Cashless Carnival

The snippet which you just read is apparently an excerpt from an email which a newbie in a software organization sent to his supervisor to inquire as to why he had been placed on a Performance Improvement Program (PIP) - a program where an employee is given a month’s notice to improve his / her performance to retain employment with the organization.

I got it as an email forward from a friend.

Initially, I chuckled reading the email but later realised that it was no laughing matter and the e-mail was actually highlighting a much bigger problem we have in the industry today. The quality of the entrants is deteriorating and could worsen further if there is nothing done to resolve the problem. There could be several reasons for this, and you could opt to blame anyone. But, having seen this problem closely from a recruiter’s perspective, I decided to scribble down a few points, which I feel, have catalyzed the problem. Some of them are things which companies can address as part of their recruitment exercises. A few others would need remodelling their hiring exercise and probably increasing the lead time. 

• The number game: Software companies (especially the ones in the services space) are in heavy need of people. The services model is such that the revenue of an organization is proprtional to the number of employees it has. (Example: A company which has revenues of a billion dollars has approximately 25,000 people, a company which has revenues of 2 billion dollars has about 50,000 people.) So, when you are looking at increasing revenues, you are also looking at increasing the employee count. When you are looking at adding 1000 or more people in a quarter, it is not a small thing. And, when you are looking at such ramp-ups, dilution of quality is bound to happen.
• Fake Certificates / Experience: This has become a menace in the industry. It takes a good 3-12 months time (could be even more) for a company to do the background checks to verify the credentials of the candidates, and even after that when the companies chuck out such candidates, it does not mark the end of the road for the candidates. They go elsewhere and seek employment.
• Interviews via telephone: I have personally had experiences where the candidates after joining the project did not actually demonstrate the kind of technical expertise which they did over the phone. It could have very well happened that the person who gave the interview on the phone was someone else and not the actual candidate.

• Recruitment agencies: There are several recruitment agencies which help the candidates find a job by altering their resumes to match the requirements.
• No focus on soft skills: Companies focus a lot on the technical skills of a candidate during interviews and do not consider soft skills an essential requirement to perform the job. In a product based company, you could still do with people who do not have excellent communication skills. But definitely not in the services space.
• No formal training at induction: I cannot count many names when I think of companies which actually provide a comprehensive training at induction, right from technical skills to social etiquette’s to cross cultural sensitivity. How many organizations can you think of apart from Infosys, WIPRO and TCS who had the farsightedness to envision this problem one day and decided to invest money in providing comprehensive trainings?

The list is endless. But, in the interest of time and instead of quibbling more about the problems, I will stop here and probably look at suggesting a few things to the HR team which I think can reduce the problems to some extent.