Small and Medium sized companies in both IT and ITES always have a hiring problem. When large established companies have swooped down on every major Engineering College and have hired away most of the good students even when they are in third year or college, what chances do you, as an SME, have of recruiting good people?
Well today, and the next 6 months may be an easier time for recruitment in India but what happens on the other side of the current hiccup?
We have found that it always better to have a strategy and follow it diligently, monitor how it is working for you and make adjustments as you go along.
One thing is for sure - if you are an SME, be prepared to spend three times the amount of time a larger company does in Recruitment!
Beyond the usual lip-service cliche " Your employees are everything", SMEs don't have a choice - Your people are going to make or break you. An ill chosen employee may not do too much harm in a large company but in an SME, they can cause havoc.
The good news is that if you spend a lot of time and effort in recruiting the right kind of people, the results can be very surprising. We spare no expense in recruitment - time wise. If we go through 4000 resumes and 100 people in interviews and tests and don't find anybody we are impressed with, we skip recruiting who is available. We are in software product development and so we can delay recruitment somewhat. If you are Services, you may not have that luxury. You may need to kickstart a project soon.
In our company, we recruit mostly freshers, given the size of our company now. When we are larger we may need to recruit more experienced candidates, which may or may not be tougher given what happens in India in the next 6 months or so.
We target only Tier 3 and Tier 4 colleges and use Naukri to spread a wider net. We don't waste time in Tier 1 and Tier 2 college although just last week we recruited some from Tier 1 also. Things have eased up a lot in just the last couple of months. We sift through many resumes and pick those that have had a consistently good academic record throughout or those that have shown dramatic improvement recently. Some realize that they are going to miss the career bus if they don't spend enough time on their studies. They tend to be serious with the right attitude since they may be already scared straight once.
We put them through three or four subject tests (like C, C++, SQL server, Dot.Net, Java) etc. The idea is to be able to compare how well the different candidates have understood basic concepts and how well they have applied themselves.
More than anything else, we spend a lot of time asking them questions in depth about a single subject they liked in college - like Data Structures or C++. The phonies can be spotted by the third in-depth question.
We also see, even from Tier 3 or Tier 4 colleges, some overlooked gems that the big companies have missed in their mass recruitment. They are usually graduates that have done a terrific final project, on their own initiative and spent a lot of time learning about their subject on their own. Very few Indian colleges have the time or the teaching talent to guide their students in their final project work well. Most of them "Buy" their final project and are easy ti spot. Asking them usually gets you the answer right away! Those that have done an oustanding job, taking initiative and learning something on their own because they liked it are the people we want.
Sometimes, some of these candidates may come from a rural background, but even if they explain things in broken faulty english, they have done amazingly well in their tests and they have understood basic concepts well - we like them also.
Many candidates with good communication skills can be BS artists also. They can be spotted with an in depth technical question.
We have had tremendous success with our recruitment. As I said before, when we recruited experienced candidates, we skip the tests but asking them in depth about their experience, you can separate easily, the wheat from the chaff!
Hope this is useful! SMEs cannot fool around with Recruitment. That's the most important part of your success. It cannot be taken easily or done quickly, especially with the amount of competition there is for the handful or really good people that is there in any group of recruits. The Normal distribution curve applies there also. But there is hope. If you take it seriously and spend enough of your sweat equity, you can land some gems!
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