A Paramount Challenge: Finding Talent

Go to the Jobs section in here and its flooding jobs right now. At least in the technology and R&D space. Its raining new technologies and newer jobs in markets like mobile phones, Automotive, e-commerce etc. India is a hot spot destination for a long time now for global tech giants to establish their captive centers and find suppliers for outsourcing. This has rendered India and especially place like Bangalore as major hiring spots. So far a healthy story...

Lets come to the story of finding the right talent. In the past the trend was that there were mass recruiters who dared hire fresh graduates and then actually mold a good portion of them in to sound professionals. This was when the industry was in the liner growth phase and supply demand was still at balance. Also companies had a strong culture of training and coaching. My first job was at Infosys and I can say that the training program, my mentors and managers really put us in the right path of learning curve and provided that platform to learn and grow as a professional. KPIT Cummins which acquired CG smith probably has produced more than half of key automotive professionals that we find in the industry today as few cases to quote. These companies actually dared to experiment with fresh talent and also knew how to push them in to the journey. Even today they do hire new engineers but they cannot keep up their standards, why? The companies, back then, very importantly had a handful of experts inside who could actually build a new set of professionals. They knew how to manage the pipelines well. These experts were someone who had spent substantial amount of time in building their own expertise and had delivered projects for their companies with unimaginable passion. They are the ones who had held on to their jobs for a good amount of time which had enabled them to invest themselves in learning, understanding and mold themselves through extremely slow and steady burning. Over years, they turned out to be that excellent set of people who could simply create their replicas with ease. But today the story is different.

We often hear that the mindset of millennials is core cause of todays unsteady grooming of expertise. Well, I wouldn't attribute the whole thing to Millennials (by the way, am a millennial as well by definition :-) I marginally make it to the list :-):-)) . Yes millennials want everything cooked and they are not used to slow and steady growth. But on the other side, its the companies themselves that are fueling this habit to a great extent. Today we rarely see people sticking to their current roles for a long time. We don't get to see many people who invest themselves for a good amount of time to grow in one place. They are always on the move and not needed to be mentioned they move to their new job for a substantial growth in their salaries and probably jump in the organizational ladder. But, they find themselves happy for a very short time and the story repeats and many people find themselves in another job and mostly again with raise in their perks. But the thing to stop and think... Who is offering them the new Jobs? Its another company similar to their current one? Mostly yes; This is the core of the issue that the industry needs to address. That is why in this write-up, am not going to talk about the issue with the millennial mindset but I would like to put my opinion on the other side of the problem. The mistakes that companies are making that are fueling the millennials' direction of thinking and why we struggle to find that right mix of talent.

The bitter "Rat Race": The industry has gone in to the rat race for hiring. Too many companies want to hire "experienced laterals" and in big numbers. Especially the race is too intense for the middle level engineers ranging somewhere between 4 years to 9 years of experience. Every company is ready to offer higher perks to these candidates. Let's say, if a candidate tells in the interview that he or she has an offer already, does any company tell them "Then just go and work there"(?) No, every company and every manager looks for opportunity to offer a bit higher and get that candidate especially if the candidate is reasonably good (Honestly, I do that too!). There are companies who still float an offer even if the candidate has had 5 job switches in his/her 7 or 8 year career and currently holding two offers. Candidates today are aware of it and that is why they openly negotiate. By this the corporate circle is actually fueling the ideas of candidates working only for benefits. Of course there shall always be a competition to attract people and that's healthy. But the question is what is our usp? How do we attract people. Today in the race to attract people through monetary benefits, employers in many domains have been offering ridiculously high wages to the 4 to 9 years band (in some cases it has reached a whooping [years of experience X 3] Lakh Pa). This unfortunately are kind of wages that cannot be sustained over years. Candidates do not think of these long term impacts when they go on that hunt. Also it creates a lot of imbalance with employees that are inside the organization and loyal. It motivates them to move as that's the message they got. Find a new job to get more money! So we neither are doing good to existing employees nor able to keep the new ones happy since that kind of increases every year is not possible. Its time that both companies and candidates shift to better purpose to move to a new job and hire candidates. Culture, nature of job, long term vision and sense of fulfillment. But who should start? Companies should work together to switch or candidates should be preached to change? Chicken or egg? Imagine what would happen if IPL players are allowed to switch teams even after auctions in between the tournament. There wouldn't be anything called a team.

