Sharma says while traditionally most rural women have been working independently on their farmlands and continue to do so; many service sectors such as IT / ITeS, Ecommerce, BFSI, R&D, MSMEs are seeing a definite increase in women entrepreneurs.

At a time when young women are taking the entrepreneurial leap in India, Sharma says women can do a lot better if they have adequate information of available opportunities, have decent market linkages, and get adequate financial support.

A German study indicates that investing in women brings in more economical and non-economical returns as against investments in men as women are more likely to share their benefits such as their children, community etc.

“On one hand, entrepreneurs are men and women and on the others investors are also men and women. Everyone needs a vibrant & viable ecosystem that enables them to perform,” says Sharma.

According to the Senior Vice-President Learning Services of the company while women are not risk averse, their businesses tend to be more. Sharma says many investors are aiming to make investments in enterprises run by women.

This article was published in Entrepreneur

Inconvenience: This is a real short-term pain but the amount of tears shed by rich people for the inconvenience of poor people and farmers would probably fill an ocean. Poor people don’t have black money and fanners are untaxable. This pain would have been greater before Jan-Dhan, Aadhaar, Direct Benefit Transfer, mobile banking, universal payment interface, Bharat Bill payment, new bank licences, mobile wallets, and other financial inclusion measures that are blunting the traditional defence of cash as access. A counterintuitive but effective measure to reduce this temporary pain is the (2000 note but the numbers of this high value note should be capped and this new accomplice of black money storage should be demonetised in a few years.

An important upside lost in the black money vaporisation debate is counterfeit money destruction. To somebody born in Kashmir such as me, it is obvious that much of valley terrorism is fuelled by money not printed by India. Getting rid of black money is not the solving of a sum but the painting of a picture; no single action moves the needle but a series of action can change the norms of acceptable, accepted, and expected behaviour. The boldness of demonetisation suggests a bias for action, however imperfect, after decades of rhetoric. The estimates in Mumbai’s financial betting pool of the 12 lath crore high value notes that will not be exchanged or deposited by December vary between 20 per cent and 40 per cent. Whatever the final number, as Karl Marx said “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”

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This article was published in Business Standard

To train 40 cr youth by 2022, India needs 10 lakh teachers per year; here’s how to get them

Vocational skills is the one solution that everyone agrees to for solving many of our problems like skill deficit, slow economic growth, low enterprise productivity, poor workforce efficiency, career development, life satisfaction and even crime reduction.

But just any vocational education or training programme will be futile if we do not enable the stream with industry-oriented curriculum, better infrastructure, improved teaching methods and quality teachers. For a nation that aims to skill 40 crore youth by 2022, we will require over 10 lakh skilled and certified teachers year on year. So where do we get these teachers from?

To develop skilled vocational teachers, we need an environment that fosters teaching and learning of vocational education. While there are no specific courses mandated for a vocational teacher, having certain attributes will have a positive impact. To be a vocational teacher, one needs to have good organisational abilities, fine communication and presentation skills, and sound decision-making expertise. The ability to use the right pedagogy is essential. Technical acumen and work experience in a speciality subject will make the vocational teacher more desirable.

Provide adequate infrastructure. The trainer must have access to enough tools and equipment, and raw material. Enough workshops, laboratories, classrooms should be provided to enable students acquire practical experience. For example, if we are training teachers on fabrication, fitting & assembly for a manufacturing unit, then the schools need to have adequate simulators and tools such as external micrometers, vernier caliper, surface finish equipment, rules, squares, caliper thread gauges, height gauges, hand saw, drilling machines, power tools. This can help teachers get enough practise before they start teaching. If a teacher needs to be skilled and certified in a sector such as beauty & wellness, then the infrastructure should be a replica of a beauty parlour or a spa.

Provide funds. Proper funding is a prerequisite for success in creating an enabling environment in the teaching and learning of vocational and technical education. Allocation of budgets to development of vocational teachers is crucial for the success of our skilling initiatives. MSDE, NSDC, central or state ministries and industry should set aside a budget for these teacher training programmes. Can CSR be another route to funding?

