Innovative Hiring Strategies

DARE.CO.IN

strategy/hiring

Innovative Hiring Strategies Companies are reworking their recruitment strategies to win the talent war. Social networking websites such as LinkedIn are only new ammunition to claim victory /Vimarsh Bajpai

Y

ou 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

54

JULY 2008

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,

Chartbusters • Employee referrals • Internal job postings • Social networking on websites such as LinkedIn • Job portals such as www.naukri.com • Employee branding • Campus recruitments • Placement consultants • Hiring teams instead of an individual • Targeting public-sector employees, ex-servicemen • Hiring housewives, senior citizens, fresh school pass-outs for part-time work • Partnering with educational and training institutes • Job fairs • Pre-placement offers (PPOs)

DARE.CO.IN

strategy/hiring Ravi Shankar Global Head, Talent Management Group, HCL Technologies

HOW ARE THEY HIRING? HCL Technologies Internal recruitment: The IT major relies heavily on this model, which also saves huge cost for the company, at the same time ensuring that the talent pool remains intact.

Campus hiring: Many of the business unit heads and senior people at HCL have been picked from the campuses of some of the best engineering, management and non-management colleges across the globe.

Employee referrals: HCL finds this to be a “reliable channel” to reach out to its potential employees.

HCL is pioneer in the usage of Web 2.0 in its recruitment process and 5-7% of its total recruiting is done through this. 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 Shift The hiring scenario has witnessed dramatic changes in the past decade with companies facing increasing talent

Sangram Tambe

Social networking sites: At least 5-7% of its total recruiting is done through websites such as LinkedIn. This primarily includes much of senior-level hiring, and makes it easier for the hiring managers to target candidates with niche skills or for roles based in alien geographies.

Tata Motors Employee referrals: The automotive giant seeks involvement of its current work force to attract key talent.

Online recruitment process: Tata Motors holds selection tests to recruit its graduate and post-graduate trainees. Applicants can take the test from any location.

Internal job postings: The automotive arm is also part of the Tata Group’s internal job postings service, and harps on employee movement across companies.

Employer branding: The company sponsors scholarships at the prestigious Indian School of Business.

Other sources: Jobsites, placement consultants, collaboration with industrial training institutes etc.

Vice President, Human Resources, Tata Motors

Tesco HSC Job portals: The contribution of job portals to the company’s recruitment mix has grown from 2% in 2004 to around 12% at present.

Campus recruitment: The company hires from various colleges across the country.

Tier-II cities and local talent: It reaches out to candidates in some of the small cities.

The screening work has been outsourced to a service provider, who does the initial testing of candidates before lining them up for interview.

Hiring for retention: The firm highlights a host of “employee benefits” on its website to attract talent with the clear idea to retain them.

Restricting our hiring strategy to traditional methods or channels will not suffice. As Tata Motors works towards becoming an international player, we are using a multitude of options.

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 JULY 2008

55

DARE.CO.IN

strategy/hiring

Manav Gupta and Ravi Pratap Founders, TooStep

Sensing the opportunity in the Web 2.0 hiring space, two entrepreneurs — Manav Gupta and Ravi Pratap — have launched TooStep, a social networking platform that helps employers and job seekers through its specialized professional communities.

How would you define Web 2.0 hiring? What are the advantages and disadvantages, if any, of such hiring technique?

Web 2.0 hiring is all about using the power of social websites to reach out to right candidates, interact with them and hire them. While Web 1.0 hiring helped active candidates find jobs through job boards or job listings on company websites, Web 2.0 helps semi-active and passive candidates find jobs through referrals from or interactions with their social graph. So, the main advantage of Web 2.0 hiring is that it helps companies reach out to those semi-active and passive candidates.

How is Toostep helping corporations find the right talent?

TooStep connects employers with valuable audiences through its specialized professional communities website focused primarily on knowledge exchange (http://www.toostep.com) and the business card application on Orkut (http://www.orkut.co.in/AppInfo.aspx?appId= 370657255860). Jobs are posted within a specialized community and then get referred by its members to specific persons that fit the job requirements. To provide incentives to members to refer, organizations attach a referral reward to a job. We have 16 clients right now that include some of the leading IT services, IT product companies and global banks.

How is TooStep different/similar from LinkedIn or other Web 2.0 platforms?

LinkedIn is all about using your existing network to find jobs, sales leads or VCs etc.

TooStep is a platform to interact and exchange knowledge with other professionals from a similar background as yours. Professionals come together in various niche professional communities and ideate, debate, discuss and share answers with each other on different professional topics. Through these interactions the users build new professional relationships and strengthen existing ones.

