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INNOVATION: Yahoo! India has a novel programme to convert employees into potential recruiters.

Yahoo!, the global search engine firm, is in rapid expansion mode in India. It plans to double the head count at its Bangalore software development software centre from the present 700 in the next 12 months. It has to do this even as it faces a high attrition rate, reported to be about 14 per cent a year.

With the demand for the right kind of people far in excess of supply, Yahoo! India has developed a novel way of recruiting fast and recruiting right. This is in addition to the regular channels for recruiting people, such as headhunters. Getting recruitment right is crucial for companies, because it can help lower the attrition rate.

Yahoo! now has a well-defined "structured, branded" training programme for converting as many of its employees as possible into potential recruiters.

How serious the company is about this programme can be gauged from the fact that this training is not optional for employees. Also, the company is branding the programmes, as this creates internal visibility and longer life.

The training programme aims to turn Yahoo! employees into people capable of interviewing people outside for a job in the firm.

"As of now we have a common course structure for recruiters across the company and at all levels. But, over time we may develop different programmes for recruitment at different levels," says Bhuvaneswar Naik, HR director at Yahoo! India.

Recruitments and referrals are becoming a part of the 'key result areas' when assessing the performance of employees, says Madan Padaki, co-founder and director of MeritTrac, a talent management firm. So how good you are at your job, on which your compensation depends, will partly be measured by how successful you are as a headhunter for your firm.

When a member of a team working on a project leaves, it may not always be possible for the HR department to find the person with the right profile in a short period.

"This approach doesn't give members of the team a chance to point their fingers at the HR department for not being able to find the needed personnel. It therefore also spreads responsibility," adds Padaki.

This decentralises the process of recruitment and entails sharing the responsibility for hiring.

The programme to make recruiters out of employees is the brainchild of Lakshmi Keerti, head - talent acquisition at Yahoo!.

She believes that the programme can last even after one set of employee-recruiters leave, as it has now become a part of the firm's culture. However, itt is early days yet for the programme. Only some 15 employees have so far been trained and certified.

These people are considered fit to assess a person and conduct an interview. Given conversion rates of as low as 10 or at most 20 in every 100, it has become imperative for companies to be able to find as many people of the type they need in the shortest possible time. The number of employee-recruiters in companies is therefore likely to go up pretty fast, Padaki believes.