3 things that sets apart a good IT recruiter

We have noticed over the years that setting apart a great IT recruiter from a not so great one is very simple. However, application of the right attitude and values to be a great IT recruiter is something only 1% of IT recruiters commit to. If you want to be in that top 1%, here is the secret sauce.

#Technology savvy

In this era of technology, no professional can excuse themselves from being technology savvy. Moreover, having made the choice of being an IT recruiter, you need to love technology to meet people in that sector. If you abhor technology, you will not like the people you interact with. This will be the end of every beginning. You will know why that would be the case when you read the next value you need to adopt.

Great recruiters use technology to create great solutions.

“If your recruiters don’t know the difference between Java and Javascript, for example, the candidate will have a low opinion of your organization.” Jennifer Sheets, CEO of MasterStaff

#Love people

If you are not a people’s person, being in the recruitment industry does not make any sense. Recruitment as a function involves dealing with people and handling relationships. This is not at all a ‘job act’, but a genuine and natural way of approach imperative to an aspiring recruiter. Recruiters, irrespective of the sector they choose really love talking to people, hearing out to little things that they share and offer them career solutions. They are genuine with what they speak and how they interact with job seekers.

#Know the job thoroughly

Great IT recruiters don’t stop at reading the job descriptions, they go beyond that. They want to achieve the best for the people, they interact with. This requires a recruiter to understand the sector of operation, no.of vacancies to be filled, why are they being filled, what is the company expecting out of the candidate and what is candidate looking for through a change. A recruiter plays the role of a charming magician and a marketer.

It takes immense skill to build relationships, identify right talent for given needs and help job seekers. We are looking for people with such skill sets who can drive recruitments and build more happy careers.  If you are internet savvy and a peoples’ person, who can identify talent in the IT sector for different needs, drop in your resume to <email id>

We are looking for someone who:

> Can handle recruitment requirement independently

> Needs to be internet and social media savvy

> Can build relationships and drive vacancy closures

> Can close 2 to 3 positions every month.

> Can hire resources for product companies

Who is Hiring?

Options Executive Search is a 20 year old leading provider of personalized HR recruitment and consultancy services with a specific focus on finding the right job for professionals with over 5 years of experience in 3 industry sectors – Information Technology, Manufacturing and Infrastructure. Over the last two decades, Options has worked with hundreds of startups and established companies (Indian / large multinational corporations, venture and PE funded companies and others) identify and hire their core team to drive their respective businesses in India. Explore at: www.optionsindia.com  

Exciting opportunity for finance professionals in MNC Auto Major

 

Would you know any Qualified Chartered Accountants & Cost Accountants-with experience in manufacturing companies?

Our client, a leading passenger car manufacturer is looking out for topnotch professionals for their manufacturing plant based at Chennai, Tamilnadu.

 

Opportunities exist for

 

GL & Reporting - Senior Manager & Assistant Manager

Inventory - Manager & Deputy Manager

Material Control (Costing) - Manager & Deputy Manager

Costing - Asst Manager

Custom - Senior Manager & Deputy Manager & Asst Manager

Taxation - Senior Manager & Manager & Deputy Manager

Manufacturing Control (Costing & Budgeting) -Manager

Treasury - Manager & Asst Manager

Please feel free to reach out to me and I shall be glad to provide more inputs for helping you take the right career decision

Have a great weekend!

Is Recruitment trending towards Marketing?

A question that is asked by most recruiters is if recruitment as a skills needs to be treated as a marketing subset. Answers to this question have been provided by a panel on India HRLive. While answering this question the panel also shared their insights on building a career site, lessons for recruiters and marketeers and a path for recruiters to build their career.

10 key take aways for recruiters is a best mix from Google Hangout hosted by #IndiaHRLive.

Building a career site

@theHRbuddy points that people just “window shop” when they get onto a career site. So what are the ingredients required to brew the right talent combo for the organization.

@Mattcharney says that there is no passive candidate for a company. (there is no such person as a passive candidate..everyone today is open to opportunities)

http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140501144640-3930926-the-real-skills-gap-competent-recruiters

@Sharlyn_lauby recommends to have a career site that is easy to engage, easy to use with simple navigation and great user experience and easy to share.

