind of lop-sided growth we are fostering? We are no longer behaving like a country that wants to progress in all fronts including science, technology (other than software), equal education and employment opportunities for all,self sufficiency, alleviation of poverty, good and affordable health care for all and self preservation. We have merely become a provider of semi-skilled labour (whatever is the flavour of the day or decade) for the world.

Today, India has become just a temp staffing outfit!

Job sites and privacy issues (2)

2008-06-25T05:56:00.000-07:00

Another question that crops up frequently is
Does fudging my contact details on my online resume reduce my credibility?

The answer, most definitely, is YES! In fact, fudging leads to more than just diminished credibility, it could actually take you to jail! Fudging any part of your resume is a big no-no. Your curriculum Vitae or resume is a sacrosanct document which typically ends with
I hereby declare that the information I have provided is accurate to the best of my knowledge
followed by your signature. While this does not make your resume a legal document, your employment contract is most definitely a legal document and it is based on the belief that the resume is factually accurate.

Given the fact that this method of "privacy protection" is used quite often on online job sites, most employers try to rationalize this behaviour. Nevertheless, on deeper probing many of them do agree that at least at a subconscious level, some amount of credibility of the person (who has done the fudging) diminishes.

Let's look at this from the potential employer's perspective.

It is only natural for a potential employer to think "if he has fudged this, what else would he have fudged?" With that thought, in one fell swoop, your entire credibility goes down the drain. Guilty until proven innocent!

Additionally, no matter what the realities of today's corporate world may be, it is difficult for most employers to understand why people have to hide the fact that they want to move on to another job. Remember, they face this situation every day in their own offices with people leaving for one reason or another (however legitimate the reasons may be). So they have been in a situation before where one or more of their employees started looking out for another job while working there. So it does not take a great amount of imagination to figure out that they will think "If she is doing that in that company, what makes us feel she won't do the same thing here?". There goes your trustworthiness, even before day one at the new job!

There is no point in starting the rest of your career on the back foot. Don't make the mistake of fudging your resume. If your job site does not provide adequate legitimate means of privacy protection, dump them and go elsewhere.

Like I said before, fudging your resume, for any reason, is a no-no!

Job sites and privacy issues (1)

2008-06-24T02:34:00.001-07:00

Many people have expressed concerns about the privacy protection actually provided by the current crop of job sites. Despite the fact that most job sites boldly declare "100% privacy protection guaranteed" on their home pages, these concerns seem to continue to remain at the top of the users' minds - with good reason!

Having tired of explaining to each one individually, I have decided that a series of blog entries would help all concerned. In each post of this series, I will try and answer one of the constantly recurring questions. Here goes...

Q. If I register myself on a jobsite, will just anybody and everybody be able to see my resume? Importantly, will my current employer find out?

A. The short answer is yes, mostly. The longer answer follows...

Most job sites, such as naukri, monster, timesjobs and shine provide the user with multiple levels of privacy. It is very important to understand their capabilities and limitations clearly.

The first option provided is the invisibility flag. By default it is set to false so everybody can see you. You can, however, turn it on. What this does is that it effectively makes you invisible to all. Including potential employers and recruiters - which may not be quite what you want! However, you can still log on to the site, search through their list of job postings and apply for one or more of the jobs, just as usual.

The other options that sites provide is a flag that says "Don't let my current employer see me!" Usually, this is set to true by default. While the intent of the job site is good, this option, based on my discussions with many HR departments and recruiters , is pretty much worthless.

The way this option works is that when your current employer uses his/her account to login and search for candidates, you are automatically excluded from the search results so that your employer does not find out that you are actively searching for employment behind his/her back. If other employers log in with their user id / password and search the candidate database, if your profile matches the search criteria, you will be part of the search result. So far so good.

But employers are constantly worried about attrition and are desperate to know who all among their employees are planning to leave. That is quite understandable, especially in industries with high attrition rates like IT and ITES. So, what they do is identify a friendly organization, a sister concern or a recruitment firm that has accounts with some of the popular job sites and exchange account information. So company A uses company B's account, logs in and searches for "All candidates who are currently employed in company A who have updated their profiles in the last x months". Presto! they now have the list of all their employees attempting to jump ship including, unfortunately, you!

