BIZZ STREET IT recruitment cut to control ‘F'

Have you ever pondered why IT companies have a hard time recruiting coders and developers whose skills correspond to the requirements of a particular job? What triggers regular and swift departures of IT professionals from their companies? Blame it on the human resources executives of most IT firms who are tasked with recruiting. The majority of HR MBAs are not from a technology background but given the continuing demand for recruiters in India's technology sector, they get sucked into IT companies. Since their understanding of the technology business is minimal and coupled with the pressures of meeting hiring deadlines, most of them are thrown to the wolves, as it were, from day one without any inputs on industry trends.

Microsoft Office is what they fall back upon. The control "F" option, as we all know, seeks out words that are being searched for on a document. Young and generally untrained recruiters in IT companies keep two documents open on their desktop when they are shortlisting bio datas. One is the skill set inventory structured by the business manager and the other is the candidate's bio data. Thereafter, he or she proceeds to do a control "F" on the bio data with what he/she believes are the buzz words that appear on the skill sets document.

Since IT companies expect a combination of skills for almost all roles, the buzz words are multiple which complicates the novice recruiter's job. Since they are hazy about the bigger picture, young recruiters end up missing the woods for the trees. As a result, some good bio-datas don't get past the desktops of these recruiters whereas many candidates, who fake their bio datas by incorporating skills that they don't actually possess, pass muster. Owners of recruiting firms have often confided to me their sense of dismay with such disorganized recruiting practices but as the off shoring wave continues to deluge India, MBA schools offering HR specialization are focusing on quantity rather than quality. As corporate old timers maintain, an undergraduate degree from St Stephens or Presidency College in the sixties and seventies is probably far more credible than a MBA from any of India's business schools other than the top ten in today's context.

Talent drying up High services, industries like growth Information technology, financial real estate and organized retail are projecting a huge shortfall in terms of the talent pipeline in India but nobody seems to be doing anything concrete about it. Since the government has failed miserably in this regard, like most other areas, not much may be expected of our politicians who are teamed up across party lines to keep most of India uneducated for their narrow vote bank interests. To occupy this vacant space, one would have expected credible privately funded vocational institutes to have come up but what is happening is quite the contrary. Fly by night operators are setting up industry specific institutes of professional development and extracting unreasonable fees with the lure of "job guarantees" which remain only on paper.

Bengaluru debuts In keeping with its imploding infrastructure, traffic snarls, power outages and dry taps, Karnataka's parochial politicians have got their way by renaming India's Silicon Valley an outlandish Bengaluru. Likewise, the former princely state of Mysore is now Mysuru. But Kumaraswamy has no time to sanction a larger budget for the proposed Anti-Terrorist Squad despite the strong Bangalore links of the Glasgow bombers.