What is the top most concern of a job seeker? Is it stability, satisfaction, pay package, or top brands? How to deal with the aspiring manager syndrome? How to assess a candidate's technical as well as soft skills in just a half-an-hour interview? How to retain employees and bring down the attrition levels? These are the questions that haunt the HR department. In this panel discussion, we have attempted to deal with key issues in HR.

Muralidharan Jobstreet.com

Madan Padaki Meritrac

Anil Dev Fischer Consulting

BS Murthy Human Capital

Are technical skills as important as soft skills? And how do you rate experience?

Muralidharan, MD, Jobstreet.com: When we talk of the relation between technical skills and work experience in various stages of an organization's development, one of the key challenges is technical skills. The importance of the time an organization needs to spend on training and development is tremendous. I am aware of a couple of organizations where even at the chief executive level there is a person designated to focus on the next level of training and development in technical skills.

Soft skills are as important as technical skills. The degree of soft skills you need as you go up the corporate ladder may vary. This issue has to be taken care of in the global context today. Previously if there was a leader who did well according to Indian standards, it was enough. But say, if you have to deal with the Japanese, then even the minor things matter. So it's the need of the hour to develop the skills of your staff, both technical as well as soft.

Madan Padaki, Director, Meritrac: If you are looking at a fresher, the emphasis is not much on the soft skills but more on his intelligence, aptitude, whether he is smart enough to learn things fast. The emphasis is not much on developing him into a leader. Especially when you are recruiting freshers by the hundreds, the focus is on how fast you can get them on board and make them learn things and then start delivering.

And after a year or two down the line, they start looking at developing that person into a team leader. So the necessary criterion is about technical skills or the learnability when we go to campus interviews.

What we have found is that there is no correlation between the kind of experience and the technology. It primarily matters which companies he has worked with and what projects he has done. Theoretically, the correlation has to exist, since the longer you work the more you are supposed to know.

For instance, a team leader needs to have experience to manage a team. But if you need a developer, it's wrong to expect 2-6 years' experience. It's better to test people for technical as well as soft skills through psychometric tools.

Anil Dev, Fischer Consulting: Thomas International is one such certifying body that certifies individuals by administering psychometric profiling instruments. Typically it goes into building the framework of a person. It doesn't say that this person has only sales skills.

As individuals, we may have multiple skills and the quantum of each skill in each individual is different. In most organizations you will see an accounts person doing a sales job and vice versa. When it comes to the performance of the organization, it wont be the optimal. An instrument like this evaluates the individual to the available templates like a sales job or an accounts job. This instrument I measures the skills on specific parameters.

Murali: As the old adage goes, "Hire a person for attitude and train him for skills." I would suggest we spend more time on the attitude of that person. Through my experience of working for a large company for ten years I know the amount of time one spends on recruiting a person. As they say, "Take your time to recruit and then if you have to make a decision to fire, don't delay."

Measuring attitude is difficult. You have just about half an hour with that person. And in that half an hour, you should recognize the capability and assess the attitude of a person. I don't know how an instrument can assess soft skills. I would say that comes out of experience and assessing soft skills is what differentiates a good HR manager in recruiting.

How do you assess a person if he is able to present his work well or he is making it up?

Madan: I am a great sales guy but if you put me in front of the computer and tell me to write code, I cant do it. This is where lot of psychometric tools are used to understand one's orientation. Tests like the 16 PF, Thomas Profiling, HSL tests, break a set of competencies into 16 factors and look at it minutely.

Now the trend is to go back to the top five factors like emotional stability, sociability, conscientiousness, etc. which determine work orientation towards the job. Though you have a whole set of tools, in India not a single tool as been standardized. For example, in the US you can be sued for discrimination if you use a psychometric tool without valid data to prove its efficacy. The organization orientation is also important. You might -choose the right person but if you put him in an organization where he doesn't thrive, he might not perform well.

Murali: That's why I say that HR function is critical. Good companies are recognized by the amount of time they spend in recruiting people.

Anil: Say a technically sound candidate is rejected by X company for lack of delivery or soft skills. The same guy gets selected in Y company and he is now a good performer. Now the issue is whether Y company is wrong in selecting the person or X company wrong in not choosing him. So if a company spends time in recruiting a guy, they go through many rounds using different angles. I have seen that at the end of the fifth interview, managers sit and discuss why they should recruit a guy or why they shouldn't. They have to validate their argument by saying what they found in him or what they did not.

