NASSCOM creating a list of NO SHOW candidates

We in our association have been implementing this for sometime now, however, I guess NASSCOM too has now woken up to this menace and is planning to create a list of such candidates who do not show up after accepting an offer. This list can be accessed by all major companies to check for any such behaviour by candidates in the past. Such candidates may also be blacklisted, making it difficult for them to work for reputed companies in the future.

While a candidate is perfectly within his/her rights to accept the offer which he feels is the best suited to his career path, however, it is very important that once they have made up their minds they show some basic courtesy by immediately informing all the companies from whom they have collected an offer letter about their decision. This would help these companies in working out alternatives in time and their work schedule and commitments to customers would not go haywire.

Why people leave an organisation

Here is a message sent to me by someone which I would like to share. How true!

Every company faces the problem of people leaving the company for better pay or profile.

Early this year, Arun, a senior software designer, got an offer from a prestigious international firm to work in its India operations developing specialized software. He was thrilled by the offer.
He had heard a lot about the CEO. The salary was great. The company had all the right systems in place employee-friendly human resources (HR) policies, a spanking new office, and the very best technology, even a canteen that served superb food.
Twice Arun was sent abroad for training. "My learning curve is the
sharpest it's ever been," he said soon after he joined.

Last week, less than eight months after he joined, Arun walked out of the job. Why did this talented employee leave ?
Arun quit for the same reason that drives many good people away.

The answer lies in one of the largest studies undertaken by the Gallup Organization. The study surveyed over a million employees and 80,000 managers and was published in a book called "First Break All The Rules".

It came up with this surprising finding:
If you're losing good people, look to their immediate boss. Immediate boss is the reason people stay and thrive in an organization. And he's the reason why people leave. When people leave they take knowledge, experience and contacts with them, straight to the competition.

"People leave managers not companies," write the authors Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman.

Mostly manager drives people away?

HR experts say that of all the abuses, employees find humiliation the most intolerable. The first time, an employee may not leave, but a thought has been planted. The second time, that thought gets strengthened. The third time, he looks for another job.
When people cannot retort openly in anger, they do so by passive
aggression. By digging their heels in and slowing down. By doing only what they are told to do and no more. By omitting to give the boss crucial information. Dev says: "If you work for a jerk, you basically want to get him into trouble. You don't have your heart and soul in the job."

Different managers can stress out employees in different ways - by being too controlling, too suspicious, too pushy, too critical, but they forget that workers are not fixed assets, they are free agents. When this goes on too long, an employee will quit - often over a trivial issue.

Jack Welch of GE once said.

A company's value lies "between the ears of its employees".

Dangerous Alliances - Peter F Drucker

"Business once grew by one of two ways: grass roots up, or by acquisition. Today businesses grow through alliances - all kinds of dangerous alliance, joint ventures, and customer partnering, which by the way, very few people understand."

Although Mr Drucker is no longer with us in this world, his words of wisdom continue to provide deep insight into this continuously evolving business paradigm. 

Windows Live Writer

Today, for once, after years, I used a MS product  within days of its launch and I must admit I am pleasantly stumped! Although I have not used it extensively but the simple uploads that I did today worked like a charm. Uploading the same post onto different blog hosts was a cinch. Great stuff - till now.

Economy's racing but talent is still hard to come by

It’s been 10 weeks now and Marut Sikka is still on the lookout. The Delhi-based food expert is looking for a chef for his client since June. “They are just not available,” he says. With the changing lifestyle and rising disposable income, the food and restaurant business in India is growing rapidly. The organised restaurant business, pegged at Rs 21,000 crore has been growing at 25-30%in the recent past. Big restaurants in Delhi alone, Mr Sikka estimates, would need up to 35,000 chefs.
But where will they come from? India does not have a single training institute for chefs. Most chefs who are good were trained on the job, and most have been picked up by international outlets. “Indian food and chefs are in demand,” he says. It’s the most serious issue for the industry, adds Mr Sikka.
This isn’t just about chefs. Add masseurs, hair stylists, event managers, interior decorators, florists and many more services professionals to the list. Garment exporters are looking for merchandisers. The auto industry is looking for design engineers. Infrastructure companies are looking for urban and town planners. A rapidly growing economy is creating plenty of jobs — but mostly in the services sector. But there aren’t enough trained professionals to take those jobs. “Employment and educational infrastructure — both haven’t kept pace with the economy,” says B Santhanam, CEO of Saint Gobain and chairman of CII HR committee. The scramble for talent is making headlines when 45m Indians are unemployed and many more underemployed as agricultural labour.
Clearly, an agrarian economy has leapfrogged to turn into a services-led economic engine — today, services sector provides over 60% to India’s GDP while agriculture and industry provides around 19 and 10% respectively. But the employment patterns are just the reverse. Over 56%of India’s workforce today is employed — often underemployed — by the agricultural sector. “It’s no rocket science — going forward industry and services will create jobs in future. To make that work, agrarian workers will have to migrate,” he says. Through training and skill development China has successfully managed to migrate 9m workers from agriculture to industry.
If India does not wake up its a time bomb ticking. The Teamlease Labour report estimates that if things continue the way they are, India will have anywhere between 8.4 crore and 21 crore (see table) unemployed workers in the country, depending on the rate of employment growth. Of course, literacy levels will matter. Given the trend growth in the 1990s, India’s working age population will have 233m uneducated and 157m primary school pass people. Hopefully the Left-backed government will go on a literacy overdrive to tackle that. But this isn’t just about literacy levels.