Finally, there is the third option, which is to fudge your contact information and any other details specifically identifying you, from your profile. Most job sites do not and cannot check the validity of any of these entries and so your employer will never find your profile online. Of course, there are problems with this approach. which I will address in another blog entry.

In summary, none of the existing job sites can guarantee the kind of privacy protection that you would ideally want. Not that it can't be done, mind you. Complete privacy protection is definitely possible, but you would require serious gumption to implement it! Check out Search In Stealth.

What do you do at work?

2008-06-17T05:37:00.000-07:00

My home desktop's monitor died on me recently. I called Dell customer service and had the best customer support interaction ever!

The customer service agent, let us call her Anu, took down the monitor's serial number and after a few seconds told me that my warranty had expired 20 days earlier. I asked her if I could extend the warranty now and still have the monitor covered. She said she would check and was gone for about 3 minutes while I waited impatiently, all the time cursing my luck with gadgets which seemed programmed to die immediately after warranty expires. Just as I was beginning to think that she was never going to come back, she said "I'll tell you what; I just had a chat with my manager and this is what I'll do - I will replace your monitor as part of the existing warranty and then you can call the warranty department and extend your warranty at your convenience, if you so wish. How does that sound?"

I was obviously overjoyed and agreed to it whole-heartedly. She asked for another couple of minutes while the system registered the details during which time she continued talking to me about other things with genuine interest.

The very next day, at half past nine in the morning, I had a spanking, brand new monitor on my desk!

If somebody asks her what she does at work, she can truthfully say "I keep our clients happy by providing friendly and efficient customer services".

So, what do you do at work?

An appropriate parable

2008-05-11T00:07:00.000-07:00

A long time ago, the parable goes, in a land just like our own, was a rich and prosperous kingdom, ruled by a benevolent and intelligent king. The land was fertile, the education system was good, and trade with the neighbouring kingdoms highly profitable. In short, the people of that land, all lived a good life.

One day, the king decided to check how good his people were. So he told them that he would like each family to donate one pot of milk for a yagna to bring more prosperity to their kingdom. He then kept a huge drum in the temple and asked each family to bring one pot of milk that night and pour into the drum.

Overnight all the families came one by one and by morning the drum was full. However, when the king checked the drum in the morning, he was heartbroken to find that it contained mostly water with just one or two cloudy patches to indicate that some (very little) milk had also been poured in. Obviously, most of the people had assumed that their pot of water would go unnoticed in the whole drum of milk and had brought water instead of milk.

Thus the pot contained mostly water and whatever milk a few good souls had brought was also lost due to the miserly acts of the majority.

This parable is a good analogy to the state of most of our current job sites. With millions of resumes in each database, people assume that whatever falsifications they do in the resumes would go unnoticed.

However, all they are doing is diluting the quality of the entire database of resumes and making extraction of the good resumes within nearly impossible, thereby diluting the credibility of each and every resume within the database.

I don't know what the king did, but I think I have a few ideas that may just work...

What if...

2008-05-07T08:45:00.000-07:00

What if you knew more about the job market and your prospects?
What if you knew how your salary compared with that of others in your industry?
What if you knew how your salary compared with that of your peers, ex-colleagues, classmates?
What if you knew more about your employment opportunities in different cities?
What if you knew, to a ballpark, your total future lifetime career earnings ?
what if you knew your career growth path for the next 5 - 10 years ?
What if you knew which jobs will result in interesting opportunities and challenges?
What if you knew that switching now
--------Will not make a difference in your total earnings?
--------Will adversely affect you earning in the long run?
--------Will have a significant long term impact on your earnings?
What if you knew that you will have more responsibility but less pay if you remain in your current job for the foreseeable future?
What if you knew exactly what courses to take in order to improve your career?
What if you knew exactly which new skill sets to acquire now for a great career?
What if you knew which company will make you the happiest?
What if you knew which company will pay you the most in the long run?
What if you knew which company will provide you with the best environment for growth?
What if you knew which company will let you achieve the most?
What if you knew you will always earn more than you need no matter where you work?

