Desperate to meet growing demand for software engineers in India's high-tech hub, headhunters are adapting the concept of "speed dating" to job recruitment.
Gautam Sinha, chief executive officer of TVA Infotech, one of the more than 300 technology recruiting firms based in Bangalore, hired an indoor basketball stadium recently to help his software clients meet employees.
"It is like speed-dating. Earlier we had six months to hire a person. Now we have six weeks," said Sinha as scores of job hunters clutching their CVs queued at booths throughout the floor of the 20,000-seat stadium.
PHOTO: AFP
He said 400 candidates came to meet TVA clients and 80 found their match -- a job from companies such as computer networking giant Cisco, the world's largest business software firm SAP and supply-chain software manufacturer Manhattan Associates.
"Cisco plans to hire 300 professionals with four to six years of experience at its research and development center in Bangalore," Vinod Mankala, human resources manager at Cisco said in his cubicle inside the stadium where he was conducting interviews.
The event is like many job fairs around Asia where prospective employees lodge applications and have initial interviews. But here, the urgency to fill vacancies mean many applicants are offered jobs on the spot.
Despite the boom in recruitment, headhunters are worried that their matchmaking services will fall short as the number of qualified candidates drops.
The National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), an industry lobby group, projected in a report last year that the nation's outsourcing industry would face a shortage of 262,000 professionals by 2012 and that already many university graduates lack the necessary skills to fill available jobs.
India's five-year-old outsourcing industry which employs 700,000 people is set to grow by 40 percent for the next five years and hit revenues of US$5.1 billion this year, according to the NASSCOM.
The competition for the best and the brightest tech workers has also led to secrecy, recruiters say.
"Today the focus is all on speed, speed and speed," said B.R. Sheaker, managing director of Mind Group, a headhunting firm which recruits people for more than 100 firms such as Wipro, Google, EMC Corporation, Yahoo and Amazon.
As soon as a resume the reaches the mail box of the Mind Group it is sorted and sent to the relevant companies "within seconds across multiple locations," he said.
The quick action is needed as job seekers now broadcast qualifications to dozens of recruitment firms. To avoid losing business, companies such as Mind Group fly in prospective candidates from around the country and sequester them in hotels ahead of company interviews.
"If we did not do that then they move on to the next offer. An opportunity is also lost," Sheaker said. "Most of the time our clients come up with demands at a very short notice. They want to hire 100 people at times within two weeks which puts pressure on us."
To stand out in the crowd, firms like Sinha's TVA's launched a "special portal" to attract resumes for people willing to join start-ups and arranged interviews in five-star hotels.
"The aim is to cater to a niche category. One must know today the candidate is becoming an extremely perishable commodity. He or she is like a fruit. So you've got to gear yourself toward that sort of environment," he said.
Lured by skilled engineers who are willing to work for one-seventh of their counterparts in the US, technology and manufacturing firms are outsourcing their activities to India, the "back office" of the world.
US-based Dell said recently that it plans to double the number of employees in India to almost 20,000 in the next three years and Anglo-Dutch technology services firm, LogicaCMG, said it will hire 1,000 people.
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