Improvise signalling value of vocational skilling. In countries like Austria and Germany, over 40% of the workforce comes through vocational skilling route. But in India it is perceived as something that is for others’ children, calling for a change in mindset both at the student as well as at the industry level. All stakeholders must be fully aligned to the vocational skilling route and present a roadmap for trainers taking up vocational teaching as a career. A positive attitude towards vocational education will enhance the interest of student enrolling into a programme. A BVoc degree can change the outlook many have.

Improved training quality. This will require the curriculum to include vocational and technical entrepreneurship skills, with emphasis on acquisition of practical knowledge and skills rather than theory and certification. Competency acquisition and proficiency testing should be the core of the programme. Another area of focus during training is that vocational education graduates are expected to possess some entrepreneurial skills as well, such that they can enable their students to become entrepreneurs.

Improved training quality. This will require the curriculum to include vocational and technical entrepreneurship skills, with emphasis on acquisition of practical knowledge and skills rather than theory and certification. Competency acquisition and proficiency testing should be the core of the programme. Another area of focus during training is that vocational education graduates are expected to possess some entrepreneurial skills as well, such that they can enable their students to become entrepreneurs.

Continuous learning and skills upgrade. According to Gerhard Fischer, director of the Center for LifeLong Learning & Design at the University of Colorado, “Lifelong learning is an essential challenge for inventing the future of our societies; it is a necessity rather than a luxury to be considered. It is a mindset and a habit for people to acquire.” Teachers should be given the flexibility and resources for continuous learning, only then can they improve teaching.

Industry partnerships. We need to create closer collaboration between teacher training institutes and industry. This will encourage trainers to gain industry experience and bring that to teaching practices. There should be flexible career paths between industry and trainer institutes.

Unfortunately, the Rs. 1 lakh cap on cash acceptance for jewellery was rolled back, but thankfully, the Supreme Court-constituted special investigation team on black money has recommended caps on cash transactions (13 lakh) and cash holdings (MB lakh), which the government must accept. Chartered Accountant Shailesh Haribhakti estimates that about 20 percent of last year’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth came from cash conversion running away from real estate and gold and advocates a phased de-monetisation of the Rs. 1,000 note. The fourth tool of tax reform has made huge progress with the goods and services tax (GST), but the rate should be no higher than 18 percent. It’s also time to end deductions, move to lower TDS and tax rates. The fifth tool is furthest behind; ending corruption, randomness, and terrorism in the tax organisation is urgent and overdue, however difficult.

This war on black and physical money has hugely positive implications for India’s formal jobs. 100 percent of net job creation in the last two decades has happened in small, low-productivity enterprises. Of India’s 63 million enterprises, 24 million do not have an office or address, only 8.5 million have any form of tax registration, only 1.1 million pay the mandatory Provident Fund, and only 18,000 companies have a paid-up capital of more than Rs. 10 crore. Decent wages can only be paid by enterprises that have the productivity that comes from the access to talent and credit that comes with formalisation. Over the next decade, I anticipate the number of India’s enterprises to decline by over 50 percent, ending the self-employment that is self-exploitation, and low-productivity informal firms that operate in cash. Black money often goes to goofy investments; it’s the only reason India’s banking system does not have a sub-prime real estate crisis, and the new joke about 24 percent return schemes for cash deployment is that you get 24 percent of your money back. Now, much of this money will become available to fuel growth in formal jobs, productivity, and wages.

The war on cash also forces political parties to think creatively about financing and finally create the grassroots and retail funding machinery that political scientists suggest, at the margin, creates more accountability and political participation than wholesale financing by interest groups. Negative interest rates have often been thought of as irrelevant for a capital starved India. But anecdotal evidence of their emergence for holding in large amounts of physical cash in parts of Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu are surely a sign that the government is winning its war on cash. This is wonderful for India.

“It’s a pro-worker move and in a way historic. After hiking the minimum wage late last month, the Union government has again taken a pro-employee stand that will benefit 1.2 crore more beneficiaries,” said S. Mallesham, another ESIC board member.

Mallesham is also president of Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) in Telangana.