What would it take for you to plan your career now instead of looking at just the next jump?

Productivity and happiness

2008-05-05T03:12:00.000-07:00

For many people, going to the office is borderline misery. To them it is an unavoidable activity that needs to be performed, however unpleasant it may be - kind of like having to take a leak midway through a beer session - only more time consuming.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Let us look at one common complaint that people have and the steps that can be taken to avoid it.

"I am spending 12 hrs a day at work and my boss still complains that the work done is not enough!"

Now, if this happens only rarely (like during sudden unforeseen times of increased demand), then it may be ok. But if this situation extends for long periods of time then the possible reasons could be:
a. Your boss is an as**ole.
b. You are not spending your time productively

While it is convenient to choose option (a), that may not be the sole reason. If it is, remember life is too short to work under an as**ole. Quit now and find some other work place.

If you think some part of your problem is due to reason (b), then we are already on our way towards the solution.

Making the 12hrs into 14hrs in NOT the way. This is a classic case for "less is more". Here's what you need to do:

First, get a life. Find something interesting that you have to do every day or at least most days. It could be anything that you already have a passion for. Then, decide that you will stay in the office only for 8 hrs. This will make you focus on the things you need to get done so as to get out in time to do that which interests you. Once you start prioritizing big chunks of your time, you will become adept at prioritizing and scheduling the smaller bits that make up the bigger chunks. Soon you will be able manage your time better. And that is the secret to productivity.

A Life + productive work = happiness.

The difference between a job hop and a career move

2008-05-02T06:18:00.000-07:00

In a day, you have 24 hours.
If you are like me, you will spend at least 8 hours of that sleeping.
Another 1 hour on hygiene.
An hour and a half eating (breakfast, lunch and dinner).
Another hour and a half traveling to and from work, if you are lucky, that is.
A couple of hours on personal work
About 9 hours in the office.
Leaving you all of ONE HOUR to do what you like.

If you take a job where you can put in those 9 hrs for better pay, or a better designation, or something like that, then that's a job hop.
But if you find a place where the ONE HOUR (doing what you like) gets converted to TEN HOURS of enjoyment, then you have made a career move. It's that simple. And it's all in your hands.

Don't just find your next job. Go ahead - make your career move!

Ten things that will help you land your first tech job

2008-04-25T21:05:00.000-07:00

Show up for the interview. Arrive on time or even a little early for your interview. If you are late, the message is that you are not interested.
Inform the relevant person that you have arrived. Don't hide in some corner trying to blend with the wallpaper. With so many "No shows" nowadays, nobody will come looking for you.
Introduce yourself with a bright smile. Don't behave as though you are doing the employer a favour by attending the interview.[You may be nervous, but try and be cheerful]
Keep a copy of your resume ready. If you are confident, say that you intentionally did not print your resume on paper because you want to be carbon friendly. Take your resume in a pen drive or a CD instead.
Have some favourite (Academic) subjects which you are comfortable with. Since you are fresh out of college, you obviously don't have any work experience. So the only thing that you can be questioned on is what was taught to you in school/college. Better that they question you in the areas of your strength than on other subjects. So state clearly the 2 or 3 subjects that were/are your favourite areas so that the interviewer asks questions around these topics.
Know your subject in these areas. If, after several years of education, you cannot answer basic questions in your favourite areas, nobody will believe that you can be taught anything, ever.
If you know, answer. If you don't know but think you can guess, say so and then try your answer. If you haven't a clue, make that clear too.
Be aware of the latest happenings in your industry. Know about blogs, twitter, techcrunch, social networking, SAAS, AJAX, or whatever else is the latest craze.
Have other active interests and hobbies. Show that you are having/pursuing an interesting life. Browsing and watching TV are not hobbies.
Keep your phone on silent during the interview. Don't answer calls. I have had people answer their phone in the middle of an interview and saying (to their current boss, presumably) that they are having lunch with a friend. No one will recruit a liar.
Bonus: Stick to the truth, always. This is non-negotiable.

Why am I talking about my son's education here?

