Challenges In Recruitments

There were two very divergent reasons for me to leave a cushy corporate job as a Vice President - Human Resources as early as just 9 years into my professional career and jump into the tidal wave of the rapidly growing recruitment industry.

One, I was fascinated by the huge amount of revenue I managed to generate for this sector by simply changing my job; it seemed a trifle too easy. Secondly, as a Head of the hiring function for a few years, I had noticed the sheer lack of professionalism in the dealings with the typical recruitment agencies and I really wanted to change the way a typical "placement agency" functioned.

In fact it's amazing to know that the recruitment and staffing industry has such a huge spread and width that from a simple housewife to a global fortune 500 corporation happen to be in the same business. It's a business that needs not much by virtue of qualifications, virtually zero investment and a person can simply convert their household PC and home phone into a business proposition by efficient networking and usage of the net. This probably has become a double edged sword and is perhaps a reason why recruitment agencies are taken quite lightly by many companies, unlike many other professionals like Chartered Accountants, Lawyers, Management Consultants etc.

In fact, it's a sad state of affairs the way companies approach recruitment in India today. Most companies have a knee jerk reaction to fulfilling any vacancy. Here are some scenarios that typically happen:-

A business leader acquiring a new business suddenly faces a contractual commitment to be made to a client stating the days in which he would start delivering. He does a quick calculation and agrees to an unrealistic time frame and then calls up his HR head to meet the numbers within a deadline that has already been committed. The HR folks go crazy and call up all agencies in their list and ask for resumes by the very next day. Feeble attempts by the agency to get job specifications are met with - "I am sure being in this profession you would understand our needs". It then becomes a rat race among agencies to log on to job sites, pick the resumes and send it to the client. It becomes a scenario of "fastest fingers first" and the casualty in all of this is both the interest of the company and the interest of potential candidates. Once the shortlist comes in the agencies use their best selling skills to push a candidate into a job that may or may not fit into his / her career aspirations / goals. The end result - if the person does get hired - he may not last long in the job, creating a vacancy soon enough which will again create a business requirement for the recruitment agency.