BMS is a national trade union affiliated to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

But industry representatives said the move will not benefit workers much.

“We said that unless the quality of medical facilities improves increasing the wage ceiling will not be a great decision. When you have some 14,000 vacancies in the ESIC system, how can you serve more people,” Dias said.

Rama Kant Bharadwaj, vice-president of Laghu Udyog Bharati, a federation of small and medium industries, said that while pro-worker decisions are a political compulsion, the government must remember that to stay competitive in the global economy, workers’ costs need to be competitive.

Relaxing the wage ceiling adds to the financial burden of employers, as they have to pay 4.75% of an employee’s salary as ESI contribution salary limit every month.

Sonal Arora, vice-president of staffing company TeamLease Services, said, “Though the decision to increase the wage limit for inclusion in ESIC from the current Rs.15,000 toRs.21,000 is well intentioned, it will have a far-reaching negative impact on employees and corporate India.

“For employees, it will mean a reduction in their take-home salary by as much as 6.5% at the onset of the festive season when they would rather have money in their hands. For employers, it will lead to more hassles as compliance and documentation will increase,” he added.

Other than hiking the wage ceiling, the ESIC board also allowed employees to continue as members even after their wages cross the Rs. 21,000 threshold.

Currently, a worker goes out of the purview of the ESIC once their salary crosses the wage ceiling.

“This is a good move, as older employees need more medical attention and it should be left to the workers to decide if they want to stay with ESIC after their salary crosses the threshold,” Bharadwaj added.

ESIC: Wage ceiling hikes over 20 years

• From Rs3,000 to Rs6,500: effective 1 January 1997.
• From Rs6,500 to Rs7,500: effective 1 April 2004.
• From Rs7,500 to Rs10,000: effective 1 October 2006.
• From Rs10,000 to Rs15,000: Effective 1 May 2010.
• From Rs15,000 to Rs21,000: Effective 1 September 2016.

Do you get part of your salary or reimbursements in cash? Then your employer may have to re-think the remuneration rollout.

The government on Wednesday suspended road toll across the country for two days

In one stroke, Prime Minister Narendra Modi turned the tide on black money as cash remunerations which feeds informality in the job market is set to end.

Rituparna Chakraborty, co-founder at staffing firm, Teamlease Services, said: “The move would cause inconvenience to some employers immediately. “However, soon, we shall see recalibration of transactions which will become forcibly legit and would be in compliance with the law of the land.”

Top sectors where salaries or part of salaries are paid in cash are real-estate and infrastructure.
However, headhunters expect that a massive shift will be witnessed as the undeclared economy will slowly move into the organised sector.

Also, with lesser cash transactions, more employees will now fall under the ambit of other necessary benefits such as provident fund.

Moorthy K Uppaluri, managing director, Randstad India, a headhunting firm, said: “This reform will benefit everyone as more employees can avail benefits provided in the formal job sector such as provident fund, medical claim, gratuity and additional benefits.”.

Industry echoed similar benefits. Ronesh Puri, managing director at Executive Access, an executive search firm, said, “The initiative will now force the companies to re-consider the salary structure.

Most professional organisation in any case doesn’t pay any component in cash and hence should not affect them at all.”

This article was published in Hindustan Times

The top roles that require reinvention:

1. Manual Testing: Technology: A tester works with results to provide inputs to product development teams on vulnerabilities and also interacts closely with the architect, development, integration, user interface and implementation teams. What is bringing disruption to the space is automation. “More and more jobs are likely to get reinvented with automation. Tech companies in the US have shed about 63,000 jobs this year alone,” said Kunal Sen, senior vice president, TeamLease. With the rise in complexity of technology, automated testing will stay and grow.

2. Digital Architect: This is the fastest-growing field in the information industry. An enterprise architect is required to shape solutions for clients and provide the delivery of it. Digital technologies have evolved from Web technologies but taken a form of enterprise applications at present. The role is necessary for integration, ERP, SCM, ecommerce, etc. A digital architect must know Java: Servlets, JSF, Spring, JUnit, Hibernate, Log4j or other logging framework. This skillset is evolving to add understanding Design Patterns, XP, .NET, Java/J2EE or similar industry standards.