India's educational infrastructure has to be completely hauled up. Today professional orientation is very low — Of the total college enrolments, 84% in ‘04-05 is in arts and commerce or sciences. Only 16%of students were enrolled in professionals courses. Even in the small base of 16%, there is an issue of employability — barely 20% can be directly hired by the industry. “Training infrastructure set up by corporates will play a critical role,” says Vineet Kaul, director, HR Philips Electronics. Capacity building at colleges will be important. But they will also need to impart softer skills, introduce new courses and attune syllabus closer to the industry needs.
Not just at the high end, India Inc will need many more at the low-end in jobs like plumbing, brick laying, electrician, tailoring. "ITIs today offers training in only 40-45 trades, overlooking many other skills that the industry may need today," says Shailendra Sharma, former advisor, employment and training, Planning Commission. ITIs will have to evolve — already in five-six states, private sector is chipping in streamlining operations and training programs.
But migrating over 200m agrarian workers to other sectors of the economy will hold the key. “Private sector is willing to partner training in most areas but here the government's role will be critical,” says Mr Santhanam. CII is already piloting a project for the Tamil Nadu government where Rs 550 crore is being invested in grassroot training. At a national level, it expects Rs 5,000 crore annually will suffice to train 50 lakh agrarian workers. “It may sound big — but this investment will have a multiplier effect for the nation and the economy,” he said.

Source: The Economic Times

Pitfalls ahead for the booming KPO sector

Supply side issues may yet trip up the growth story at the high end of the offshoring business.

The conventional wisdom so far has been that knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) is going to be India’s (and indeed, the globe’s) fastest growing sector over the next decade, growing at more than 40 per cent a year.

Upbeat estimates envision the global KPO business soaring from the current $2 billion to $16-17 billion by 2010, with India’s share of this newest, hottest sunrise sector at more than two-thirds, or $12 billion, and employing 250,000 people.

However, while a new White Paper by employment services firm Kelly Services is gung-ho on KPO, a study by RocSearch, a UK-based research services firm, warns that the size of the Indian KPO market in 2010 will be just a little more than $5 billion, and that it will provide employment to only 100,000 people.

Yet another employment services firm— Manpower Services— however offers a way out of current and potential problems through private-public partnerships.

The White Paper by Kelly Services, titled Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO)— An Emerging Opportunity, cites the usual reasons why India is considered “by far the most attractive KPO destination”: its competitive salaries (less than 40% of US salaries); proficiency in English (with more than 70 million people speaking it); and its large and competent pool of professionals (nearly 3 million new graduates every year).

A large number of Indian and foreign players have made a successful entry into the KPO domain in India. They include Evalue Serve, Genpact, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, SmartAnalayst, McKinsey, Value Notes, Netscribes, Smart Cube, WNS Global, Quest, HSBC, Office Tiger, Citigroup, Reuters, Fidelity, Tech Books, ITC Client Logic and Copal Partners.

“It is estimated that most of them will grow the India KPO business manifold in the coming years, while simultaneously a host of new players will enter the KPO segment in India,” says the Kelly study.

However, RocSearch warns that a severe talent crunch may limit India’s achievements in the KPO domain, forcing a scaling down of market-size expectations from $12 billion to $5 billion, and employment in the sector from 250,000 to 100,000. It adds that analysts may have overestimated the supply of skilled workers in the country.

There is currently an annual addition of more than three million graduates and professional degree and diploma holders to the existing of 100 million. India has the world’s second largest reservoir of engineers and scientists, and the second largest pool of IT manpower. More than six times as many Indians as Chinese go to universities. However, there is the issue of poor employability and competing demands from other sections of domestic industry.

