One of the biggest worries that plagues companies of all sizes, locations and so on, is managing attrition of good experience and talent.

And yet, there are VERY FEW companies that really wake up to this call, till an employee decides to call it a day. They all wait for the proverbial axe to fall on their necks, and then decide to either get a patch and heal it back to its old ways, or try to stitch in a solution.

Every man, woman in an organization, irrespective of rank, function, location, designation etc, has aspirations.

An aspiration to get bigger, become better, and shine brighter.

Status, capability, commercial, all these aspirations keep growing, and growing within an employee.

Organizations do try to keep up with these through performance management systems, regular benchmarking cycles and so on. And yet attrition happens.

Why ? Because of any one of the following reasons:
a) The person’s capability has stopped growing (no more challenges)
b) The org is not proactive enough to encourage and reward capability growth.

Its time orgs learned.

Managing employees is not just about passing down doles in the form of increments. Its all about managing aspirations, presenting them a way ahead to grow into their desires by managing their competencies and capabilities, credibly.

More on what my thoughts are, on various aspects of “aspiration” to follow…

And from what I’ve seen of it, I would call it a purely lead generation exercise. Volume games. For a single requirement, a recruiter has not done his/her job till he/she has supplied the client with 10 resumes. It’s what the client demands, for the percentage value that is paid to the recruiter.

I have been trying to evaluate paradigms related to issues like fitment analysis, skill mapping and rating, and so on. They don’t seem to work, not within the current scope of things. It seems to be a routine, that for X% recd as commission, N number of resumes should go, irrelevant of how close they fit a requirement.

Face it. A recruiter is not an SME. A recruiter is an intelligent keyword matching engine.

If the requirement says JAVA, 2 years, salary between X and Y, thats all they scan for. And based on how close the fitment is, they send it across to the client. The intervention they get to the table is nothing more than calling a candidate, checking availability and disposition towards a change of job, and following up on tasks like interviews and so on.

Sadly, there seem to be no technologies that automate processes, not yet at least, and leave the recruiter to do better fitment.

This seems to have the following downsides. Recruiters just become glorified search engines / scheduling machines. Nothing more than that.

Recruiter Skills and Training

For some reason, there is no basis for monitoring skills of a recruiter, for the simple reason that there experience is the only recordable component here.  So a recruiter is analyzed purely on the basis of how many years he/she has spent in the industry.

Recruiter skills have escaped the industry totally. No one seems to want to focus on “what makes a Good recuiter” and work on a program to enhance recruitment skills. I’m not talking about the capability to search a resume database. I am talking about the capability to see a resume for what it is, before recommending it to a client, to see a candidate in terms of value add for a client, before recommendation.

Most recruitment cos that happen during a boom phase, are nothing more than mom-n-pop shops that spring up for “spare time” money making, sending mails, connecting and passing on “leads”. They are not trained on understanding JDs or fitments or anything at all. They just say “job available” to as many people as they can, and hope that one of them bites.

Focussed, well designed Recruiter Capability Enhancement is really not happening.

And in all probability it won’t happen. The recession has gotten people to start talking about “Recruiter Capability”. But the moment the markets swing back and volumes come back, the rat race will start. That of sending a 100 resumes more than the other recruiter, to be labeled better.