A person with 15 years of work experience in this function can draw Rs 45-60 lakh a year in salary, said Shiv Agarwal, managing director at ABC Consultants.

3. Product Manager in FMCG sector: Traditional forms of delivery for FMCG managers i.e., the way they reach out to the consumer, is changing and that requires reskilling. People who have branding skills for FMCG are valuable to the ecommerce space as well. Ecommerce requires social media connect. Someone who heads a product on a website is responsible for this delivery, unlike traditional FMCG product managers who never did this. Their responsibilities include point of sale, branding and dealer distributor work. Salaries have changed dramatically here and job changes can bring a 30-35% increase in salaries. ESOPs also come with this profile.

4. Data Analyst in FMCG sector: FMCG companies — and indeed most companies across sectors — are focusing heavily on data analytics as a function, which means the profile of a data analyst is undergoing major reinvention.

“The role of a data analyst is itself undergoing a sea change, primarily because better technology is available now to aid in decision-making,” said Sumit Mitra, head of group human resources and corporate services at GILAC.

Companies require employees working in this role to analyse how data can be useful. Today’s data analysts need to be able to identify trends quickly, which, in turn, will ensure the company can leverage these to its best benefit. There is currently a demand-supply gap for this role.

5. Chief Digital Officer in BFSI sector: Nearly a decade ago, when banks and financial institutions started pushing online connectivity tentatively, the role of the chief digital officer came into the picture. His job was to oversee digitisation of core banking processes, ensure smooth functioning of ERP software and speedy transactions. With greater efficiency and quick development on the digital front, it has evolved into one that has manifold responsibilities today.

“They are now responsible for looking not just after payments and transactions, but also acquisitions, engagement, and customer service — all of which are done through the digital medium,” said Deodutta Kurane, group president for human capital management at YES Bank.

At senior levels in this function, one can expect salaries upwards of Rs 1.5 crore, compared with about Rs 75 lakh four years ago.

6. Project Manager in infra sector: There are fewer changes in infrastructure jobs compared with a sector like FMCG, said S Venkatesh, president of group HR at the RPG Group. But the whole project cycle is getting tighter so there is pressure on business managers to fill up product timeline. “Engineering procurement construction or EPC projects have to be delivered not just on time but have to be profitable as well. Reskilling is happening in project processes. All of these have to follow a templatised process and follow a project guideline,” he said.

Salaries haven’t dramatically changed in this space. But a lot of Chinese and Indian companies are going to Latin American markets since they enjoy cost advantage in material and contracts — so, people will have to learn to live and work in new geographies.

7. UX Designers in Technology: Today’s user experience designers are fusionists who have evolved the field of UX from stylistic endeavor to one that solves spiky technology and social problems. “We’re moving into things like robotics and autonomous car driving, so one can’t be stuck on UX and visual design skills any longer. Employees in the field of design should augment their skills and correlate with fields like affective science, machine learning, contextual intelligence, environmental and material design, etc., and the talent to merge product and service design,” said Mohan Krishnaraj, global head – Litehouse (The User Experience Design Group) at Harman Connected Services.

This article was published in Economic Times

We feel concerned when companies reach out to us to help them with their diversity Hiring. The concept of introducing and encouraging diversity hiring is to give equal opportunity to all individuals, regardless of their gender, race, age, physical ability, ethnicity, or religious beliefs. But this is largely practiced as hiring more female employees to maintain the gender ratio in the organization. This helps them to attract more female employees and to maintain a healthy, diverse atmosphere.

It is now almost a decade that I have been managing large recruitment teams, comprising freshers, experienced professionals, some returning after a sabbatical etc etc. Recruitment fortunately has more female employees, but I have now realized that in these 10 years, I do not see more than 14% of my ex-colleagues continuing to work in full-time or part-time assignments. And this genuinely makes me feel concerned and scared. If the ratio is better elsewhere, I am sure organizations have helped these employees stabilize their work-life balance better. When I go back and spend some time on the reasons behind 86% of my female colleagues not being in the industry, it is disturbing.

