Mr. Kiran Karnik of NASSCOM addresses a 100 recruiters

Last week, the Delhi Chapter of ERA ( Executive Recruiters Association) organised an very interesting event -here is a first hand report by Dony Kuriakose, the convener of the chapter, and founder Director of Edge Executive Search.

Hosted at the India Habitat centre, the Symposium consisted of two parts – a panel discussion on the topic : “It’s a Whole New World of Hiring – Recruiting for the new age economy”, followed by an address by Kiran Karnik of NASSCOM.

The panelists for the discussion were –

DP Singh, Head HR of IBM Daksh
AVK Mohan, Head HR of Bharti Airtel, Enterprise Solutions
Suvamoy Roy Chaudhury, Head HR of Reckitt Benckiser
Atul Sharma, Vice President and Head of HR for Consumer Banking, Citibank

Some of the important takeaways were :

Corporates are looking for recruiters to partner them much more closely in the coming period and would prefer to work with just a couple of key partners.

They expect a knowledge transfer to the recruitment partner which comes back as a value-add in the form of a more perceptive and efficient process.

Industry perceives a majority of recruiters to be paper pushers and would want them to move to higher value addition.

The talent pool has evolved and we now have younger, more thinking yet aggressive candidates with higher awareness and global transferability.

Recruiters need to attract this new talent pool and also expand the search horizon to include diverse profiles which are currently outside the mainstream.

Companies, while working with consultants, are creating alternate avenues of direct sourcing to reduce dependence on a single mode.

Recruiters who do not move up to the partnering mode will have to compete with efficiency in the volume mode – lower pricing, higher numbers.

The Q&A after the session saw different levels of querying depending on the questioner’s specific niche and hence helped resolve queries across a broad spectrum.

Next we introduced Kiran to the audience and he gave us an excellent 45 minute talk focusing on two broad areas –

He started with addressing the people issues that had been raised during the panel discussion and firstly assured us that the threat perception was misplaced, since demand in the industry is expected to grow rapidly and as per current estimates, India should be hiring 2.5 million people in IT/ITES alone by 2010. He then focused on the recruiter adding value to the process and creating a higher ethical platform for candidates and corporates, to weed out inefficiencies.

The second part of his talk was focused on the benefits of association and how ERA can do for Recruiting, what NASSCOM has done for IT. The brief pointers given by him were :

Associations should focus on industry issues that are relevan for all members – hence grow the whole pie, so that there is more to share.

Individual members will differ on priorities, hence focus on tackling the issues that are common to all and speak with one voice.

Members must contribute more than money – giving time and effort for the common good without thought of individual gain, is essential.

Create differentiation. The association must brand itself such that members are perceived on a higher plane compared to non-members.

Create internal transparency and good governance to avoid politicking and ensure people offer themselves and not vie for positions

Aviod a tendency to stick to positions of authority or eminence beyond tenures, so that fresh thinking pervades the association.

Though captured in brief here, there was the depth of experience and knowledge in what he said. The complete talk has been recorded on video and would be made available for the ERA members to share.