Shyamal Majumdar: Pampering Indian talent, the MNC way

HUMAN FACTOR

With the right kind of manpower in short supply, talent hunting in India is now the top priority for corporations across the globe. The war is so intense that even companies such as Microsoft and Google are pulling out all the stops to attract Indian candidates.

Microsoft, for instance, has announced a country-wide talent hunt, called Code 4 Bill, among Indian students, which would give the winner the opportunity to work with Bill Gates' Technical Assistants team. The 20 best students will be selected to intern with Microsoft at its Indian operations, while the winner will get to join Gates' Technical Assistants team for a year.

India is the first country where students will get the opportunity to learn about cutting-edge product development and innovations by working directly with Microsoft's product and development and research teams. The contest is aimed at pre-final and final year students pursuing various technical courses across India.

Google is not far behind. The company sensed that its global practice of a lengthy recruitment process is too tedious to attract top talent for its Bangalore centre as engineering students in India are assured a job more than a year before they graduate. Google found a way out by starting a Google India Code Jam, a computer programming competition with Rs 3,00,000 as first prize, to find the best programming talent from India and south Asia. The Code Jam will serve as a short-cut through its hiring regime, which is usually a seven-stage process. Much of that screening can be set aside for Code Jam winners.

Google has staged Code Jams in the US, but this was the first such exam in Asia, and the response was huge. Some 14,000 aspirants registered from all over south and south-east Asia for the first round in February. The top 50 were selected for the finals in Bangalore: 39 from India, 8 from Singapore, and 3 from Indonesia. All 50 finalists got absorbed in Google.

Among the other creative solutions employed by multinationals operating in India (Qualcomm and ABB, for instance, are making rapid progress on this) for attracting the top talent are the establishment of computer labs on college campuses, which provide a means for direct recruitment of talented students trained in skills of particular interest to the corporation.

ABB India, which needs a steady flow of new talent to keep pace with its growing business in the country, has also gone in for innovative recruitment. It used to visit 35 campuses every year: a huge outgo of time and money. Also, since placement week is held almost simultaneously across campuses, visiting one meant skipping another. The problem was solved last year. On a pre-appointed date in July, over 500 students from 23 colleges went to the Reliance Web World near them. There, through video conferencing, they participated in a live, pre-placement discussion by ABB officials and sat for online tests immediately.

Apart from slashing the recruitment process to just 12 days, from three months earlier, the new method has also meant considerable savings and a chance to approach a better crop of students.

Recruitment firms are also joining in and doing their bit to attract top-notch talent, especially in the senior management level. Bangalore-based TVA Infotech, for instance, has gone in for what it calls lounge hiring under which discreet weekend sessions are held in plush hotels. Companies are segregated on different floors to maintain secrecy.

At the "Aspire lounge", invited candidates walk in with their cards, register, and are guided by the counsellors to watch presentations on each of the companies present at the Lounge. IT professionals with five to nine years of experience, register for the programme by posting the resume on the TVA website. The candidates who match the required criteria are invited to the lounge.

Aspire Lounge is just one of the 5-star recruitment options that TVA provides. For more senior managers, there is Aspire Platinum. This exclusive, by-invitation only, hiring get-together is for senior professionals with over 10 years of experience and the interviews are done over cocktails and dinner. Accenture, Hewlett-Packard and Wipro are some of the firms that made use of such lounges.

To pamper possible candidates at the CEO level, some recruitment consultants have advised recruiters to take candidates for expenses-paid family holidays. Such pampering is set to become the name of the game as India's software and business service industries, from computer coding and call centres to accounting, equity research and engineering design, are expected to see an explosive growth this year.