Recruitment reassurance

IN CONVERSATION

Vipul Prakash got into the business of recruitment by accident. He had run a web education school in the late 1990s "" which failed after the dotcom bust "" and this put him in touch with some promising young web designers. So, in 2000, when one of his friends needed three web designers for his company, Prakash was able to make the transaction very quickly. It was the easiest Rs 43,000 he ever made, he says, and it got him thinking about setting up a recruitment firm. Today, Elixir Web Solutions has 300 people working for it, and a turnover for Rs 20 crore. He tells Business Standard about the trip so far.

How much did you invest in setting up your firm?

I hired a place in Kalkaji in New Delhi for Rs 3,000 a month. I started with around Rs 23,000, which had to cover rent and the salary of the one person my partner and I hired.

In two months, Rs 20,000 of this was gone; we had to ask our first client, Matrix Cellular, to give us an advance of Rs 15,000 for our services.

Our first break came when we made Rs 1 lakh by placing the father of one of my old students at Max City as a senior programme manager. I learnt very quickly that luck and networking play a large part in this business.

What would you say differentiates you from the other recruitment comapanies here?

We're probably the biggest; so we can specialise in different fields. We have 11 different practices, and each has a head who has at least 4-5 years of experience working in the field that he's recruiting for.

We've also got great career movement within our company "" our employers can make partner, for instance, which gives them an incentive to work.

Because of our size, we're also able to diversify our services, so that we can spread our risk. For instance, after 9/11, we weren't that badly affected, although hiring for BPOs did go down "" because we could depend on all our other areas of specialisation.

Also thanks to our size, we can also cover all stages of the recruitment process, from interviewing people to actually positioning the company as a brand to potential employees.

You say that you are the first Indian company to initiate Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO). Can you talk a little bit about this?

I think that RPO is the next logical step in the recruitment industry. More and more firms, instead of leaving recruiting up to their inhouse human resources (HR) department, are starting to outsource.

This includes taking care of things like recruitment, compensation and benefits and training. This is particularly important also when foreign companies come to India.

For instance, when a company like IBM comes to India and wants to set up a branch here, it makes it much easier for them to leave the whole process to us, for they do not know enough about work practices here. I've also spent some time in the US, which helps me understand the way these companies work. Our extensive network means that we can hire 20,000 employees for IBM much more efficiently than they themselves can.