It is easy to generalize why many females drop out from a promising career: getting married, being on the family way, husband in a different city, or maybe a new family does not want them to work (the usual suspects). I am not sure if this helps any of us in the society. While I understand that as a woman, we need to manage and fulfill multiple roles of a caring wife, good mother, responsible daughter, or daughter-in-law, we have been taught from the very beginning that each of the roles has to be performed to the fullest. In these roles, a career aspiration doesn’t exist, and if somehow any woman decides to take up this option, then she naturally feels she has compromised on her other roles. Many women quickly end up dropping out of their careers.

Is this a situation we have to accept? Do we have to choose between office demands and pressure and household workload? While the family can be a challenge or a support for a long-term career plan but it is the same family that has taught us from the very beginning that whatever situation one has to face, we are never allowed to drop out of our schooling. Then why drop out of your career today? Why not figure a solution for every situation? Do some of us see this as an easier option—taking our partners for granted to manage our expenses and our lives at the cost of us managing their household work? We need to take a stand for a better individual, a better family member, a better mother, and a better Indian.

I have known families where the daughter-in-law is the only earning member in the family. There is one exceptional manager I have seen in my team; she manages her drunkard father-in-law, she is abused daily at her home, and she manages her preschool-going son, an experimenting husband, and a retired mother-in-law. The courage to face all this and continue working with the best of productivity is not easy. You need to have your mind and goals in place. Obviously giving up on the job and accepting the family situation could have been the easiest option, but I feel so proud seeing her in the office every day. She just lights up my day. She has made a decision and worked on her ambition day in and day out without letting her family life get in the way.

I remember, females started opting for HR as this was an easier office job. There was a time when males would pick up sales and marketing and females would opt for HR in their final programs, but I feel sad to see many of these potential women HR leaders disappear. I sincerely request my female graduates and postgraduate students to give some shape to their ambition after putting in 16-19 years of their lives in academics. Life is not about compromising every time. Life is about creating solutions and working things out for everybody around, which includes you to begin with. I understand we need some support from our families, friends, and colleagues, but our confidence behind our decision will help them to see a better future.

This article was published in World HR diary

Exit options: One should be clear about how ESOPs can be monetised. Unlike the share of a listed company which can be traded, encashing an ESOP happens only when the company gets listed or when a merger or acquisition happens. Documentation: Ensure the grant document is executed in a formal manner.

It should capture all details related to an employee’s grant, right from the vesting period to monetisation of the grant in case of acquisition, IPO and even a shutdown.

Taxation: Returns earned from the ESOPs are taxable, which is currently 33%. Apart from the fineprint, self-awareness about one’s own risk appetite is also critical. Just like investing in the stock market, one needs to be mindful that this is a high-risk investment.

Startup executives becoming millionaires with their ESOPs is an exception and not a norm. It’s important to understand the vision of the partners and their value system. Startups which crop up, taking advantage of the valuation game, lose steam. It’s also important to understand what is one’s own financial objective behind joining a startup — if one is fine with deferred gratification, then one should not hesitate.

However, if one is looking at ESOPs as a means to fund prescheduled financial commitments, one should think twice. Though an exciting option, it is always prudent to walk in with one’s eyes wide open and be clear on possible outcomes — you win big, you lose big.

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This article was published in Economic Times Panache

Hiring right

Hiring is an expensive proposition, and hiring wrong even more expensive. “It’s difficult in a 30-minute interview to make a full assessment of someone,” says K. Narayan, the Mumbai-based president, human resources (HR), of textile company Raymond Ltd. He finds psychometric tests useful because they add an important input to the evaluation of a candidate. Narayan says Raymond uses a mix of tests like the Thomas Personal Profile (TPP) Analysis and the Occupational Personality Questionnaire (OPQ).

“While a job interview reveals the person’s achievements, psychometric tests provide insight into their style of thinking and engagement,” says Gurprriet Siingh, Mumbai-based country head at leadership consulting firm YSC India. Tests like the MBTI, the Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation-Behavior and the Hogan Personality Inventory can tell employers whether the candidate has a participative style or a directive style of doing things, whether s/he is more operational and detail-oriented, or more of a strategic thinker, says Siingh.

