Make your hiring logical.

Sometimes, job postings surprise me. A small organization having its office in downtown city asks applications from candidates who are supermen from nice institute, having mind-blowing experience of handling everything. Of course, their salary package is not that mind-blowing. Sometimes their expectations are just unrealistic. I have seen the job post which asks 8 years of experience in certain technology and that technology is only 5 years old. Every company wants their candidate from reputed institute, working in reputed company either in MNC or Indian MNC. When I see these job postings and if I would have been the candidate, I am sure that there are little chances of my résumé shortlisted. There are few candidates who also don’t bother what’s written in the job advertisement; they apply for every position cluttering the inbox of recruiter. Recruiter gets confused whom to shortlist because s/he doesn’t get anybody who is qualified. 

As commonly cited statistic is that women only apply for jobs when they feel 100% qualified, while men are willing to apply when meeting just 60% of the qualifications—evidence of a confidence gap between the genders. But both men and women fall into the trap of taking job requirements too seriously. 

I frequently listen to talent acquisition specialists aka recruiters speaking about selling the job to the candidate. This is because their mailbox in cluttered with irrelevant resumes because of strange job posts and they get very few relevant candidates. It doesn’t mean that there is a dearth of relevant candidates.   

Most of the time such job posts are created by most junior recruiter in a team. Hiring manager will write everything, he dreams of having. They want readymade candidate who will start delivering from first day in the organization. Don’t know when those hiring managers started delivering when they joined the organization. 

Then there is a category of job postings (common in India) which only seek applications from certain institutes (like tier 1), specific gender (to improve the diversity targets given by their bosses) and certain companies like European or American companies. People in American companies think that working in American companies is very tough and employees working in Indian or other MNCs will not survive in “their” companies. And later think the same way. 

In short, they want the best, fast & cheap. This is the rule of three in the business world: whether you’re talking about a product, a service, or a person, you simply cannot have it all. But then what we do in such cases. As a professional we need to calibrate our expectations and you can do it by working on following tips.

Challenge the assumptions: Healthy and challenging discussion is always good. HR professional, talent acquisition specialist and hiring manager should come together. In-take meetings are crucial. TA specialist should ask lot of questions and challenge if manager has some different expectations. For example, most of the time, managers expect candidates from competition. By only hiring from competition, we are creating artificial dearth of candidates, secondly, we are discouraging the diversity and third creating the monopoly for the talent. Same is for candidates from specific college, specific region and genders. 

Recognize & overcome biases:  We have biases as explained above about companies, colleges, gender, community, cast and regions. We need to recognize that, yes, we are bias and then work on to overcome those biases. HR plays an important role here to help the manager by challenging his biases and supporting him to take the right decision. 

Hire for potential: Candidates should not be shortlisted based on their tenure, short or long, in the company. Selection should be based on what experience they gained, how they developed themselves, and what they contributed to the business. You should find out the reason of short or long duration. They may contribute in a short span in one company or multiple contribution in another company. See their growth and pattern of development instead of just experience.  

I know this is not rocket science, but you take a balanced view, you may get a result. 

Overqualified, unfit, semi-skilled…

Do we have a real talent crunch in India as projected by different professionals and consultants? Or do we have the crunch of RIGHT talent? Or is it artificial scarcity of talent? Anybody coming out from the school needs training, how our skill development programmes are? There are lot of questions and we need to address those with right mindset.

There are lot of hiring mistakes which we do tenaciously. I have seen, hiring manager hiring CA for account keeping jobs, diploma for  doing workmen job and engineers just for supervisor jobs. 

Do really we need overqualified candidates for filling moderate jobs? If yes how you address their aspirations? And if you have highly aspirants people do you have opportunities for all?

I think we have upgraded the qualification for the positions. Earlier there would be only one CA in team, today there are almost all CAs in account function doing the job of accountants. There are companies who have hired diplomas for doing workmen jobs, MBAs just for salesman job. Candidate are highly qualified but not employable, however their expectations have been increased a lot. This is resulting high employee attrition, dissatisfaction.

This is a real time to correct this and have a moderate expectations from candidates. If you hiring MBA, just expect that he is just qualified, but ask the question, is he employable for the job?  Simple graduate may be smart than the MBA graduate. Anyways you have to spend lot of time to develop both.

I have challenged my functional managers on hiring overqualified candidates. Earlier we used to hire Engineering or MBA graduates for SCM who were doing customer support and commercial jobs. The attrition was high, employees were not happy. They were just speaking with customers, planning deliveries, scheduling production and arranging documentation. Can’t graduate employee perform this job? Yes. We changed the hiring strategy and today this group is most engaged and doing good job.

We should not blame the market, colleges. We have to find out the mid-way and educate, sometime challenge hiring managers with right perspective. 

Students & their employability

Employability is the major issue in today’s world. There are (management & engineering) colleges which are below average quality. Students coming from those colleges have to struggle to get the jobs. If the student is struggler and has the fighting spirit, he may get the job. He then can build his career on this. However in those colleges, there are few students who really want to learn. Those few students are talented, good and really are in search of good opportunities. (Talented means, a recurring pattern of thought, feeling or behavior that can be productively applied.  When they get the opportunity, they value the job.) Unfortunately Industries tend to pick candidates from reputed institutes which is not wrong, but there is no point hiring the candidate from reputed institute with big cost for shop floor routine job and keeping the guy for only doing the routine job. I personally feel that these students should be really challenged and should be rotated through different functions and finally put them result oriented high level tasks. You really come to know the capabilities of the candidate.