@Achyutmenon Don't expect too much out of a career site. Fish where the fish are and hence go find the candidates where they are. Bring in the human element and don’t be too overwhelmed by the technology aspect.

@GlobeSlother mentions with her experience that the whole idea to bring in social media is to be social hence send out your recruitment manager in that world to go and engage with talent communities. Bring in the need for recruitment for the not so active candidate instead of calling them passive candidates.

Lessons for Recruiters from Marketeers

@Mattcharney

Know your audience and learn to communicate with them in the way that they want.

@Achyutmenon

Listen more! Avoid assuming a lot of things about the candidate. Listen to them before we say we understood them.

@GlobeSlother

Make the Employer brand story exciting enough for the candidate to be a part of it. Core product has to be good but the communication has to be equally engaging.

@Sharlyn_lauby

Get to the basics of marketing of applying the 4Ps to the recruitment process.

Advice to recruitment professionals to build their career

Unfortunately the recruitment industry in India is nascent than other western countries. This has made people choose recruitment as a stop gap instead of pursuing it as a serious profession. To avoid this approach and to take up recruitment as a serious profession what is your advice:

@Mattcharney A recruiter needs to have basic understanding about ‘business’. Most times recruitment is not to be made opportunity centric making it sound more like it is about getting value to the organization than to the candidate, but it should be about genuinely knowing more about the person.

@Sharlyn_lauby Irrespective of the recruiter being a generalist or a specialist, they need to know everything about recruitment. Recruitment process is not just about interviewing it is more about strategy.

As a recruiter you may also want to know what are the ways a job seeker uses social media and where would you find him. Here is an e-book about Social Media Recruitment for Job Seekers that would help you understand a job seeker’s hub for recruitment action.

Minutes from a tweet jammed session on #RecruitmentMarketing

Dated April 2014

We had gathered tips and tidbits about social media recruitment for Job Seekers in one of our recent e-book. Some of the themes we didn’t deal in the book are showcased and discussed in a Google Hangout hosted by #IndiaHRLive that brought into light the evolution of recruitment marketing, use of social media in recruitment, candidate experience during the recruitment process and mobile recruitment.

What still remains esoteric and yet to be discovered in how to define quality of candidates and the ROI out of the social / mobile recruitment process. Each of the panelists shared their views on the following topics:

@Sharlyn_lauby How did the role of recruitment marketing role evolve over the past five years?

The strong connection between recruitment and marketing has always existed but it is only over the past 5 years that the industry has seen a specialization take place.

Recruitment Marketing. What’s the buzz all about?

@Achyutmenon Recruitment marketing is it a jargon?

People are using the term ‘recruitment marketing’ more as a jargon than as a valuable, tactical process to find talent. There is a talent war out there among companies to get the best talent. Now the recruitment globe is moving all over where employers are hunting for jobs and at the same time candidates are trying to find the best deal out of the opportunities expressed in the market.

@Sharlyn_lauby What are people doing about the talent war?

You see websites of companies where they define more and more about their corporate culture and create better definition is describing a job role. Recruitment marketing is setting out as a strategic pattern rather than a simple process introduced in an organization.

@GlobeSlother What is the challenge that recruiters face while marketing?

The challenge is to find the right talent and to interact and engage with talent communities which have passive talent. People who might be a great fit but with whom there is a need to create a sense of excitement for the opportunity.

When does the candidate experience start and end?

@Mattcharney Social media could be a terrible place to look for candidates but would a great place to advertise and let people know about the emerging opportunities. Track the difference between use of an ATS and social media for the purpose of recruitment.

@Sharlyn_lauby Candidate experience never starts or ends. Candidates are like customers. Candidate experience is not just about with reference to full time employee, but also is applicable to part timers, seasonal employees and interns. Because what they think is how the employer brand is affected. Candidate experience is about consumer marketing.

Use of an ATS and the flow of it.

@Achyutmenon ATS enables the recruitment process from a technical role but it the person who is using the technology that matter because recruitment is more about human interaction than use of technology. ATS depends on the ability to match keywords.

