Arun Kumar, 25, wanted to settle in a big city and earn big bucks. In pursuit of his dream, he migrated to Delhi from Lucknow six months ago to join a large-sized BPO firm. ?They offered me this job through a hiring centre they set up in our city a year ago. Since they did not have a functioning office in Lucknow, they were looking for English-speaking people who would be willing to migrate to their offices in Gurgaon and Mumbai,? says Kumar. Due to aggressive hiring by BPO companies and shortage of talent in metros, in the recent past, youngsters like Kumar have left their native places in search of better opportunities. And hiring centres in small towns like Lucknow, Bhubaneshwar, Ranchi and Coimbatore are the first ones to tap this vast resource of talent.

The $12.4-billion Indian BPO industry employs 8 lakh-plus people across cities. Primarily, they used to focus only on metros for hiring talent. However, when they faced manpower crunch, options to hire from smaller cities gained importance. As a result, many BPOs like Convergys, Genpact and EXL Service have set up hiring centres in tier-2 and tier-3 cities or they just send their recruiters to these cities regularly.

Industry captains are now realising the existence of a huge talent pool in these small towns and are formulating plans to tap it. The country?s largest BPO, Genpact, has six hiring centres in Lucknow, Chandigarh, Bhopal, Bhubaneshwar, Kochin and Dehradun. Rajneesh Sinha, VP, HR head at the company says, ?At present, we manage 10% of our hiring from small cities and till now it has worked well for us. As we enter new cities, this number is expected to go up to 15% in the next two years. We are also planning to increase our number of hiring centres in tier-2 and tier-3 cities to eight in the next 12 months.?

Sunil Goel, director, GlobalHunt, an executive search firm notes, ?On an average and as of now, total hiring from small towns is not more than 20-25%. But it is assumed that it would grow consistently as this model has not been utilised appropriately from the hiring perspective.?

Even Convergys BPO hires almost 20% of its talent from tier-2 towns, which are located closer to Convergys? offices. The company has hiring centres in Thane, Pune, Lucknow and Dehradun. Aashish Singh, director, human resource, Convergys in India, says, ?Being an industry that needs talent at a very short notice, we just cannot rely on hiring from the metros. Our gap is filled by getting youth from non-metros.?

Sanjay Gupta, global head of human resources, EXL Service adds, ? EXL has been hiring regularly from Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, the North-Eastern states, West Bengal, Orissa, Jharkhand and Bihar.? He further explains that state capitals and cities like Chandigarh, Bhopal, Kolkata and Lucknow have served as their representative centres for recruiting talent from tier-2 and tier-3 locations in these states. While the BPO firm does not have permanent hiring centres in these locations, their recruitment team visits these places on a regular basis.

Infosys BPO, too, operates out of five delivery centres in India, which include Bangalore, Pune, Chennai, Jaipur and Gurgaon, and all of these centres have full- fledged hiring systems. Raghavendra K, vice-president and head, human resources, Infosys BPO says, ?However, we do realise the importance of having some presence in smaller cities and, therefore, conduct frequent hiring drives in cities such as Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Bhopal, Indore, Udaipur, Alwar, Kota, Ajmer, Bhubaneshwar, Guwahati, Kolkata, Chandigarh, and even Bhutan. While, we don?t have any direct presence in these cities, we hire through our recruitment consultants/partners. We also have a strong presence on campuses with regards to graduate hiring in many of these cities.?

Raghavendra adds that earlier, close to 25% of the hiring was from smaller centres, but today close to 45% of the hiring at entry level (graduates with up to two years of experience) is from these smaller cities.

The company believes that there is an abundance of talent in the interiors. And thus Infosys BPO has also taken up few initiatives to boost the talent scouting from small cities. ?The only thing that students lack there is the exposure, and hence our focus is to unearth and equip students to meet the challenges they face when they cross the threshold from student life to the corporate world,? says Raghavendra. The BPO firm runs initiatives like Project Genesis, which focuses on coaching the trainers in colleges who in turn prepare the students on the basics of what is required from them to enter the industry, and the in-house residential training programmes at their campus in Mysore. Through such interventions, the percentage of hiring has increased over the last two years for Infosys.

It has also been observed that when people from small towns are hired, the percentage of attrition is minimal because they take time to understand the process, the firm and the industry. So by the time they understand the industry, they would have spent at least one or one-and-half year in the organisation.

However, analysts feel, while companies are offering less compensation to people who hail from small towns, they are also spending more on their training and development processes.

At the same time, BPOs like Aditya Birla Minacs and Hinduja Global Solutions, which hire talent from these cities, also run their operations out of the same city. Paneesh Rao, chief people officer, Aditya Birla Minacs says, ?More than 70% of our current domestic talent is from our tier-2 and tier-3 centres. This was only 47% two years back. Apart from delivery centres in Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and Kolkata, we also have delivery centres in tier-2 and tier-3 cities such as Baroda, Aurangabad and Ranchi. They were established over the past two years. The firm is also considering to set up centres in cities like Kharagpur, Anand, Bhilwara, Ahmednagar, Nasik, Nanded and Patna. We will enter these markets depending on our client?s business requirements.?

On the shortage of talent in metros, Jessy Christin, vice-president, human resources, Hinduja Global Solutions says, ?We anticipated the shortage of skilled human resources in tier-1 cities for both voice and non-voice processes in metros. In order to mitigate this risk, HGS opened centres in tier-2 and tier-3 cities and is also looking at opening more centres across India.?

HGS plans to recruit talent pool from these cities where education system is strong. ?We were one of the first few companies to set up delivery centres in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. We began with Mysore in 2006, Durgapur in 2007, and Nagercoil and Guntur in 2010. We recently set up a centre in Siliguri this year,? he says.

However, the picture is not as rosy as it would appear. Companies face a lot of challenges while hiring talent from small towns. Explains Sinha from Genpact, ?The challenge is that even smaller cities are developing and it is getting difficult to attract youth to bigger cities. Also, they are very attached to their families and might become cultural misfits in big cities.?

Infosys? Raghavendra adds, ?We do face some challenges to upskill them for industry-ready roles. One of the biggest areas of improvement is communication and presentation skill, which is a critical requirement in the ITeS setup. Our three-week foundation training at Mysore makes a huge difference in readying the talent to meet these challenges.?

But the more important point is that small towns have limited resources, and if these hiring centres can manage to cull out the best of resources at a lower price tag, they can develop their cost effectiveness.

As BPOs continue to gather talent from non-metros, it would be interesting to watch the developing scenario?the cultural amalgamation and war of talent in the people-driven industry.