User:Krsnarao2006/sandbox

Dusk to Dawn

"15+ years of Recruitment??? How did you survive the Pressure?" These are some of the questions I face but then I love what I have done and what I have been doing. Recruitment has definitely changed over time and as recruiters we had to quickly adapt to the change.

Little more than a decade ago

I carried a hard copy of the short listed candidate with all his skills highlighted in a marker... huffing and puffing up the stairs of my client's office and knocking on the door, heard a burly voice to come in and in 5 minutes I am out with a worried look as I am asked to rework on the assignment.

Have we come a long way? I would say YES. During those days paper ads were a fad too, but very expensive. Recruiters had to struggle with a proper applicant tracking system.

Candidates at that time had fewer options and job security played on their minds as they were the lone bread earners. They were termed as Generation X and were perceived to be ‘Directionless’ & ‘Dissatisfied’. The hiring managers had a pool of candidates to choose from and they could handpick genuine talent, for which they also seemed to have a lot of time in hand. A hire would easily take around 3 months.

IT Boom

After 2003, millions of jobs hit India with the IT industry’s outsourcing wave. With Globalization, the geographical boundaries shrunk and so did the type of candidates we were dealing with. IT boom happened and we had to churn out big numbers of recruits to fulfil off shore projects. There were serious skill gaps in what the company expected and what the candidates possessed. The education system and lack of guidance made job seekers struggle to succeed in other areas like soft-skills, leadership and hardcore technical skills. However, the robust systems did help recruiters screen and analyze candidates, hence helping the hiring process.

Recruitment

This meant a recruiter with little or almost no knowledge of IT had to churn huge numbers to fulfill the demand, by only depending on what was mentioned in the resume. A keyword search on the IT skill, and a resume was pulled out for an interview. Recruiters in this phase learnt how to manage volumes and build operational efficiency but with very less strategic inputs value addition. This was a generation of Job boards and agencies. It virtually seemed like every house hold had someone running a recruitment agency. We brought in concepts of technology towers where we groomed talent in specific IT skills backed with other soft skills and made them factory ready to meet the growing demand.

“I personally was a head hunter who moved from being a Call center recruiter to an IT recruiter and then become a Leadership hiring person. This skill also helped me nurture my other passion which was Wildlife photography where I started shooting animals with cameras. Here too I observed similar change in strategies. Tigers need large habitat areas in the forest to hunt for their prey and survive. They are fiercely territorial too. With conservation efforts and deforestation, areas shrunk for them and they had to adopt different strategies to survive. I have seen tigers hunt in packs to bring down a prey which was unheard as Tigers are solitary hunters.”

Current

Generation Y or Millennials are the current job seekers around the age group of 22 to 25. Hand held devices have taken over as the most important gadgets both for candidates and recruiters. Recruiters who used to reject profiles if the candidate used to change 3 jobs in 8 years had to adopt to hiring candidates who had changed double the jobs in a similar time frame. Candidates have become more ambitious for growth and work-life balance to pursue their Goals. With advent of start-ups, it is becoming tougher to attract and retain talent for traditional firms who basked in the glory of being a big brand and a large conglomerate.

Current curriculum in colleges have been giving them exposure to industry and corporate environment. The access to information or the Google/Wiki generation have the world in their palm. This generation is smarter and can also multitask extremely well.

Recruitment

To handle them, the recruitment process too had to change by going online with mobile friendly sites, attractive and interactive career sites, creative approaches to internships and better campus engagement initiatives. Providing Global opportunities as a carrot work well with this generation. Giving live projects and interaction with the leaders of the organization also work very well with the young job hunters.

Recruiters too have to get into behavioral interviews, Social media (Linked-in, Facebook, Twitter) mapping of individual, blogging sites. As I write this, in my knowledge, Facebook has more than 500 groups under the header of Jobs.

The landscape continues to evolve but the thread remains the same where we are required to hire the best of the candidates in the least time and ensure he joins as of yesterday.