Traditionally, most people selection in India (be it civil services or admission to premier engineering colleges like IITs) has been based on the method of elimination. The underlying principle being, when you eliminate the rest, those who remain are the best. There is nothing wrong with that proposition except that it assumes that supply will always be more than demand.

Most IT companies also started that way but soon hit a ceiling. The few selected campuses that they were going to could not give them the number of engineers they needed. Being a globally competitive business, lowering the standard was out of question.

That is when a few pioneering companies as well as industry body Nasscom, started looking at how they could tackle this challenge effectively. The first step was to go to the next level of colleges and if they found some candidates who were good but lacking in a few skill areas, provide them training to bridge that gap. This, while still practiced by many, could still not meet the rising demand. After all, the IT industry, all the concerns around its linear model notwithstanding, will continue to grow by absorbing more and more people for the foreseeable future.

HR departments in large companies, so far focused on hiring, training and retaining people were mandated to find out what they could do to expand the pool of talent: growing the pie rather than just take a bigger slice of the existing pie. Many new ideas emerged: going to newer campuses was of course obvious; reaching out to newer sections such as women who have taken a break from work, differently-abled people was another; training science graduates to make them ready for IT work was yet another. The latest seems to be helping the institutes to train their students according to industry needs, through faculty management programs.

Some of them have worked; some have not been successful. But one thing is for sure-this work, which started as a new, peripheral initiative to supplement the core HR function has become a core function itself. Seeing the early results, tier-2companies have also joined the bandwagon.

Today, the HR strategy of India IT Inc is as much about expanding the pool as it is about regular HR functions.

How Big is the Pie?
India has a billion people. Yet, nowhere is the proverbial war for talent as intense as it is in India. India's top major competitive advantage continues to remain talented workforce, but as companies grow and expand their operations both within India and overseas, getting the right talent is becoming increasingly difficult for companies. This is true of both campus hires as well as lateral hiring. For lateral hires, the easier way some companies (particularly new entrants to the market) have adopted is “poaching” which has created some bad blood between competing companies. For fresh hires, the situation has improved in terms of employability, but it remains far from satisfactory. The reasons for this are manifold. Outdated curriculum, lack of any planned training on developing skill-sets beyond the core engineering domain, mainly soft skills, resulting in a large chunk of graduate engineers being rendered unemployable.

According to AICTE, the total annual intake of students in 1,346 degree engineering colleges is about 439,689. Large companies are putting serious effort to expand that pool-in the short run by training science graduates to take up work hitherto performed by engineers; in the medium run by academic partnerships; and in the long run by encouraging mathematics and science education in schools. There are companies like Wipro, Infosys and others who have taken up the initiative to train faculty members in select engineering colleges so that they are in a better position to train their students, and make them more employable. A beginning has been made but real success will take some time. Effort is on to grow the pie, rather than just grow the slice. Some indications of shortage have started to emerge. A study done by IDC shows that there will be a shortage of 1 lakh networking professionals alone in the next 3 to 5 years. According to Piyush Dutt, associate VP, Human Resources, HCL Comnet, “In an industry which is hit by talent crunch, it is a strategic imperative for organizations to create focused programs for accelerated development of people.”

“We started hiring BScs in the last two years, and had tremendous success. We have a target of 3,000 such people for 2008” Nandita Gurjar, group head, HR, Infosys Technologies	“Much work is necessary in the less tangible areas of soft-skills such as management, communication and language-important elements of what comprises an 'industry-ready' or 'employable' resource” Ajay K Sharma, president and CEO, New Horizons

One curious thing has also happened. There has been a flight of a good chunk of engineering talent to BPO companies where the minimum qualification is as low as intermediate, and, in some cases, even class10. BEs from reputed engineering colleges are providing technical support jobs which were traditionally done by non-engineering graduates. Finding the reason for this is not so difficult. BEs simply could not get into software/IT services jobs due to their failure to pass the recruitment test-thereby bringing in the employability factor.

Hiring numbers are also impressive, and an indicator of the shape of things to come. TCS inducted, trained, integrated and absorbed over 35,000 people during 2007-2008 while making 22,451 campus offers for 2008-09 including over 4,000 science graduates. Accenture announced plans to hire 13,000 people in 2008 while Infosys plans to hire 25,000.

Employability is Key
Though the employability percentage has somewhat improved from what it was four years ago, it is not sufficient to sustain the amount of growth the Indian IT industry is witnessing. According to Rajasekharan SG, senior VP, Keane India, “Employability has tremendously improved in the last four years. But we have found that 40% of students get rejected on analytical skills, 20-30% on soft skills, and another 10% on technical skills.”

An innovative program initiated by Wipro, aimed at faculty development is Mission 10X (see box). The idea behind this initiative, according to Selvan D, senior VP, Talent Transformation at Wipro, was to work at the faculty level in terms of capability building which will work in ground up mode and will go a long way in increasing employability. He also laments the fact that there is no structured faculty enablement program across the country. There is another program from Infosys with similar objectives, called Campus Connect (see box).

Talking about the project, Nandita Gurjar, group head, HR, Infosys Technologies says, “There was not much success and response to the program in the first year, 2004, and, in fact, we got into a situation where we were told by some universities that they were not interested, and that we should take care of these students once we recruit them. But in 2005, we started seeing some progress, and by 2006 there was acceleration of the programs and more and more colleges came into its fold.” The interesting aspect was that the campus connect trainees were free to apply for any company, not only for Infosys. Same with Wipro. Companies are doing their bit but it would be more productive for similar minded companies to come together and use their energies in a united manner. Nasscom is another forum which has been at the forefront of trying to address the issue but clear-cut data points on how far it has managed to succeed are unavailable. According to Gurjar, “Infosys would be keen on such joint initiatives.”

According to Jaswinder Ahuja, corporate VP & MD, Cadence Design Systems, “Employability of India's engineering graduates is a key concern across the industry ecosystem, as companies spend up to a year training new recruits.”

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