Students from Tier 1 schools, in particular, are definitely more prepared, but when you talk about value for the money, and you talk about value per unit of money spent on a particular candidate or the efficiency level per unit of the money spent on a candidate, there is no major difference if you compare it other schools. When a new MBA comes in from one of the top institutes, “he has bought some level of premium tag”, but that does not mean this candidate will have the most or best practical knowledge.

Jobs like supervisor,  regular maintenance, logistics, , QA, regular production etc. where, there are routine jobs as per the standard operating procedures do not demand high level intelligence. however, they do require greater frustration tolerance, personal discipline, organization, management, and interpersonal skills than were required two decades and more ago. These are precisely the skills that many of the young people, who are in business schools today, as opposed to two decades ago, lack. 

India’s school and university-based education system doesn’t equip you with skills that employers look for.  While Indian graduates know something about the theoretical aspects, they lack domain skills, communication and professional (employability) skills. (see the exhibit)  Curriculum and pedagogy at teaching institutions are increasingly being set by people who do not understand what companies want. Most of the times, teachers’ quality is the major issues. Those teachers are the people, who fail to get good industrial and professional jobs. As the last option the teaching profession is accepted. There is not such passion of teaching.

Even the attitude of students is different. They spend big money for getting the degree certificate, sometimes they even don’t know why they are doing the particular degree. Their expectations is if they are spending such amount they would get the highly paid job with air-conditioned office. Third class management institutes made this totally business case to earn the money without any value addition.

Institutes should focus on following areas while preparing their students for industries. Otherwise all those institutes will perish one day.  

Skills :  Skill is the how part of the task and job. It is also capabilities that can be transferred from one person to another. This can be actually done by aligning with industries. Institutes need to take efforts to reach out to industries, understand the expectations and prepare the curriculum accordingly.

Knowledge: It is ‘what you are aware of .. Factual ( things you know) Can & should be taught. Experiential (understandings you have picked up along the way). Less Tangible and therefor much harder to teach

Talent: Recurring patterns of thought feeling behavior, that carve individual minds. If someone does not have the talent as part of his filter , then very difficult for others to inject it.

Now just look how many candidates have above capabilities. I think there is a long way to reach the goal.   

Exhibits:

Hire, don’t fire

“I have told almost 300 employees to go home.” one senior guy was proudly telling us in our regular meeting. This person was known in the company for his wise conversation skills. While speaking with the employees he uses to catch employees in words. He was also known for politicizing issues.

It is very difficult to hire a good employee. It is very easy to sack somebody. You should be proud for hiring good people. If you are sacking somebody and so frequently, it means your hiring is very bad.

“Sir, I hired almost 1000 employees in my career and they all are doing well. They still call me and ask my advice on the issues they face in life.” I replied, “I have fired very few people in my career. I am not proud to say this.” I replied, “However the companies are also doing well where they are working.”

Identifying the talent in the market is very critical. I also sacked employees in my career. This is one of unpleasant jobs; we HR professionals have to do. But the option should be exercised as a last option in respective cases. In one big company, where I was heading the Plant HR & IR function, we had given the charge sheet to almost 20 employees for their habitual absenteeism; few were for abetting to strike. Few cases were suspension pending enquiry. The cases and misconducts were very grave. We completed the enquiry. All found guilty and we were justified to terminate these employees. However on the request of union and considering their family situation, we agreed to get the personal bond for good conduct. In industrial relations, there is no right or wrong decision. You have to analyze the situation before any decision. I personally counseled them in presence of union office bearers and plant head. “You should be present for all working days in a year in the company. Your one day, absence may warrant your termination. We had enquiry reports with us, we had already issued the show causes to your on the finding of enquiry report and you have given the good conduct bond. Now ball is in your court.” I explained. Sometimes you should be blunt to tell the fact during counseling.

After two months union called one day flash strike. It means above employees did not report to work. They are technically absent on duties. As pressure tact, we decided to terminate some employees who had committed grave misconducts. I made the letters and put for the sign of plant head as he was the authorized to sign such papers. “These are my first terminations in my life and I am not proud to do this.” He said to me before signing the papers.

Above cases were the isolated cases of Industrial relations. Sometimes you have few options in such scenario. As a part of my profession, I had to do this unpleasant work.

Termination of white collar employees is totally different task. In fact very easy as compare to blue collar terminations. In isolated cases it is again very easy, but I always see the reason why we need to terminate somebody. These are improvement areas. Why I need to sack the person? Performance issues? Discipline? Behaviors ? what are reasons?

Bad hiring, no proper feedback or HR system can be the root cause of all these.

During recession, we all must have dealt with this. The terminologies like Manpower Planning, HR planning has no meaning sometimes. Companies hired the employees without any future projections. If you need 5 people, management was ready to give you 7 without much justifications. But then recession brought them on the ground. There are companies who exercised the downsizing as a last option. But in business, “you have no any other option” is the last statement.

One day top boss of the company call me and bluntly told me, “I think Mr. X is creating more problems now and you need to seriously tell him to go home. If he is not ready to put the papers, just terminate him.” He was referring about the same senior person who once told me that he had asked almost 300 guys and girls to go home. One circle completed. I believe intention matters. His intention was different, my intention is different.