The following are interesting HR news for the month : -
Reliance’s Retail Hiring Goes Wholesale
Picture this. Fourteen months into the business and the headcount stands at over 6,000. It’s hiring over 100 people a day, touching 3,000 people a month and this is just the initial warm-up phase. That’s what happens when a group that thinks big and executes fast decides to put its muscle and might into a red-hot sector of the new economy. This is the revving up of the Rs 25,000-crore Reliance Retail venture. And if the rollout goes according to plan, it sees employee count touching a million people by the year 2010. Reliance Retail has roped in the who’s who of Indian retailing to put the plan on ground. One of the imperatives for a business that would need many shop-floor staff is putting in place a robust internal process of recruiting, training and retaining talent across all functions. Sources said that it’s systems-oriented HR team numbers more than 500. Backing it up is a research team which tracks the best practices of Fortune 500 companies to assimilate learnings and incorporate them into its own processes. The venture may be just 22-stores old now but Reliance retail has readied the framework necessary to scale up aggressively towards the 1,500 stores across verticals from food and groceries to consumer electronics.
Source: The Economic Times New Delhi Edition
Wipro Plans To Hire 14,000 Freshers
Continuing with its belief in running software development in a factory style, Wipro plans to hire more entry-level employees. Wipro plans to add about 14,000 freshers in 2007-2008 and has already issued some 10,000 campus offers, said Mr Suresh Senapaty, Chief Financial Officer, Wipro. In the current financial year, a total of 6,600 campus recruits have joined Wipro till date. Wipro is also planning to enhance the intake at Wipro Academy of Software Excellence (WASE) — where it converts science graduates into software professionals through in-depth technology training — to around 4,000 in the coming year from the present 1,700, Mr Senapaty said. Wipro feels that de-skilling of services would broaden the potential recruitment pool, thereby lowering the costs. Increasing wage inflation by an estimated 13-15 pct annually has been a cause of concern for Indian companies in recent years and firms such as Wipro among others are trying to keep a tab on their wage costs through a higher intake of entry-level employees. In the recent years, Wipro has absorbed about 7,000 science graduates. In fact, the company's utilisation rate during Q3 declined by 2 pct to 62.2 pct because of the high number of rookies.
Source: The Hindu Business Line New Delhi Edition
Head Hunting To Get Tougher For Other Sectors
Information technology and the financial sector between them are expected to hire close to 5 lakh people during the current financial year. It is going to be a tough job for the rest of the industry to recruit the people they are looking for, according to Mr Mohandas Pai, a member of the Board of Infosys Technologies. While the financial services sector might hire about 75,000 to 1-lakh people this year, the IT sector's head count will nearly be four times of that — about 3,80,000 people. These two industries are driving up the demand for entry- level people and the IT sector was the largest hirer. He said: "They get the best of the crop. And obviously competition is for the best of the best." Referring to the entry wages, he said: "We raised them from Rs 2,40,000 a year to Rs 2,70,000 a year for the next year. And this could go up by may be 10 per cent a year after that." If the entry-level salary is up by 10 per cent, one could possibly pay slightly more to the middle-level employees. But he said: "Definitely going forward for the rest of the industry in this country, it is going to become very, very challenging to get more and more people in." Mr Pai said: "Right now, the retail industry is hiring. They are not able to get people." The construction industry also was finding it difficult to get the manpower it wanted "because all engineers want to join IT."
Source: The Hindu Business Line New Delhi Edition
Cos Look Beyond IIMs For Fresh Talent
A rising tide is lifting many boats. India’s premier colleges like IITs and IIMs are learning to deal with surging salaries and multiplying job offers. Their lesser brethren - the degree colleges from Delhi to Mumbai, Punjab to West Bengal - are getting some deflected attention too. At Presidency College, Kolkata, placements have gone up 200 pct over the past five years. At Delhi’s SRCC, the number of companies showing up on the campus is expected to go up from 10 in 2001 to 35 companies making up to 150 offers this year. Up North in Chandigarh, while engineering and management colleges have registered 200 pct rise in placements, in degree colleges 70 pct of the screened students are landing job offers. Placements, which stood at 50 pct in 2003 in the city colleges, have been steadily rising 7-8 pct every year. Salaries too have been rising. In Delhi’s St Stephen’s college, for example, HLL has offered highest package of Rs 9.5 lakh to three of its students compared to Rs 7.2 lakh last year. If the increase in job offers and salaries look good, the recruiters’ list looks even more impressive. Some of the best and biggest names in corporate India have been lining up - from Google to Deloitte Consulting, HLL, Ernst & Young or McKinsey, Corporate Executive Board or KPMG, UBS Bank have been lining up to recruit graduates from these campuses. Says Mr SY Siddiqui, HR head, Maruti: “Our experience has been absolutely A-class. Their desire to learn and grow beats all others.” Maruti last year had hired 13 graduates from degree colleges from metro cities as part of a pilot project. They will be put through a two-year on-the-job training program before being absorbed at par with MBAs. Encouraged, they are hiring 25 this year.