What is your revenue model? How big is your team and what kind of growth are you looking at?

Our revenues come from successful closure of jobs posted by our corporate clients. We charge them a certain percentage of the placed candidates CTC as placement fee. We share part of the placement fee with the referrer who referred the job to the selected candidate. We started clocking revenue within two months of launch and our revenues have been steadily growing since then. We are a 12-people-team right now. We are headquartered in UK with a subsidiary in Bangalore. We are funded by some top angels and seed funds from Europe and India. 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.

What’s In, What’s Out In view of the challenges on the manpower front, most companies have reworked their hiring strategies. Rajesh A R, Vice President (Temporary Staffing) 56 JULY 2008

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

“

Websites like LinkedIn are extremely popular. However, replacing brick and mortar in the hiring process is still a challenge.

”

— Monisha Advani Managing Director, Randstad India

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

DARE.CO.IN

strategy/hiring Sudheesh Venkatesh Head, HR, Tesco HSC

Some interesting job postings from startups on LinkedIn n Senior software engineer—startup—innovative

Join our internet startup and work on our patent-pending technology. We are a talented and innovative group of seven looking for #8. Don’t bother applying if you don’t live and breathe technology. n Unusual opportunity—state education officers at iDiscoveri

This role is very hands-on, entrepreneurial and will give you a lot of opportunity to paint your picture! iDiscoveri offers enormous opportunities to learn, make a difference, be recognized and rewarded.

Websites such as LinkedIn and TooStep are reaching out to passive job seekers, who are comfortable in their present position and do not visit job portals.

The use of social networking websites for hiring is here to stay, and is picking up very fast. than just on skill sets to address the recruitment needs," he adds.

Social Networking There has been a significant shift in online recruiting, with the first wave seeing the emergence of job portals such as naukri.com. While job portals continue to play a major role in the recruitment process, the second wave (Web 2.0) has been unleashed by social networking websites such as LinkedIn, Orkut, Facebook etc. “When we started in 2004, the contribution of portals to our recruitment mix was 2%. Now close to 12% of our hiring is being done through job portals,” says Venkatesh. This is also a very cost-effective hiring method. Some of the new websites that are reaping the benefits of networking are TooStep, Yellojobs and Reffster.

While job portals succeeded in reaching out to active job seekers, companies were still finding it difficult to attract those who are comfortable in their present roles, and do not care to put up their resumes on jobsites. “Web 2.0 hiring is all about using the power

n Entrepreneur, new internet business at Naspers The business leaders we are seeking to appoint have high energy levels, entrepreneurial drive, extensive knowledge of the Internet and digital world, coupled with sound business acumen. n Co-founder and key person at a self-improvement promotion company

I am looking for an ethically ambitious, smart and energetic team player with strong sales management background, preferably in consumer services. n Startup opportunity for iPhone developers

This is a great opportunity for programmers with entrepreneurial spirits. As a partner you will be offered company shares (equity in the company) or some sort of combination of equity and milestone payments. We have all options open at this time. of the social web to reach out to the right candidates, interact with them and hire them,” says Manav Gupta, Co-founder, TooStep. The firm is leveraging the social networking capabilities of the Web to place candidates for 16 companies who are its clients.

The growth of social networking sites has been swift. For instance, LinkedIn had more than 19 million registered users as of February 2008, across 150 industries. “These sites, especially the business-oriented social networking sites, provide instant credibility to a professional’s profile, with the referrals and recommendations of the person, thus aiding recruiters

“

We are witnessing an unprecedented increase in lateral hiring in the private sector from the public sector, the armed forces, as well as experienced people looking for second careers.

”

— Sampath Shetty Vice President (Permanent Staffing), TeamLease

in captivating their mindshare. Thus, today many job seekers and recruiters in India are making use of such sites to identify the right and potential candidates, including international talent, at minimal cost,” says Shankar.

"For recruiters", Shankar says, "social networking sites come to the rescue when one is looking out for candidates having niche skills or for roles based in alien geographies." He cites an example, “For instance, if an IT services firm wants to hire a regional head for its media and entertainment business based in Boston, it won’t find much value in uploading this position on job sites, and that’s where networking sites come into play when one is looking for candidates for roles based in far-off places.”

Social networking sites can be used by recruitment agencies, as people who are not very active job seekers can be contacted and offered job proposals.

The best part about Web 2.0 hiring is that it gives job seekers the chance to scan firms and vice versa. Most companies highlight on their websites the kind of work environment and benefits they provide. For startups, social networking websites now provide fertile ground for hiring and more and more entrepreneurs are logging DAR E on to it.

JULY 2008

57