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Friends,

I was going through this interesting article by Vimarsh Bajpai in DARE magazine and I found it worth reproducing here with due acknowledgment and for open view and discussion on the same at this forum.

Companies are reworking their recruitment strategies to win the talent war. Social networking websites such as LinkedIn are only new ammunition to claim victory

You definitely put hoardings across busy junctions of a city to promote your products and services. Would you do the same when it comes to hiring key talent from the market? Probably not.

But when Tesco, the British retail giant, set up its service support arm in Bangalore in 2004, it spent a huge chunk of its recruitment budget on hoardings. It was important for the firm to build its employer brand. This was because a majority of its prospective recruits, had either never heard of Tesco, or had no shopping experience at any of its stores across 13 countries. “We put hoardings in the corridor where IT folks travel, and Bangalore having slow moving traffic, you can’t even escape it,” says Sudeesh Venkatesh, Head, HR, Tesco HSC.

The company not only altered the medium but also the message. Some of Tesco HSC’s IT recruitment campaigns showed potatoes and carrots, while the underline message was that “you use technology to keep food fresh.”

The move by Tesco HSC is just an example of how companies are working on innovative ideas with the ultimate goal of attracting the best minds. Talent crisis is not just restricted to the hiring part alone. Training and retention also pose big challenges. Given the demand-supply gap in the market, firms devise multi-prong strategies to beat competition. This includes campus recruitments, internal job postings, employee-referrals, availing the services of placement consultants, participating in job fairs and advertising in newspapers and job portals. The trend, however, is now moving towards leveraging the benefits of online social networking. Many companies are now bringing in global talent on board, with the clear intention of meeting their client requirements in specific
geographies. Also, welcoming ex-employees back into the fold in no more an exception.

The hiring scenario has witnessed dramatic changes in the past decade with companies facing increasing talent crunch. This is also because new sectors such as retail have come on the horizon. While the number of people joining the workforce is a plenty, “employable” brains are in short supply. Employees are now calling the shots, with companies ready to offer benevolent “benefits” packages that promise superb “work-life balance.” “In the past decade, we have witnessed the transition from being an employers’ market to that of an employee,” says Monisha Advani, Managing Director, Randstad India.

The IT-ITES sector, considered to be the most lucrative from an employee’s point of view, has bore the biggest brunt of this transition. Such is the movement that a separate IT recruitment industry has taken shape. “It has become an ultra-competitive market, with soaring employee turnover and widening demand-supply gap. This has made the industry to be very aggressive and innovative,” says Ravi Shankar, Global Head, Talent Management Group, HCL Technologies.

In view of the challenges on the manpower front, most companies have reworked their hiring strategies. Rajesh A R, Vice President (Temporary Staffing) at TeamLease Services says the importance given to referrals has grown multifold in the last few years. “More than 50% of placements at TeamLease are done though referrals. We believe that this trend would further firm up with the advent of various social networking sites,” he adds.

Take the case of Tata Motors. The automotive giant has adopted some new methods of hiring, while retaining traditional ones. It runs an employee referral program. “Through this, we encourage the involvement and participation of our current work force for recruiting the right talent,” says Sangram Tambe, Vice President, Human Resources, Tata Motors. It also uses an online recruitment system, internal job posting service and various employer-branding initiatives.

"Job fairs, online talent auctions and talent referral programs, job sites, walk-in tours of employer campuses are just some of the popular means to bring home the best," says Advani. "Apart from this, unorthodox means of canvassing candidates and talent through street profiling is also gaining momentum, given the industry’s appetite for more to manage," she adds. Private sector firms are also poaching heavily into public sector companies and the armed forces.

"Newspaper advertisements were given preference five years back. A few years back, the platform shifted to web portals for increasing ROI. Now blogging seems to be the buzz word," says Rajesh.

The rules of the hiring game differ significantly in the case of mass- and class-hiring. Mass-hiring strategies work best for junior profiles, where the skill-set required does not vary much, while class-hiring is done for mid- and senior-level profiles. "For class-hiring, organizations engage executive search firms and some authenticated internal references," says Sampath Shetty, Vice President (Permanent Staffing) at TeamLease Services.

Rajesh believes there has been a significant shift from the “carpet bombing” approach (mass approach) to niche hiring (class approach). "Lot of recruitment companies are segmenting candidates based on behavioral patterns, demographics, etc., rather than just on skill sets to address the recruitment needs," he adds

I seek your views and suggestion on the above article in this forum.

Jaspal