Source: The Economic Times New Delhi Edition
Bangalore Is Truly A Jobseekers Heaven
When it comes to hiring in India, Bangalore is the place to be, it seems. The city remains the favourite destination for jobseekers, with a sharp 7 pct net increase in hiring outlook for the January-March quarter over the previous quarter, according to staffing major TeamLease. And obviously, hiring in the Silicon City of India is led by IT and ITeS sectors. The city has a net employment outlook of 90 index points in the Jan-March quarter, compared to 83 points in the October-December period. According to the TeamLease Employment Outlook Report, Mumbai is expected to see the second highest hiring growth in the current quarter with index points touching 90 while Delhi follows with 88 index points. Net employment will see an increase in Hyderabad and Pune by 4 pct and 2 pct respectively. Net employment outlook is derived in percentages as the difference in the proportion of respondents reporting an increase in hiring needs and those who report a decline in hiring needs over the next three months. According to TeamLease Services, there is a sharp 6 pct increase in the business outlook for the January-March period over last quarter, with the current index point touching 91. The overall employment outlook for the quarter remains consistent at 81 index points.
Source: The Economic Times New Delhi Edition
GenX IT Professionals Are Restless, Get Bored Easily
GenX IT Professionals are restless, get easily bored and want to go up the ladder quickly without becoming experts, says a senior official of Infosys and human resources management specialist. "I think the people, who have been joining in the last one-two years, have a feeling of restlessness among them," Mr T V Mohandas Pai, who is in charge of human resources at the Bangalore-headquartered NASDAQ-listed firm, said. Mr Pai, who is also Chairman of Infosys BPO, said IT professionals joining today are restless, they want to go up the ladder very fast and see rapid change in the work they do."They get easily bored. They do just one project and they get bored and they want something else," he said in response to questions at a press conference, where the company announced its third quarter results. He said the way out possibly is to have "better communication, more hand-holding, more investment in training and talking to them and making them understand that they have a long working life of 30 years and they need to become masters of one or two technologies and for that they have to spend time and do a deep-dive exercise." According to him, IT professionals, who joined firms some years ago, were willing to work in a job, learn and grow.
Handle With Care: Greenhorn At Work
The placement season is on and you have just hired an enthusiastic bunch of fresh graduates. But hiring them is the first of the many challenges you are going to face. Passing out from top colleges, sitting on multiple job offers and wooed by many recruiters, freshers these days come with loads of attitude and unbridled expectations. Chalk out a clear career path for them, tell them what a career in a particular function holds for them and where it would lead them. If possible, allow them to pick from a few options you have to offer. This would give them clarity on what to expect. Secondly, if they are involved in the decision-making process, the patience threshold will be a little higher. With high aspirations and low patience levels, disenchantment and disappointment set in fast with fresh graduates. The best way to handle this is by talking straight and telling them what the corporate world is all about. Besides showing them the path to dream and grow, it is also important to tell them about the downsides of their jobs and how to handle them. Ensure that the work environment is challenging enough to hold them back. And also allow for churn of job profile with cross-functional exposure to help them find their feet within the organisation. They should be enthusiastic about their work and at the same time be accountable too. A sense of responsibility and accountability is important for both fresh recruits as well as for the organisation to get the best out of them.
