An interview with Mr. Pandia Rajan, Managing Director, MA FOI, Management Consultants Ltd.

How is Ma Foi structured as a company?

I started this company around eight years back with about sixty thousand rupees of initial equity. We have grown little by little and today we are valued at ten million dollars by the venture capitalists. We have 12 offices spread across the country in 9 locations.

This is a board-managed company, and we are the only HR service providers who are a public limited company today. The board consists of seven members, of whom two are operating directors, and the others are non- executive directors. Below the board we have the Management Council that consists of twelve members, who are the service heads overseeing all the services that we provide, regional heads and the functional heads. We have 178 core staff who are organised in the matrix model and they report to the Service and their regional head. We follow a very flat structure with not more than these three levels of management.We have the concept of an institutional meet every year, where all the key members of the organisation assemble in the first week of April to examine the mission of the company and analyse whether we are heading in the right direction. Most of the systemic, strategic and structural course correction happens at this meet rather than in a closed board or management council meeting.

Outsourcing manpower has become a big business, can you tell us your position in this expanding area of business?

Ma Foi is an integrated HR service provider, we are a team of more than 800 people, a core staff with the rest on deputation, whom we take on our rolls and depute to our 28 client's firms. We outsource specific functions for organisations. For instance the entire secondary sales force of a Fortune 500 Agro-chemical company is on our rolls. So we recruit agricultural graduates, train them, and groom them. Right now there is a huge outsourcing phase that is sweeping through the country and we intend to grow to almost 2,000 people next year and become the pioneer in the industry.

How do you meet your in-house manpower requirements?

For Ma Foi, we have been recruiting from campuses and we build a cadre where the individual grows from an Assistant Consultant to a Senior Consultant, and goes on to become a Service head or a Regional head. We conduct very elaborate career design programmes for our employees who have proven themselves in the organisation at the entry level. We have mentorship schemes, where someone other than the boss mentors the person. We also conduct career workshops where the employees' career design is planned out in detail. This greatly helps us to discover the competencies that we need to invest in the particular employee to enhance his performance levels.

Why has there been a gradual shift of focus from the job competency of the candidate to his psychography?Initially psychometric testing was done as just an icing on the cake but stress was laid on getting a candidate who could do the job well. Then the employer realised that within that half an hour of interviewing they are not able to find out sufficient information regarding the candidate. So a psychologist or a psychometric test can raise meaningful questions and thereby help the employer.

The results of psychometric tests are not taken as absolutes and these tests only work as an adjunct the selection process. The also indicate what developmental inputs need to go in to that particular candidate.

There is a lot of attrition within the work force, communication problems, fitment issues, adjusting to the corporate culture etc are at an all time high. The resume might tell us about his work experience but not about his motivation, aspiration, his capability to communicate and leadership abilities. These tests help to map the mind of the individual and find out from an organisation's perspective whether the individual will fit into their working environment or not.

Why does an interviewer reject a candidate even if he possesses the required education and experience?A candidate can be rejected for various reasons, right from his speech patterns to certain mannerisms. This is not a condemnation of the individual but from the organisational point of view they might serve as an obstruction in the long run.

When we started the holistic search process, we asked three questions to our clients, what are the critical attributes, the strengths necessary and the shortcomings that are just not acceptable for this position, and the weaknesses that the employer can live with. Many of them found it tough to answer the final query but to us it is important while searching for the right candidate for that vacancy.

So as long as employers are able to clearly define the kind of candidates they want there are bound to be rejections, which might seem hard to understand. How applicable are the employee satisfaction surveys that are conducted regularly within organisations?

Traditionally organisations conduct many satisfaction measurement surveys. We discovered that many of the employees were quite disillusioned with this pure satisfaction survey. One of the simple truths, which these surveys overlook, is that in a company the most satisfied employee might not be the most productive or committed employee. On the contrary, a very dissatisfied employee can be the most committed employee, to the extent that he is vocal about it. So we came up with an Employee Commitment Measurement.

MALINI SURYANARAYANAN