Currently in India there is a severe talent shortage going on for consulting talent. This applies not just the IT consulting area where IBM, HP, Capgemini, EDS, CSC, as well as Indian IT firms like Infosys, TCS, Wipro and Satyam are planning to hire tens of thousands of developers and analysts in 2007.
Even the strategic consulting firms like McKinsey, BCG and the Consulting practice of Deloitte & Touche are all setting up offices in India to support the work of their client facing groups in the US and other western countries. Even HR and Outsourcing firms like ADP and Hewitt are using India as a base to provide data analysis and client solutions. Coupled with the fact that even investment banking firms like UBS, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Lehmann Brothers have backend centres in India, one gets to see how critical this talent crunch will be.
There are two challenges a consulting firm faces when trying to recruit and attract talent in such a market. One is to effectively target the potential candidate and secondly to use their branding to attract such candidates.
Traditionally in India employers have used three distinct approaches to hiring people:
- Using the campus recruitment method at premier technology and business schools to attract entry level employees.
- Advertising in national newspapers’ careers section to reach out to active jobseekers
- Using executive search firms to recruit senior consultants and practice heads.
However, increasingly, more and more the focus is shifting from the “active jobseeker” to the “passive jobseeker” in the younger generation of employees. This is because of various reasons:
- Campus recruitment is a tough place to hire consultants for India. In the top 5 business schools in India (namely the Indian Institutes of Management and XLRI Jamshedpur) students are looking for global opportunities.
- IT services firms are ramping up their domain knowledge capabilities (in the case of Infosys for example, by a fully owned subsidiary called Infosys Consulting) and increasingly poaching talent both from traditional industries as well as strategy consulting firms.
- Younger generation of workers get most of their news from newer social media like blogs and other sources like Yahoo and Google news.
Various consulting firms are therefore turning to newer social media and using newer approaches to reach that elusive talent. Most consultants have a profile on a business networking site for example, like Linkedin.com . However, such consultants seldom use the real power of linkedin to either recruit fresh talent or to do due diligence and a referral check on a potential consultant for their firm.
Consultant recruiting groups in major consultancies are also slow to use the power of search engine marketing to reach potential candidates. In India, for example, Accenture Careers is the rare example of such an advertiser according to the Pinstorm –IAMAI report on search engine marketing.
Take a look at the following two graphs. The first one is the estimated expense of search engine marketing by the highest spenders in the jobs section in India. Apart from Accenture, all the other advertisers are jobsites. However, the success of Accenture’s click-through is apparent in the second graph. That underscores the fact that consulting firm’s own sites are much more successful than a third party recruiting or job site to get interested candidates to click and apply.
To make the candidate experience even better is to use other social media like blogs of employees to communicate the experience of the workplace. One example of such an approach is Deloitte Canada’s blogs (http://www.deloitteblogs.ca ) on their career site.
How would you rate your firm’s career sites? Would a potential candidate have to jump through hoops to get to know more about your firm, your culture and the career path he or she has to go through? If you had to apply to your firm again today would you do it based on your career site? What other resources would you suggest to your HR and IT groups that would help a potential job seeker?