Lack of experts to build their successors: As I wrote in the beginning, companies had their hard working, loyal, seasoned and dependable experts in the past who could groom the next gen experts keeping their pipeline alive. Since there has been a sheer horizontal expansion of industry over past few years and people moved around too frequently, the layer of such experts have rapidly depleted in many old organizations. They simply got newer opportunities and better benefits in terms of money and position. Their new organizations were so new that they did not dare to hire freshers and they needed experienced campaigners. The new organizations that has flourished has been less than a decade old. All of these new organizations need experts being hired from outside. But who are grooming them? Since, the old org already has depleting experts, they have not been as effective as before in grooming the new set of people. So in general, everyone wants to fish from the same pond but where are those fertile fishes that could produce more healthy fishes by staying in water undisturbed? Moreover, the new fishes never remain for a long time there to groom themselves, they get attracted for money and position and gets fished! How will companies cope up with this?

The rigid mindset of leaders: In the recent past, during the heavy horizontal expansion of the industry, leaders felt a sense of exultation by having a large number of people working under them. Success has always meant big team and big offices. I am not scoffing on that idea. In fact it was a great way to fuel the propulsion of our growth. The point is we are doing the same thing for ages. Time has changed, business models have changed. There are more tech centers or captive centers than old styled service companies and BPOs. For a service organization, most of the time, people mean business and that can be understood to a good extent. However leaders at tech centers running with the same idea is not the best fit after a certain while. Its a brilliant starting point but a poor long term strategy. At some point, creating expertise and excellence should supersede the idea of mere numbers. Its a simple tradeoff between short term game plan vs a long term vision. Since these small and medium sized organizations miss that long term roadmap, when there is sudden need to have a business expansion, they do something that is very common. Fish from the same pond! Companies need to look at creating a bunch of people who can stay, deliver, learn and push things forward. There is no short cut to finding a superstar. We need to create star teams inside. And this cannot be a large scale headcount business. It has to be a core team of self driven individuals of small number. Creating this team is not a one time activity but a continuous process.

Repeated and monotonous jobs offered: One of the tech giants was offering a 14Lpa job to a fresher at the campus interviews. The students told me that the interview was really enervating. What for? To finally make them tech support employees. Why did they do it? Because these people who get such high paid jobs to start with will end up staying there for a longer time since no other company can match such a salary. When you are used to those 7 digit salaries, its hard to come down. Probably a new Indian startup would be offering a better job but may be 1/10th the salary. How will anyone choose? tricky.... The core here is that there is still a certain stigma attached to the industry in India. Cheap labor; we often find it hard to get rid of this tag. The fact is that many companies are attracted to India due to this very reason. Fair enough but the flip side is that the label is so strong that often only monotonous and not so interesting jobs come to this geography (Proud to say that our company has triggered a phase of change) People who start with strong passion and ambition over the time lose their interest and eventually get in to the viscous cycle of a 9:00 to 5:00 job only meant for their survival. The expertise levels do not grow since the job and output expected of them is same thing over and again. This is something that has to slowly change. The important point is we cannot expect the parent companies to change this. The local organizations slowly need to build that trust and gear up to do more. That's the only way.

The unbridged gap between university and job: When I quit my job in 2016 to do something on my own, this was my dream. How can we educate the university grads in a way that they are job ready? I had lot of ideas but little did I realize that the universities are more business centers than education centers. I am not a business man material. I simply could not do more than few corporate trainings and my own organized trainings to just earn enough for my own food and survival. That is because I could not convince many colleges about my vision. Colleges either wanted a share in the business or wanted to know if I would help their students get more placements. I couldn't do any. With only the tag of "I can give them more knowledge" I ended up nowhere. While the management is busy making money, The so called engineering syllabus is more and more moving away from creating engineers and they are simply manufacturing B.E. graduates. The students have either been misled or mostly not led at all. Once someone asked me "If a doctor does not find a job then at least he will be eligible to put up his own clinic and start practice. What can an engineer who cannot find a job do?" That stuck to me like a lightning. There was very little we engineers could do as fresh grads unless some company picks us up for hand holding. This is getting worse with time, with diluted syllabus of universities that lacks basics and very stupid move of colleges pulling themselves to be autonomous and finally end up calling themselves universities. Who cares for skill development of engineers? The engineers themselves do not care. They unfortunately don't even know what they are missing and what they are going to face when they step out of their colleges.

Conclusion: The list can go on. I just brought some important ones. We have had a great start to the journey of establishing ourselves as key technology players in the globe. However, the eco-system of corporate and the education system is still vulnerable and needs lot of work to be done on building our talents. Finding talents outside our organization is possible only when someone is actually building it. Building and nurturing talent has to be one of the top priorities of the company goals. Education needs to move away from competitive learning towards skill development.

It's time to stop fishing and bread fishes!