Mobile Recruitment, how big is it?

@Mattcharney Mobile recruitment is very different in USA than in India because of the saturation of mobile market here. All the buzz about mobile recruitment may soon fizzle out here in US.

@Achyutmenon Mobile penetration in India is about 73% with 1.2 billion in population. However there is not great use of smartphones where mobile recruitment can be deployed. It is still nascent in India and we are yet to see the growth.

With these insights you may be asking for some key takeaways. We will have another post that would have a condensed version of building a career site, lessons for recruiters from marketeers and advice to recruitment professional to build their career.

As a Recruiter, are you looking for Internship experience?

Before 2012, internship was a choice for a student but now it has turned out to be a eligibility criteria on their fresh resumes. This statement is supported by facts released by a survey conducted by an Indian internship firm, Twenty19. This report reveals a growing trend in hiring interns for temporary and experimental projects where cost is a high quotient determinant. Internships are more like a test drive for students to figure out which roles are most comfortable to them.

Here is a quick note for recruiters applicable to two different phases:

Recruiting Interns for a project

Objective based internship programs: It really matters if you are bringing an intern on board to evaluate them as a full timer or get some mechanical and operational work done to complete a project. Recruiters need an objective to have an intern on board. Without much value being added to the intern’s experience as well as to the organization, it remains as just another recruitment menace. No matter what the intern’s role is, it needs to be driven by a basic objective of employability, which has been extensively dealt in another article on our blog. The objective for an intern needs to be big. Steven Spielberg started his career in the movie industry as an unpaid full time intern at Universal Studios and now we all watch his movies.

Time tested process: Though interns are required for experimental and innovative projects, ensure that you are handing over an intern to a mentor who has already worked with time tested processes. The need or project could be innovative but not the process. Pre-existing supervision and redirection over a process always helps is better resource management.

Manual with a Mentor: The survey revealed the need of assigning a mentor to a group of interns and we reiterate the need. Apart from a cohesive job description, operational manuals for the intern’s study  during the internship is equally important. These job guides and manuals are to be documented, managed and known by the mentor who would interact with the intern.

Evaluating Interns as a full time employer

Do you have this is your agenda?: As mentioned earlier, do you have the objective of absorbing an intern into a full time employee at the end of the project. If yes, then the internship should be designed around HR KPIs for the specific job, you intend to recruit them for.

Trends turn into Process: The report reveals top roles for which interns are being hired. Some of them being content writing, marketing, SEO, research, app development and so on. This just shows that companies want to try out the happening trends with interns and eventually establish these trends into value added processes for the organization’s growth. The so called new projects are hence being created upon identifying an industry trend or an unexplored process. It re-emphasizes that, hiring interns is not just about experimenting new processes but about bringing in new, trained talent onboard.

Initial screening of interns and creating an employable talent pool enables creation of strong team at the base of the organizational team pyramid. In this era, this recruitment model most helps the companies operating in engineering, mobile app and marketing space. The most promising tenor is about letting interns grow with the expansion of your startup. This can be supported by how Xerox CEO Ursula Burns started out as an intern -- years later she became the first black woman to head a Fortune 500 company.

How to enjoy a job in the Asian subcontinent? "Expats and NRIs turning desi".

Congratulations on your new job and home coming to India!

Welcome back. Times have changed and the economic landscape of India has shifted since the first few years in the 90s. Culture and lifestyle would influence your stay with your family in India to a greatest extent.

Over the last two decades Indians settled abroad, initiated Bollywood clubs, celebrated Dussera with Dandiya concerts and engaged in conducting Carnatic music and yoga classes as an aftermath of Brain Drain. Now, we have already started to experience the after effects of reverse brain drain. Gated communities, international schools, mall culture and celebration of mother’s day  are some trends that Indians imported to their country with years of international exposure. Having identified these traces, is it enough for you to pack your bags and move back to India? Is it as simple as it was when you went to a foreign country to establish your career? The answer may be no.

You may face some shocking, interesting and annoying instances, which could be joyous, funny and adventurous with a little bit of acceptance.

