The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : IT firms face dearth of experienced professionals

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Jul 05, 2007
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

IT firms face dearth of experienced professionals

M. Dinesh Varma

Frustration over low conversion rates of interviews for lateral recruitments

CHENNAI: Most IT companies that think lateral these days are nonplussed over the low conversion rates of interviews to recruit professionals with work experience.

While hiring fresh graduates on campuses is still going strong, lateral recruitments are gaining ground and companies have upped their requirements considerably for lateral hires for the coming quarter.

However, top tier companies looking to build their portfolio of high-end projects get to tap a miniature talent pool, ironically so, in a country that generates around four lakh engineering graduates annually, according to a thought paper to be circulated at the NASSCOM annual HR summit beginning in Chennai on Thursday.

Skills assessment agency MeritTrac, which evaluated 4,500 professionals in the lateral pool with experience in the 18 to 48 months range, found that the test throughput rates are lower than 30 per cent (cumulative on technology and analytical ability). And for post technology and HR interviews, the overall conversion was as low as 15 to 20 per cent.

“While a 20 per cent throughput, in itself, may not be overly worrying, it certainly gnaws on the minds of recruiters sizing up an upscale business opportunity,” said Madan Padaki, co-founder-director of MeritTrac.

The agency routinely tests over 80,000 candidates every month across industry verticals for companies such as Microsoft, Accenture, IBM, Cognizant, Google, Satyam, Wipro and Wockhardt.

The evaluation of candidates for compiling the thought paper was held across New Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune.

Significantly, hire trends have blown holes in the corporate-world canon that employers can save substantially by hiring freshers as opposed to laterals due to salary gaps — estimated to be as high as 30 per cent — and that attrition levels are lower in freshers.

Most majors foraying into end-to-end solutions are buying into the wisdom that increased salary spends from hiring laterals is offset by increases in project productivity and minimising risk of slippage in delivery within a competitive offshore space.

Companies are also being forced to think up strategies to counter attrition levels among freshers that are as high as that of laterals.

Mr. Padaki posits that the template for the current dearth of talent was cast in the mass recruitment of freshers at campus placement campaigns of three to four years ago. The acute talent crunch had driven companies to recruit under par candidates at the fresher level to meet high targets. This segment had graduated to the lateral level without a commensurate scaling up of skills, he said.

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