Companies in India today face tough challenges in selection and development of high quality talent to stay competitive in the global market. HR challenges range from dealing with skills shortage, high levels of attrition, and limitation in communication skills among the pool of candidates available for recruitment. In addition, there is a dearth of skills available among the pool of employees to be promoted to managerial positions that require decision making and high-level people management skills. The future prospects for Indian companies depend on their ability to recruit and retain employees that have high levels of communication, critical thinking, creativity and collaboration skills.
How many times has an HR professional defined an ideal candidate in terms of abilities, personality and communication skills—and finally compromised on the selection criteria, based on the limited availability of suitable candidates? A formidable reality that most HR professionals grapple with in the process of staff selection is the overabundance of candidates that are under-qualified in the area of communication skills. Combine the skill shortage with the pressure to hire in a growing economy and one can see the extent of challenges that HR managers face in corporate India. Complicating the issue is the fact that usually a large number of candidates apply for jobs in India, making the process of sifting through resumes, screening and scheduling interviews a tedious and time-consuming process. This then becomes a major challenge for companies – how to sift through the applicant profiles and hire the right candidate in an efficient manner? It is truly a paradox—famine amid the feast.
At the entry level, the basic requirement for most companies is to hire people with sound general abilities. Organizations that value the concept of a good fit between job roles and individual personality are also interested to know about the individual’s value system and dimensions of personality that relate to a job function. There is no debate that all organizations seek employees with excellent communication skills, both in the spoken and written domains.
Information Technology (IT) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies face the challenge of assessing English language skills of candidates since most employees in these companies need to either speak or write to customers and colleagues abroad. The traditional method of interviewing candidates and assessing English language proficiency has consistency and quality problems. Whenever there is large-scale recruitment, a team of interviewers are empanelled to assess candidates for their speaking and writing abilities. The problem is that assessment of language using human evaluators can be prone to bias. Decisions tend to be subjective and may be influenced by cultural, gender and other factors. Additional issues like ensuring consistency among a group of interviewers and loss of consistency over a period of time, need to be addressed. It is no wonder that some of the candidates that have inadequate language proficiency slip through the gates and end up creating poor customer satisfaction. Over a period of time, the accumulated customer dissatisfaction may lead to diminished brand value for the company for customers. Good writing skills are also of increasing importance in companies particularly because of the extensive use of emails as the preferred method of communication by a majority of employees. The ability to speak well does not necessarily translate into good writing skills. Both are different skills and need to be assessed separately. Given that for many outsourcing companies 60 per cent or more revenues coming from non-voice process that could involve scripted, semi-scripted or unscripted writing, assessing writing skills becomes equally if not more important than assessing spoken skills in English. Particularly for high-end business processes like publishing and legal & financial services, employees need to write in an unscripted manner, making the ability to write proficiently an important job requirement.
Progressive organizations in India are looking at assessments not only at the point of recruitment but also as an on-going process for talent development and succession planning. An important challenge for HR at this level is to scrutinize a large employee base eligible for succession and raise the bar with respect to decision-making skills, creativity, collaboration and communication – skills increasingly recognized as essentials in high-level management roles? While in-house training programs can always be designed by organizations to improve these skills among the existing pool of employees, it might be best to assess employees for these skills in the first place to avoid later challenges of training top level management.
Clearly, the community of HR professionals in India will need to do a relook at their current recruitment and development strategies in order to give legitimate space to assessments at both these levels. A scientific and objective assessment carried out at the right time within an organization will pay off in the future. A wrong hire is much costlier than the cost of using the right assessment at the right place.
The author is, Managing Director, Pearson Clinical and Talent Assessment