You should factor traffic time and not travel time. Leave early to work. You should be doing this because it gives a chance to beat the traffic. Traffic jams could be painful at times but with technology it becomes the most productive time slot. Use the traffic time to answer quick emails and cuddle your iPad or Kindle breezing through fantasies, news updates and self help tips.

Do you find Starbucks? Do you want to schedule a meeting in a coffee shop. Indians call this  CCD which is the acronym of Cafe Coffee Day. A popular and successful chain of coffee shops mushroomed across cities, towns and highways in India.

Did you hear someone say “I have to be at work on a Saturday”? Yes, a reasonable number of private and government offices are open and fully functional on Saturdays too. Don’t be surprised if a client, vendor or associate schedules a meeting on a Saturday.

Domestic help and assistance is a must. Don’t hesitate to hire domestic helpers, cooks and drivers. Indian employment has a vast spread. People make a great living out of these professions and you receive assistance for a smooth lifestyle.

India is colourful. Your HR manager or boss will send a list of holidays spread across the year. People celebrate many festivals all round the year in smaller bits than relaxing over longer vacations. Be prepared for holidays in bits and pieces.

Larger families and their involvement in your job. Though you have been used to small and nuclear families, be prepared to meet a lot of people over weekends. Companies have also recognized this cultural strand and have designed events for employees which involve their families too. Companies encourage involvement of employee families. You will find the same at your child’s school.

There are a lot more to share, but we do not want to give it all away. An element of surprise adds more excitement and thrill all through your move and stay. This exercise of understanding the cultural shift would have preceded with career planning and evolution. Having been a part of such phase, you may enjoy learning What stops people from changing careers and the recruiter’s role?

Opportunity to share one’s learning as a ‘Returning Indian’

We spotted an Opportunity that feels more like your heart’s calling. Especially to those who intended to return to India, bring back their years of lessons and share a slice of global exposure to the next generation. Here is how it reads...

Job Title: Passion combined with years of earned wisdom.

Job Description: We invite brave youngsters who stepped outside India few decades ago and have grown into wise men and women. Are you one of them? If you are, we invite you to bring back insights gained over your stint at different organizations. Here is an opportunity to stay in your own country and serve it in a noble way. We invite you to share our campus, grow with us and make a difference for our nation. We welcome you.

Share your skills and knowledge in your field of expertise. Your job involves responsibilities like:

• Shaping your country’s future citizens with relevant and up-to-date industry experience.
• Making the best into better beings
• Introducing discipline for perfection
• Adding hope to the future of nation
• Listening to virgin thoughts from youngsters
• Mastering the art of re-learning
• Mentoring dispassionately

Does this drive you to guess the job? If you were unable to guess it, but have been inspired to take up this job, then the description has achieved its objective. If you have guessed that this is something to do with teaching, then you already have it in you.

We will connect you to this institution, which is opening doors for three streams of education viz, Engineering, Management and Science. The institution is a vision being realized by a renowned company in India and is looking for faculty in these areas and for quality PhD candidates with teaching and/or industry experience. They are offering accommodation on campus with basic amenities. The campus holds a strong student base with CBSE background.

Feel free to know more about this opportunity [email protected] or share with someone who is looking for a platform like this.

Employment is an agenda of every political party. What about EMPLOYABILITY?

Amidst the political chaos in India, citizens won’t miss to hear about employment in the agenda of political manifesto. Here is a word that political parties could use which may excite both recruiters and job seekers. More than employment, the long term need is employability that needs to be added to the agenda. Each candidate hired needs to add value to a company’s growth.

In 2013, ASSOCHAM had proposed inclusion of employability in the manifestos of political parties. This received attention from the Rajasthan State government which further worked towards introducing skill development programs and entrepreneurship education. It create a great turnover which should be stated as an example to the nation.

Why is this the need of the hour?

With fast changing technology, immediate entrance of Gen Z  and increase in restructuring of workforce; employability is the most alarming subject to be attended to.

