Recruiting a career

HEADHUNTING: A school which will focus only on recruitment professionals.

After schools which offer MBA in Human Resource (HR) management comes a school which will focus only on the recruitment aspect of HR "� Elixir School of Recruiting (ESR).

Founded by Elixir Web Solutions, a recruitment process outsourcing firm, the school aims at addressing the shortage of recruitment professionals India is facing today.

Elixir's business intelligence and communication department undertook a survey and discovered that the Indian recruitment industry is going through a crunch of 200 professionals every working day of the year and there would be a requirement of one million professionals in the recruitment segment in 2006. Thus the firm came up with the idea of a recruiting school.

"With more demand and less supply and no formal training available to hone skills in recruitment, Elixir came up with a unique school which will focus only on the recruitment industry," says Perry Madan, associate partner, and the co-founder of ESR.

But why a school on recruitment? Answers Madan, "Recruitment today has become more like a sales job which involves number crunching, meeting targets, developing channel partners et al.

Today 80 per cent of HR jobs have become recruitment related and only 20 per cent of them involve other facets of HR. Since finding the right person for the right job is the biggest challenge in the industry today, the recruitment school has planned to teach students the nuances of recruitment."

The one-year course will begin this July. It will be a full-time programme involving seven months of theory and five months of internship.

The programme consists of four core modules "� recruitment industry overview, recruiting techniques, assessment and interviewing techniques and industry specialisation. The faculties for the course would be HR professionals from the industry.

The candidates should be graduates or postgraduates in any stream and have to undergo a comprehensive selection procedure namely interview, psychometric tests, aptitude tests, logical reasoning, English, Mathematics and general awareness.

"This one year recruitment course will provide the students with both the theoretical and on job training. Experts from the professional fields have been chosen to be the faculty, who today, hold the forums of the human resource industry. Also, the students will be given a choice to specialise in recruitment practices of any specific industry of their choice," says Madan.

What else? The corporate world too has given a nod to Elixir's venture. According to Madan, corporated have already approached ESR to devise corporate-specific HR courses and train professionals.

The HR heads however, are positive about the school. Says an HR head of a pharma MNC, "Selection and sourcing are the two key aspects in recruiting. If sourcing is right, one can get the right person for the right job. A school which can achieve this can meet the need of the industry to a great extent."

For Parul Kumar Gupta, director HR of Avon Beauty products India, the school could produce dedicated and specialised recruiters in the industry.

Says Gupta, "As of today there is a serious shortage of good recruiters in markets. The passion to recruit is no longer in people. A school on recruitment is a novel idea. In fact, had we realised the need for recruiters two years ago, we could meet with the shortage today."