RocSearch observes that, partly as a result of outdated curricula at many professional colleges, only a fraction of the qualified labour force can be considered suitable for employment in reputed companies. Of the three million educated workers added to the labour pool in 2005, it points out, only 500,000 “could be considered employable in a world-class company.”

RocSearch says this would bring down the number of India’s KPO employees in 2010 from the currently projected 250,000 to 100,000. At an average revenue per person of $55,000 in 2010, it projects that the sector will be worth a little over $5 billion by then.

Manpower Services points to the way forward in a White Paper of its own, titled Confronting the Coming Talent Crunch: What’s Next? The paper observes that as the talent crunch intensifies across countries, governments that are finding it difficult to recruit the right talent have started looking to employment services providers for ways to recruit and train individuals for positions that are hard to fill.

Indeed, Manpower has worked with government agencies in Australia, the Netherlands, China, the UK, the US and Canada to address supply-side issues on the labour front.

On the BPO front, private-public partnerships featuring NASSCOM, Dell, Microsoft, the Indian Institutes of Information Technology, and the governments of Andhra Pradesh and Chandigarh, have already taken off.

The NASSCOM initiative is called IT Workforce Development, in which some 20 companies are involved. This covers faculty development, mentoring and internship programmes, with professors work closely with companies.

Source: Business Standard

Court passes restraining order on Poaching

The High Court of Delhi has passed a restraining order restraining Wipro Biomed's longtime partner Beckman Coulter from luring away its employees. Beckman Coulter is said to be preparing the ground for an independent foray into the Indian market.

With an acute shortage of talent being faced in sectors like Life Sciences, Aviation, IT and BPO this would establish some kind of a benchmark in the Indian scenario where where there is still no clarity on the validity of non- compete agreements.

In industries like Aviation considerable investments are made in training the Pilots and in case such a non-compete clause is missing then as per Capt Gopinath, Air Deccan Managing Director, "one fine day you see key people not having reported for work, and there you have a grounded aircraft. We spend considerable amount of money on training our crew."

Source: Times of India

Global Outsourcing Guide 2006 CIO/ A T Kearney

The CIO's global outsourcing guide, prepared by A T Kearney, brings out how the offshoring world has changed.

The Executive Summary

India remains the leading offshore destination by a wide margin, particularly for U.S. and U.K. companies. "Every year, the risks of moving work to India get lower," says Dean Davison, VP of strategic outsourcing for Nautilus Advisors. "India is increasingly more adept at IP protection, providing resilient infrastructure and managing global relationships effectively." Although Gartner estimates that India currently holds 80 percent to 90 percent of the offshoring market, wage inflation and the increasing maturity of other low-cost areas threaten its future dominance. And as India's star has risen, so have its turnover rates—a growing concern for CIOs. Consequently, Davison expects India's market share to shrink 20 percent by 2010.

Today, less than 10 percent of American companies outsource to more than one country but "most are evaluating multiple locations," says Davison. China, for example. Experts say it could be a powerful rival to India in the next three to five years, even though it currently can't match India's large English-speaking workforce, its level of compliance with international law or its number of IT grads.

Labor and operational costs in Central European countries such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic—attractive outsourcing options for Western European businesses—continue to rise, approaching the level of their customers. So penny-pinching European CIOs are looking deeper into the former Soviet bloc, to countries like Romania, Bulgaria and the Ukraine. Latin American destinations such as Costa Rica, Mexico and Brazil are beginning to attract U.S. back-office and call center work as the need to service Spanish-speaking markets grows. And A.T. Kearney suggests that the Middle East and Africa may be the next frontier for offshore operations—if the politics of the area stabilize.

Although labor costs will continue to be the driving factor behind offshoring, CIOs must internalize the "cost-versus-risk equation," says Ian Marriott, research vice president at Gartner. When going offshore, common risks (infrastructure stability, process maturity, security) become more conspicuous, and uncommon risks (human resource predictability, political stability, rule of law or lack thereof) emerge. Increased competition for the offshore outsourcing dollar promises to raise standards around the globe, but more opportunity equals more risk, and choosing a location is an increasingly complex decision—one we're hoping the "2006 Global Outsourcing Guide" will help you make.

Outsourcing Is Forever - Jack & Suzy Welch

The issue for the U.S. economy isn't outsourcing -- it's bringing in more talent from overseas.

BusinessWeek columnists Jack & Suzy Welch say that the debate over outsourcing should be over by now. It was pretty much all about politics to begin with. The question now is not how do we stop outsourcing, but how do we use outsourcing to enhance competitiveness in what is, and forever will be, a global marketplace?

Well, I guess, this is another nail in the coffin of naysayers.