Madan: What you have suggested as a model is fantastic. But you need to look at the fact that IT and BPO companies are ramping up fast, especially BPO companies recruit thousands of people a month. So if you need at least 10 per cent conversion rate, then you are processing 10,000 people a month.

Madan: When we talk about interview, the crucial issue is interviewer bias. If I ask each one of you here to define good communication skills, we would all come out with different views. For instance, in a call center interview, a person is rejected because of bad body language. But come to think of it his job is to talk on the phone. Who cares what type of body language he has. What matters is good grammar and fluency. This is where each of our personalities plays an important role. So we are now conducting workshops on interviewing techniques, to bring an understanding about common job parameters. Otherwise you might be rejecting candidates randomly.

Do you have any ideas on how to increase the hit ratio during recruitment?

Madan: If you look at IT recruitment in campus interviews, the conversion rate is 7 per cent. That is, for every 100 who apply, only 7 are recruited. In the BPO sector, it is only 4 per cent conversion rate. Now if you extrapolate that on the number of the jobs that have to be filled up in four years, there will be a shortfall of another 500,000 people. By any projection if this is the conversion rate, then by 2008 India needs to produce three times more graduates than what it is producing now, which is impossible. So the question is how do we increase this 7 per cent conversion to 1 5 per cent?

There have been some. government initiatives in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala. The Karnataka government is stepping in with the launch of B5AT, the BPO Skills Assessment and Training. The candidates can come in and take a test. Some training agencies have been identified to train these guys. They have also brought in employment partners like Dell, AOL, ICICI Onesource who pick them up once they are trained. So it is in a way a private-public partnership program where everybody is working towards a common goal. So with the involvement of educational institutes, the whole system of producing employable graduates is being fine-tuned.

Now the other crucial issue is 'Cooperative Competition.' For instance, one particular campus in Bangalore is visited by every IT company in town and they do variants of the same test. But at the end of the day, nothing much happens since the good ones are always taken and filtered ones remain.

It is a classic theory propounded by some Harvard professors on how to collaborate and compete. I think this should start happening here. The industry has to act positively to participate in the education process. Once we made an observation to a university Vice Chancellor and he said don't commercialize education, it is not for getting jobs, but for a higher purpose. I told him he can teach philosophies but what will the person do to survive?

At a call center, it is predominantly communication skills. Companies are acting like Quality Controllers who either accept or reject. Candidates are not even told what are they bad at and how to improve. We have to move towards quality assurance, where the industry gets involved in determining quality in education.

Anil: In every company, they should give the right feedback to the candidate, irrespective of the level, technology or the area. That gives a better professionalism to the organization. But HR has been more into coordination than into probing the technical aspects of why the candidate was rejected.

Does online recruiting help?

Murali: Online Recruiting has changed the paradigm in terms of recruiting speed, the reach and aggregation. But it does not help in identifying voice recognition skills. How do you assess a fresh graduate through online recruitment? In a physical medium, it is near impossible for the recruiting agency to correspond with every candidate.

For instance, Anil runs his Fischer Consulting where he sends and receives hundreds of resumes from other companies. It is impossible for him to say what actually is the status of an application. So if you implement some of these technology initiatives, you can at least be in touch with them. Candidates have adapted to Web technology much more than the corporates.

Madan: A call center job, either in an MNC firm or a top Indian firm, would have similar pay package, same work atmosphere, and extra benefits. So how do they distinguish themselves? That's why they want to treat the candidate differently so that there is brand building. The candidate's experience is of paramount importance. But how can you customize experience for each individual when you deal with thousands of aspirants? So surely the online feedback has a major role.

Murali: It is important for the candidate to know where he stands and online recruiting helps you do that. You need to tell the candidate why he is rejected. Then he can go back and try to enhance his skills.

Madan: Without enhancing skill levels you cannot have a higher conversion. At this moment, if you are lucky enough you can get 5-6 per cent conversion. But on the average you will land up with 3112-4 per cent conversion. So the primary method to increase the hit ratio at interview is by enhancing the skill base.

The other problem for companies is that if they want to recruit 200 people, they will have to interview about 5000 people, which is virtually impossible. That's why companies are choosing more objective forms of assessments, which is one way of categorizing skill sets. They then pick from the most optimal lot those candidates who meet their requirements and conduct the interview.

Anil: Primarily we should know what we are looking for. We need to broadly outline who the right person is and define the technical specifications of the job.