There are also a whole set of customized psychometric tests. In India, testing companies like Gurgaon-based Mettl and Aspiring Minds and Pune-based Jombay design their own tests. There are different tests for different job roles and different seniority levels. “It’s about reducing error and subjectivity,” says Mohit Gundecha, chief executive officer (CEO), Jombay. Gundecha has a client list of 250-odd firms in sectors such as banking, insurance and retail hospitality. “We are democratizing assessment by defining key competencies, based on the analysis of top performers. Like for hospitality you need to be high on stress tolerance and networking, while for production management in a manufacturing concern, you need achievement orientation and attention to detail. Hence our tests look for these traits in potential hires,” says Gundecha.

Do they work?

Mumbai-headquartered Angel Broking is a user of Jombay’s “Feet on the Street” test, meant to select salesmen. “We’ve been using this test for the last six months, and we have seen our attrition levels go down,” says Subhash Menon, chief of HR and learning at Angel Broking. The test has identified perseverance, communication and relationship management as traits that top-performing salesmen have.

Some companies, like HR outsourcing firm Teamlease Services Ltd, develop their own tests. Teamlease recruits up to 5,000 employees every month and determines what role is best suited to their skills and personalities—sales, back office, retail, data entry. “We have our own in-house team that administers psychometric tests and looks at attitudes like patience and perseverance levels, decision-making abilities and confidence,” says Neeti Sharma, the firm’s Bengaluru-based senior vice-president.

How accurate are they?

Can candidates “game” the tests by pretending to have behaviour patterns that they think employers will like? It’s not so easy, say the test-makers. “We ask questions in different ways to check for consistent responses. And we employ ‘situation tests’, where we ask for their response to a particular situation. There are no clear right and wrong answers, so it makes it harder for candidates to fake responses,” says Varun Aggarwal, co-founder and chief technical officer, Aspiring Minds, which works with both students and companies, testing domain knowledge in subjects as well as behavioural skills.

Aggarwal, a postgraduate engineering student from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, became interested in testing and psychology while he was pursuing his postgraduate degree in engineering. “Testing is at the intersection of statistics and psychology,” says Aggarwal. He returned to India in 2007 and set up Aspiring Minds. Aggarwal says each psychometric test has an inbuilt measure to gauge if the candidates’ responses are incongruent.

Mettl’s CEO Ketan Kapoor agrees that the tests are all about statistics: “Psychometrics may be an inexact science, there may be a few false positives, but on an overall population we will be directionally accurate.”

Still, there are many caveats to using psychometric tests as recruiting tools. Firstly,the test should be chosen carefully, depending on the job requirement. Then, the test results need to be interpreted carefully. Even with the right interpretation, test results don’t always hold. Siingh explains: “The test results will tell you in which category people fall (extroverts, introverts, micro-managers, delegators.) But it tells you nothing about whether they are true to the type.” And, he says, the test does not take into account the possibility that an individual has the ability to manage their type. So you may reject a candidate whom the test labels as having a preference for micro-managing, even though he has developed the capacity to delegate.

For all that, psychometric tests remain an integral part of assessment. They are popular not only at the recruitment stage, but also later, in assessing leadership skills and in succession planning.

Spot the talent

Psychometric tests are used by career counsellors to help students choose suitable careers. Young professionals looking at career changes, as well as older professionals, can also take the tests to determine their competencies and future trajectory. These tests, which include the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF) and others, are available online, for prices upwards of Rs.2,500. Consulting firms like Aon Hewitt, YSC India and AscendPsychology, as well as assessment firms like Aspiring Minds and career counsellors like Mumbai-based ReachIvy, also administer these tests, and will help you interpret results, and suggest the additional skills that need to developed, for prices ranging from Rs.3,000 to Rs.2.5 lakh.