Source: The Economic Times New Delhi Edition
Honchos Seek Help In Global Hunt
India Inc, which is on a major acquisition spree abroad, has sought government incentives to support its global ambitions. In its wishlist for Budget 2007, industry sought a slew of tax benefits, reduction in corporate tax rates and removal of fringe benefit tax (FBT). In the pre-Budget meeting with finance minister Mr P Chidambaram, industry captains asked the government to give tax benefits to support domestic companies that are acquiring companies abroad. They also wanted government to bring down incidence of total tax from about 38 pct to 25 pct. “The suggestion was put forward that there be incentives from the government — certain tax benefits — to support the Indian companies going global. Companies such as Tata Steel must be given incentives for its acquisition bid for Corus as its Brazilian rival CSN is also being supported by the government,” said Videocon’s Mr VN Dhoot. According to sources, Tata group chairman Mr Ratan Tata is believed to have suggested that the government should encourage special economic zones (SEZ) to create employment and ensure industry gets raw materials at internationally-competitive prices. Bharti’s Mr Sunil Mittal is learnt to have proposed the correction of the inverted duty structure and reduction in service charges paid by telecom companies to the department of telecommunications.
Source: The Economic Times New Delhi Edition
No Time For Goodbyes At BPOs
Mr Ritesh Dedhia, 24, still cannot get over that day in 2003. Working at a call centre, he found his seven-member team getting reduced to three overnight. For the next few days, his small team slogged and stretched to make up till replacements came on board. “We have quit,” he was bluntly told. And the reasons could not get more bizarre: “We handled technical calls for which engineering graduates are required”. Easy job openings, desperate employers coupled with young workers and their frequent job-hopping is bringing in a new kind of casualness about jobs and resignations in corporate India. Absconding workers — workers who don’t resign, just disappear — are becoming common. Resignations are losing their value. So far, the trend has been largely limited to the sizzling $7-bn BPO industry that is growing at close to 40 pct annually. But as young workers make their presence felt elsewhere in the industry, this casualness is likely to spill over to other sectors. Genpact senior VP (HR) Mr Piyush Mehta says: “The challenge isn’t about technical skills — it’s about the dos and don’ts at work, which many of them don’t seem to realise.” At Genpact, at least 500 of the 6,000 employees turn into absconding workers. This is when the company says its attrition rates are lower than industry average. The problem is understandable. For foot-loose young workers, their first jobs are normally about trying out new things for fun, specially when companies come knocking at their doors. According to industry estimates, attrition in the first seven days of the month jumps to around 50 pct due to this factor. And desperate employers are only making things worse. The need to ramp up numbers quickly leaves companies with little time to carry out background checks.
Source: The Economic Times New Delhi Edition
Bad Bosses Spell Big Problems
For most people, it's back to work on Tuesday after a holiday weekend with family and friends. And for many, a new study shows, it will be under a bad boss. Nearly two of five bosses don't keep their word and more than a fourth bad mouth those they supervise to co-workers, the Florida State University study shows. And those all-too-common poor managers create plenty of problems for companies as well, leading to poor morale, less production and higher turnover. "They say that employees don't leave their job or company, they leave their boss," said Mr Wayne Hochwarter, an associate professor of management in the College of Business at Florida State University, who joined with two doctoral students at the school to survey more than 700 people working in a variety of jobs about how their bosses treat them. Employees stuck in an abusive relationship experienced more exhaustion, job tension, nervousness, depressed moods and mistrust, the researchers found. They found that a good working environment is often more important than pay, and that it's no coincidence that poor morale leads to lower production.
Source: The Times Of India New Delhi Edition
New Sources for Hiring - Using Social Networking Sites For Hiring
Social networking is catching on websites like Orkut, Minglebox.com, MySpace and others are becoming informal hiring grounds. Examples range from IITians, IIM guys and sundry others putting up scraps to find venture partners, websites putting up messages in communities to work on-line to scraps for young journalists to join a publishing and consultancy firm. Scraps, for the uninitiated, are messages. Do they succeed? Ask Mr Govind and you will get an affirmation. He got his start-up partner through Orkut, an IITian who worked in Intel for three years. Besides, he got two engineers from the Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad. He has got seed funding of Rs 20 lakh from NirmaLabs and expects to start operations by April 2007. He hired 3-4 people to scrap about his new company, put them on people’s scrapbooks and not just on communities. And he got a decent response of 1,200 people, including freshers.
