Going national with local expertise

WORKPLACE: Spinach sources staff from informal sector for retail foray.

All the headlines and column centimetres of space have been hogged by Reliance Retail and Bharti-Wal-Mart, but there is one retail chain (currently based in Mumbai, but planning to go national in phases) whose hiring strategy is novel"" Spinach, the food and grocery retail business of Wadhawan Food Retail Pvt Ltd, which turns one year old next month.

If Reliance has made news for its high-profile hires drawn from other modern format retailers, Spinach has recruited 100 of its 550 employees from the unorganised sector.

Says CEO Dippankar Halder: "We are not being benevolent. We saw a fit between the unorganised sector vendors and us. It's a win-win situation for both."

Halder recalls having spent long hours at Mumbai's fruit and vegetable markets, studying vendors' product displays. The most impressive fruit displays were those of Sheikh Nadir Ali (popularly known as Alibhai), who sold his wares at Mumbai's Crawford Market.

Halder got into conversation with him, asked how much he earned in a month, and offered him more money and a steady job. Alibhai was Spinach's first employee and Halder delegated to him the task of recruiting all the others who were to be in the fruit and vegetable format.

Likewise, Halder selected a fishmonger named Partha Mukherjee, who had been selling fish for 10 years, and he chose the others for the fish/meat/poultry section.

Halder argues that the foreign model of retail will not necessarily work in India, and it is important to tap locally available expertise"" hence the decision to source from the unorganised sector.

"We looked at people who were the best around in terms of attitudes and skills. The fishmonger is best for non-vegetarian items, and the best for fruit is a local fruit vendor," he explains.

Spinach Retail now has ambitious plans to expand its current network of 20 outlets to 1,500 outlets nationwide by 2011. This will require a staff of 30,000, and Halder is so happy with his hiring strategy that he plans to source as many as 6,000 employees from the unorganised sector.

Spinach has a month-long structured training programme for them, which includes technical training (handling software, billing processes), special soft skill techniques and cultural training (for interacting with customers).

Halder explains that at the grassroots level, getting the numbers was not a problem and he had to be careful that he got people with the right attitude. "It was at the general manager and vice-president level that it was a problem finding people," he says.