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This article was published in Mint

Rituparna Chakraborty, co-founder and senior vice-president, TeamLease, said, “A unified code signals accountability, uniformity, simplicity and ease of compliance and supervision. It is a forward-looking, progressive move, far from the erstwhile complex and regressive approach in our labour laws.”

RP Yadav, chairman and managing director, Genius Consultants, said, “Attempting to bring down 44 labour laws from to four codes and further to just one, the government is taking a major step in labour law reforms. This will also help to convert formalisation of the informal employment which will help job seekers.”

Under the draft code on wages, which amalgamates the Minimum Wages Act, 1948, the Payment of Wages Act, 1936, the Payment of Bonus Act, 1965, and the Equal Remuneration Act, 1976, the government intends to bring all employees under a minimum wage and vest the the power to fix it exclusively with the states, fix the wage ceiling for the purpose of eligibility for bonus and substitute the term “inspector” with “facilitator”.

This article was published in Financial Express

Essentially RPO is about bringing in predictability into the recruitment processes through dis-aggregating tasks and handing them over to specialist/s. Recruitment Services have been perceived as a human intensive and laborious. RPO breaks the myths of many such thought processes by offering results to customers on a real time basis. RPO aims at managing 100% fulfillment in a manner enabling decision making both for business teams and talent acquisition teams. A win win situation for both customer and the provider unlike the contingent model where there are very low levels of accountability to offer support and the choice of catering to difficult-to-hire roles lying with the provider making it a risky proposition for the customer.

Providing a recruiter on the rolls of the provider is not genuinely an RPO process as is misunderstood by the many in the recruitment industry. RPO is more than than outsourcing services as it can only succeed with mutual coordination and handholding on each process.

The levels of accountability to serve increases when the provider has exclusivity of requirements against the competition and the investment of time, money and effort are equally rewarded by outcomes. The provider is tied down by SLA’s and governance for the client to have a hold on the outsourced recruitment process which could prove risky if the commitment is not honoured to.

Few of the strengths which a true RPO brings to the table are predictability in hiring within TAT, enhanced employer branding, superior quality of hires, flexible recruitment, optimising processes through technology and automation, reduced cost per hire etc.

RPO proposition is not just helpful at enterprise level but also cater to the project specific need of an organisation which are sporadic and tsunami in nature. The most reliable answer for volume hiring in terms of TAT and cost efficiency is Project RPO which is designed to address size and scale of any recruitment need.

In today’s need for speed of growth with all the organisations the most edible cuisine to propel growth in terms of human capital is RPO. This is proven with over 50 RPO’s which TeamLease has executed successfully with multiple corporates in the last 18 months. The insights on the challenges revolves around capacity to build, cost consciousness, apt source mix to hire, calibrating the quality of intake, volume hiring requirements, niche or tough to hire skills etc.

Nature of RPO required for the specific needs of organisation vary from a transient engagement to managing the end to end recruitment process for organisations to meet their enterprise demands for manpower. TeamLease have bifurcated these RPO suites as Enterprise, Project, Process, Campus & Blended RPO.

Process RPO’s have gained fame and adoption as they address one or more pain points of the recruitment process which the organisation wants to outsource due to various reasons such as lack of specialisation, lack of manpower etc. One such RPO is POFU Process RPO which is a series of interventions (as defined by the organisation) which predicts the flight risk of an offered candidate through an interactive web and mobile enabled platform. This is truly called as predictive hiring. Any volume transaction process in recruitment can be outsourced as it saves manpower and creates better efficiency in the hiring eco system enabling the core team to focus on more important tasks.

How can RPOs help Startups? Well most of the Startups need to start from scratch. The first 50 employees in a startup are critical hires as they need to share the vision and goals of the founders. RPOs can help Startups to staff people by offering them exclusive services like salary survey and benchmarking, employer branding and analytics and other such value adds which will enable the recruitment engine to propel them.

Indian RPO industry is crossing the 1000 crore mark in the year 2017 with large players signing volume and long-term deals. There is a growth of 20-25% year-on-year for RPO and the acceptance and adoption industry wide is becoming rapid. Looks like RPO is the answer for all questions the recruitment challenges pose in India.

This article was published in World HR Diary