Source: The Economic Times New Delhi Edition
Head For The Nearest Exit In A Dead-End Job
Ever got the feeling that you’re working hard, yet going nowhere at all? You haven’t seen a promotion in years, the raises have been minuscule, and work seems to drag on week after week, with each day just the same as the last? Don’t worry. You’re far from being alone. Look around, and you’ll probably find any number of people out there who feel they’re stuck in a dead-end job, but simply don’t know what to do about it. It is true that while lack of suitable opportunities might be a hindrance for some, for most others, it usually boils down to a mixture of fear and complacency. A new job involves some risk-taking and uncertainty, while the old one offers a certain level of comfort and a steady pay check at the end of the month. Consider an internal transfer: Speak to your boss, HR people, or colleagues in other departments and see whether you can assume some other role in the organisation. These lateral moves may not be the same as moving up, but facing up to new situations and taking on different responsibilities may help you get out of the rut. Put in that extra effort: This may include volunteering for a job where nobody is showing much interest or brainstorming with colleagues to come up with ideas to try and boost the productivity of the organisation.
MNCs To Dominate Tech Hiring Wave In India
Multinational companies will dominate the tech hiring wave in India, during the next three calendars, giving their domestic counterparts a backseat. MNCs alone are expected to hire 1,50,000 people in the country during calendar 2007 against around 60,000 recruitments they have cumulatively accounted for in the previous calendar. The MNC hiring will more than double year-on-year in the next three years till 2009. That means, domestic tech firms, that have been going great guns with large-volume hiring during calendar 2004,'05 and '06, will put hiring on a backburner, say industry observers. Accenture, Bearing Point, CapGemini, EDS, IBM, JP Morgan and Merrill Lynch, are the leading MNCs that are going to drive the hiring storm in India till end 2009. Again, a whole host of MNCs like Cisco, Oracle, Dell, SAP, Deloitte, Perot Systems, Microsoft, Mr VeriSign, British Telecom and Logica CMG and dozens of MNC outsourcing firms like Fidelity, Convergys, America Online, Barclays, Reuters, Ocwen Financials, Viteos and HSBC are expected to scale up their people front significantly in India. A lot of high-value hiring is expected by over 50 different product development and design MNCs. In addition to all these, a large number of MNCs are waiting in the wings to enter India. ''So together, starting now, a lot of action is expected among MNCs in the coming few years'' says Mr BS Murthy, CEO, HumanCapital, a career consulting firm.
Source: The Economic Times New Delhi Edition
Google Moves Away From Traditional Hiring
Google has always wanted to hire people with straight-A report cards and double 800s on their SATs. Now it is looking for more well-rounded candidates who have published books or started their own clubs. Desperate to hire more engineers and sales representatives to staff its rapidly growing search and advertising business, Google in typical eccentric fashion has created an automated way to search for talent among the more than 100,000 job applications it receives each month. It is starting to ask job applicants to fill out an elaborate online survey that explores their attitudes, behavior, personality and biographical details going back to high school. The questions range from the age when applicants first got excited about computers to whether they have ever tutored or ever established a nonprofit organization. The answers are fed into a series of formulas created by Google’s mathematicians that calculate a score from zero to 100 meant to predict how well a person fit into its competitive culture. With traditional hiring methods, we were worried we will overlook some of the best candidates. Google is certainly not alone in the search for quantitative ways to find good employees. Employers use a wide range of tests meant to assess skills, intelligence, personality and honesty. Google has doubled the number of employees in each of the last three years. Even though the company now has about 10,000 employees, Bock says he sees no reason the company will not double again in size this year. That would increase the number of hires to about 200 a week.
Youngsters Hung Up On 5-Day Work Week
India's GenNext is now hung up on the five-day workplace. After flexi-hours and temp employment, the latest American work-style to hit India Inc is the five-day workweek, say HR practitioners and recruiters. The 22-year-old who has grown up on a five-day week in school and college is now hesitating to take up the big job offer that expects a six-day presence at the workplace. Ms Anusha Joy, HR Manager at a leading retail chain in Bangalore, says: "Money cannot pull people to work on Saturdays. We have at least three out of four people refusing jobs (like admin and HR) that demands their presence here on Saturdays." Mr Rajesh A.R., Vice-President, Team Lease Services, agrees. "Convincing employees to take up jobs in sectors that expect a six-day commitment is indeed a big problem." TeamLease has close to 60,000 temps on its rolls across sectors such as IT, ITeS, BFSI, pharma, manufacturing and retail. At temp recruitment from Tier I institutes, students look for five-day work, says Mr Rajesh. "Retail does demand long working hours and we find that people from manufacturing and army backgrounds are more easily convinced about working on Saturdays.
Compiled by Team @ HRudaya