BS Murthy, Human Capital: We work with some cutting edge technology firms in package implementation. Except two or three, most of them do not have a basic H R system in place. There is no organized system like the Applicant Tracking System, which is a basic system like CRM used for large set of customers. But till date I haven't seen one company implement that in India. Some products have their own customization and are available at as low as $ 200. If ATS is provided to the vendors it will make a hell of a difference. True, we are at the cutting edge of technology, but in recruitment, we are miles behind.

Madan: On these lines, we spotted a business opportunity of outsourcing the whole recruitment process from the companies. We call it Recruitment Process Outsourcing. Eight tech companies have outsourced their recruitment work to us. We are still struggling to make it online because they don't have the tools and we are awaiting their global head office approval. Anyway, we have committed to them that every resume will be replied to in 24 hours. So we are trying to work on measurable Service Level Agreements like that.

How do you define job description?

Murali: Defining what a company wants must be done first. Getting a proper job description is not a rocket science. I have seen many small companies who are very focused and have proper job description, preferred institutes, kind of experience, etc.

Anil: We were called ESP, that is, Executive Search Program till 1999 since we had a recruitment program. It meant that an assignment has to start from scratch by understanding the requirement and then select the right person. But today it cannot be called as ESP at all, since most of the HR managers themselves don't know what they want. They are not able to interpret their ideas and give it to the agencies. They just know that they want the guy tomorrow.

Murthy: There is no parameter to define the quality of a recruiting agency. Recruitment companies like us hardly spend any time on research. There is literally no data available on sector trends, verticals, compensation, etc. We are maturing only now and probably by the end of the day some well researched recruitment firms will emerge soon.

Madan: ESP holds good today but the definition has to be changed to Extra Sensitive Perception!

Do recruitment ads work?

Anil: The size of recruitment ads definitely matters, but that doesn't ensure the quality of applicants. Maybe the bigger the ad, the more junk it attracts.

Murthy: The very size of the market is astounding. Nowhere in the world would you get lakhs of people applying in for every ad. So this is ample opportunity to work on the technology. Bangalore is identified as the largest IT city in the world with 160,000 people working here.

Madan: No other sector has seen such a fast-paced growth than the BPO industry. It has achieved in about three years what the IT industry took ten years or what the Indian Railways took 100 years plus to do. Murthy: In fact, the largest recruitment happened in the last 18 months in IT services. Such recruitment has never been seen before.

Are many NRI professionals returning to India?

Murali: Yeah, that is happening, but how many is many? NRls always wanted to come back, but there were not many opportunities. The conditions are good now. But the percentage of people coming back is still small.

Madan: One of our friends went on a road show in 20 cities in the US, selling India as a destination. He received a good amount of applications. And not only Indians, but also many Asians said they would like to work in India.

Murthy: But I think none of us in India know about the visa problem for a work permit here. It is very tough for Americans to get even an offer letter. I have heard about how people from an American company were not able to get their work visa on time.

Madan: I think the NRls are returning because of the opportunities. Last December, i2 Technologies had a program called M21 - Move To India - for their employees and many of them returned.

Murthy: Similarly Intel had its 'Returned To India' program where many of their middle management people moved in. Most of the chip design companies typically face a drastic need for middle managers. Probably 70-80 per cent of Indians have moved to India from US.

How do you go about enhancing skill levels?

Madan: There are organizations constrained by what they can teach, like if I am working on VB/ASP maintenance project, I cant train on . NET. So how do you innovate horizontally or vertically to keep them interested? Just for the sake of moving people up, I cant keep changing the technology. In the top five IT companies, most of the revenue comes from maintenance jobs. There is no real skill upgradation. So how do I move from a maintenance guy to a testing guy to a developer? How to keep the hierarchy flowing while managing the attrition? That is a challenge.

Murali: Every organization as a part of the retention process has to drive learning. Some organi-zations have committed a certain number of days per employee per year for training. It may be just five days, but taking five days off for a formal training is an enormous task when you run an organization of 20,000 people.

But it is not at all easy for a small company like ours with just 42 people to even dedicate three days. That's the reason that large organizations devote very senior level functional expertise for training and focus on driving employability and learning lifelong. Skill enhancement is a great retention tool that keeps people from thinking about anything else.

Most Indian organizations give you lot of depth. But if you take MNC firms they give you depth as well as the breadth and that is why people want to stay. I think the successes of these companies is in the ability to give variety and also keep you constantly challenged.

As long as your salary is within 20-30 per cent of industry standards, people wont move for money. One never considers moving as long as he is learning something. When you stop learning, you start searching for a new job. So, always let your employee learn. There are good chances he will stay with you.

For the complete version of the panel discussion, please contact us at paneI41@businessgyan.net