Obsolete workforce: Obsolescence of workforce is an issue, discussed extensively, since the inception of the concept workforce productivity. Problem of obsolescence still persists with higher rate of change in technology and the higher rate of adaptability required by the existing workforce in learning and implementing the ever changing technology. Though workforce has moved towards increasing their learning curve, it is not proactive enough to seek the desired results. For instance, people in occupations like teaching, accounting, marketing and so on.  This is seen right from freshers to employees who need to adopt and apply them at work.

Gen Z round the corner: It is not just business organizations but also, political parties who are looking upto adding Gen Z into their target audience. Gen Z is promising pocket of audience both as customers and voters. Such importance is again largely connected to how tech savvy recruiters are and what political parties understand about the needs of Gen Z. Business organizations have to answer if they are ready for Gen Z before harping about employability. Political parties on the other hand, need to study if their agenda is strong enough to conduct inclusive activity with the next generation citizens to improve employability. Gen Z come with a DNA to adapt quickly to the changing trends with bigger learning curves. This needs to be capitalized. Value addition of this ilk in the roles of customers, employees and voters depends upon their employability skills.

Increasing restructuring: Here is another reason why, employability is most required. With many public limited companies in India making headlines for generating pink slips and introducing voluntary resignation schemes, it definitely calls for some thinking. Have the employees contributed enough for companies to grow and have the companies motivated and provided enough direction for their employees to showcase intrapreneurship. Increasing restructuring answers these questions.

These trends reinstate the focus required by business and political ecosystem, towards raising the degree of skill and emancipating unskilled literate rate through better employability. It is not just about better adaptability and learning curves but is about inculcating entrepreneurial thinking by stepping out of a mere employee role. This not only helps the employer in gaining profits but also enhances and build an employee’s personal wealth by creating the ability to create more employment.

How about ‘Relocating’ to India? Am I making the right decision?

Relocating to India may be an exciting thought to many of you who have been away from your extended family and home country. With promising headlines heralded over the news, it may seem all the more promising to make that move now. However, this decision does not just involve your impulsive mood but other factors which need to be a part of your decision making process.

The Options Executive Search (OES) team has identified a few key areas which need to be evaluated before making that international move.

Purpose of movement

That moment, when returning trends and moves made by peers, meet your impulse, you would experience a surge to discover job opportunities in India and migrate back to your home country. But then, pause for a moment. Is this an impulsive decision or do you really want to migrate?

We have recognized that such decisions are either driven by rational or emotional stimuli. Neither of them promise anything as long as they are made into logical and thought through decisions. This requires you to assess the context of ‘what is in it for you?’ of moving back to India.

Here is a chart that provides a list of crucial factors that need to be weighed while you decide upon moving back. Ensure that you include the needs of your family, career and your Self while making this move.

Indian context has changed drastically over the years and you may be astonished to know more than what you have read in the newspaper and rss feeds when you hear it from someone who is actually living in India.

Changing Indian landscape

Lifestyle and living: You need to be prepared to face the shift in lifestyle. Irrespective of world class healthcare and increased access to international education standards, you need to create a world of your own that is closest in resemblance to your current lifestyle. Locality of your residence, schooling, housing and medical facilities are some aspects that need to be discussed with your family. While you are at work, your family will experience and will have to interact the most with this part of the environment.

Culture: Many years of acceptance to the western style of living and thinking may create trouble when you have to settle back in India. Dressing, festival, societal norms are way different from what you had all these years. Traffic and neighborhood culture could be appealing or shocking in this land of extremities.

While you settle down with the Indian lifestyle and culture, you need to orient yourself to the tax structure, social security schemes and investment avenues. Most of all, we will throw some light on the salary structuring and income considerations as per Indian standards.

The Indian Income Tax Act, classifies income being sourced from salaries, house property, business profits and gains, capital gains and income from other sources. The flowchart below sourced from Overseas Indian Facilitation Center (OIFC) provides a snapshot of how salary is structured in India.

Having lived in a foreign country for many years and having climbed up the arduous career ladder, you will be waiting for that winning moment to settle back in your homeland. To evaluate how smart or not this plunge is you can get in touch with Mr.Achyut Menon at <Clarity.fm> and discuss further about your professional career building opportunities and the road ahead.