Though 500 million people below 25 years is an invaluable asset in a growing economy, industry surprisingly, does not share this enthusiasm?a yawning skill gap and the imponderables in talent spotting make hiring a hard task. Enter human resource professionals, with an array of recruitment solutions. Online assessment, voice-based hiring, referrals, research and metric analytics are all part of the hiring and retention aids offered by HR professionals today.
Lamenting the skills shortage, R Kannan, HR analyst & CEO of Assess People, which handles web-based employment life-cycle administration of companies, points to the ground realities. ?Around 80% job-seekers enrolled in India?s employment exchanges do not have basic professional skills. More alarming, only 25 %, 15% and 10% of the graduates in engineering, finance and general administration, respectively, own employable skills expected by MNCs,?? he says.
?With corporate India promising to create 10 lakh new jobs in the next two years, there is a skill shortage both at the top and the bottom of the corporate workforce ladder,? he asserts.
Kannan is a staunch believer in online assessment. He proclaims it to be ?the panacea for all the HR ills in head hunting.?Hinting at the movement towards online assessment, Kannan says abroad it is 80% and in India it is hovering around 18%. His company employs all IT-based tools like biometrics, phone2web, online analytics and advanced survey in matching the mixed bag of skills required by industries. He propounds the concept of virtual hiring with a leap in data, voice and video convergence.
?With higher bandwidth and fool-proof identification tools, tele-recruitment will be a mass reality with companies only need to intimate a prospect about the appointment date?, he avers.
C Mohan Ram, CEO of Lattice Bridge Infotech Pvt Ltd, a provider of voice-based HR recruitment solutions, says voice-based technology will cut down the time cycle from 13 weeks to six weeks in the recruitment phase of IT firms. ?Technological forays into job appraisal, employee satisfaction, training, exit management can address a host of critical issues wherein a company can draw scientific feedback to redress the anomalies in the aggrieved areas?, he adds.
The IT industry is appreciative of the merits of modern HR tools. Technology-based screening and learning, since it is driven purely by workforce competency, help IT industries stay on the competitive edge, says K Ganesan, vice-president, (HR talent acquisition), Tata Consultancy Services. ?Online technology helps to broaden the horizon of head hunting as the scalability of screening tools is robust. We have our internal recruitment management tools capable of testing a candidate?s proficiency in basic aptitude, logical thinking and mathematics irrespective of their professional or academic background?, he adds.
?Technology has brought transparency on people-intensive metric analytics of HR appraisal. Online management of skill upgradation helps HR to keep track of a candidate?s progress in achieving his learning goals set for the year. Needless to say, learning is quite imperative for competency building in our industry and online management of this core functionality gives us the driving edge in future project acquisitions based on workforce competency?, he adds.
Kami V Narayan of Pre Media Global, a knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) firm in Chennai, has no doubts about the uses of technology but believes employee referrals is also vital in hiring. ?While it is no doubt that HR automation can weed out redundancies and inconsistencies in personnel recruitment and management, KPO domain requires a mixture of talents with people having stronger niche in their chosen expertise?, she says and adds that employee referrals work wonders in brining people with ready-to-use matching skills required by off-shoring clients.
Attrition rates, Kamini says, would be low through the referral recruitment channel, as an incoming candidate learns all about the job process beforehand and is well informed about the pros and cons of the assignment. The KPO industry is yet to witness the explosion of scales, and technology-enabled HR management cycle will become more appropriate at that time, she maintains.
A solution to the dearth of talent is not mere hefting up the headcounts, believes Arup Varma, director of Asses People. It goes beyond the hiring process, by reasoning out why people leave work in a short span, he says. His company is heading a research project on ?causal factor?, studying various intangible issues in the HR industry.
?The research will go beyond reporting simple descriptive statistics on attrition, employee satisfaction and job change. The research will study the role of the workforce in organisational success and strategy execution. The last and final objective of our research is to share learning from the Indian workplace with organisations across the globe?, he says.
?Most of the times, the industry grumbles about attrition dealing a body blow to their expansion of business plans. We have embarked upon the research to find solutions before the scourge reaches monstrous proportions?, he adds.
Talent, it seems, is a needle in the haystack. But with technology and research, it can be found and kept.