2008-04-23T00:04:00.000-07:00

Last week, I went to my son's school and collected all his books for next year (he is going to class 6). Yesterday, I happened to look at his science text book. Every page has typos and grammatical errors. There must be over a hundred errors in that book alone! I am yet to see how many factual errors there are (Will post on that too, later). In one place, for "insulating tape" they have printed "insulting tap". Despite the anguish I was feeling, my son and I were rolling on the ground laughing. Imagine opening a tap at home and it says "idiot"!

But this is no laughing matter. The book is called "Learning elementary science - For class 6", published by Goyal Brothers Prakashan, New Delhi. Its in its fifth edition. My son and I are planning to collate all the mistakes and write to CBSE, NCERT and the publisher. If you are reading this and are concerned, please take some time and do the same.

But why am I writing about it in this blog? What relevance does it have to the job market?

Well, as employers we are all constantly bemoaning the lack of qualified engineers and employees. But can we expect any better if the fundamental education is so bad and the attitude so lackadaisical?

Dis-education begins early

2008-04-12T05:28:00.000-07:00

Human intelligence is largely dependent on pattern recognition. The very survival of the cro-magnon man depended on his ability to recognize repetitive patterns. Much of our scientific discoveries and inventions owe much to our innate ability to recognize patterns. The solar calendar, identification of agricultural cycles, Mendeleev's periodic tables, genetics, theory of evolution, most(all?) of mathematics, and most(all?) of science have come about due to the human brain's ability to ferret out repetitive patterns in everyday occurrences.
So, pattern recognition and learning how to do that in a scientific manner with checks and balances (lest you end up with superstitions which are the result of over-active pattern recognition with no cross checking) is very important.

Last week, I was going through my son's 5th standard math text book and there was a section called "complete the sequence". The following problem, lifted out of that text book, really stumped me:
Find the next three numbers in the following sequence:
1, 17, 22, 12, __, __, __
While I was wracking my brains, my son filled it up quickly with 28, 33, 23. When I asked him how, he said "Oh! that's easy. Take 1, add 16 and you get 17. Add 5 and you get 22. Subtract 10 and you get 12. So with 12 add 16 and get 28. Add 5 to that and get 33. Subtract 10 and get 23. Done. That's how the teacher taught us!".

They are teaching children to see patterns where there is not enough data. Had to coin a new word for what our education system is doing - Dis-education! Hereafter, if someone says "school did not teach me anything", I'll say "Aren't you the lucky one!".

While others are getting discriminated against…

2008-03-31T10:22:00.000-07:00

On the one side we have people who have had the opportunity for a good education but have wasted it. On the other side…

Near my house is one man - Mohan - who has an ironing business. He and his parents collect washed clothes from all the houses in the area, press them at Rs. 2.00 each and return them, crisp and neat. Together, they probably make about Rs. 500 per day. They are not educated, but hard working, sincere and very good at their work. Mohan has a son and a daughter. The son is 3 now. Last week his son was denied admission into a school because he (Mohan) does not have a college degree!

I cannot think of anything more unfair than that!

Latest interview experience

2008-03-31T10:18:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I interviewed one candidate. Before I get into the details of the interview, a brief background about the candidate.

MCA (Masters in Computer Applications) - from SRM university, Chennai., prior degree - BCA( Bachelors in Computer applications) - together adding up to a whopping 6 years of core computer science(?) education!

As usual, I started with ” Since you are a fresh candidate with no work experience, I would like to limit the topics covered in this interview to your top two favourite subjects [not including programming languages]”. He chose DBMS and Data structures.

Data structures: I asked him to insert an element into an existing array. Despite repeated hints and suggestions, he failed to answer the question. Questioning on data structures over, I moved on to DBMS (purely out of curiosity to see how bad it can get).

Q: “What is database normalization?”

A: It is the decomposition of programs for improved efficiency and reduced redundancy ! (Huh!?)

Programs? Is it anything to do with programs or are we talking about tables? Apparently he was quite sure that it was program he meant. Quite obviously some of the words he had read had remained in his brain, just not in the right order or context.

What to do?