No question, Edmund Hillary definitely had it better with Everest!  At least after conquering the summit on Everest, Hillary had fame and fortune to follow. For every summit a recruiter conquers, they get another even higher summit! Such is the scale of recruitment in India today. To understand it through the Indian perspective, one needs to understand what we call ‘recruitment in a dictatorship’, (that is, recruitment in corporates’), and ‘recruitment in a democracy’ (that is, recruitment in consultancies). 

Recruitment in a   dictatorship: This term for corporate recruitment sounds a bit strong, but is exactly apt in its description. After all, what is a major characteristic of a dictatorship?   It is the lack of freedom to choose.  A corporate recruiter has absolutely no choice to work on requirements or in fulfiling those requirements. His likes, or dislikes on the nature or degree of difficulty of requirements are irrelevant.

They have to be fulfiled - full stop and no one can fault the business logic behind this, particularly since the harder a requirement is to fill, the greater the gain for the company that does so and delivers to the client. This is even more pertinent to established corporates’ as in the numbers game, they gain that much more in having relevant staff to service clients. So the trend in recruitment has been - as long as the going is good and the economy booming - recruit, recruit, recruit and damn the consequences. After all, it is a given that at some stage the economy will shrink, so making hay while the sun still shines is the present norm for the Indian economy.

Hidden damages
But the most important cog in the wheel here is being terribly ignored. That is the recruiter. He is the first point of contact between prospective employees and the company he represents. Of course, recruiters in corporates’, especially the larger ones are extremely well compensated financially. As a consequence, they are presented with a larger number of peaks to scale to reach the Everest! In fact, the larger the pay packet, the more number of Everest’s will there be to conquer in requirements, and this is where the danger in what we call ‘hidden damages’ occur.

It is also a fact that the larger companies who are recognised brands have more choice and can offer the recruiter more variety to work on. But they also expect more effort from their recruiters. And this is where a larger part of the problems lie.  One requires a recruiter who has a passion for recruitment and not one who is just doing his job! After all, the corporate recruiter is not just a recruiter. He is a brand ambassador for the company.

He has to sell the company and the role to the candidates. The successful co-ordination of his company's recruitment process depends on him, and if this is handled badly it damages the image of the company.  Companies that are a brand today, who have good recruitment software are strangely disorganised. After all, a system is just a system.

It is the people who make the difference. If the passion is missing, which is becoming increasingly common among corporate recruiters, no amount of sophisticated systems will help. It will also decrease the shelf life of corporate recruiters with the stress levels in recruitment reaching new highs. Thereby the stamina to stay the course will also decrease.

Recruitment in a democracy: While many in the industry would be surprised that we would consider recruitment in a consultancy as recruitment in a democracy, if we look closely, we will see the reason.

As a corporate recruiter, one has no choice. Recruitment will have to happen for the company the recruiter works for. If it a well-known brand name, it makes the job a little easier. But if the brand name is not  well known, or the requirements are difficult, then a recruiter has his task cut out. But this is not the case in a consultancy. Here a recruiter can choose or is given different requirements, sometimes from different companies. If he does well with a particular company, he gets to stay on.  If he does badly, then he could try another company's requirements. Sounds wonderful? It should be, because recruitment done this way will get a lot of results. Unfortunately, the democracies in recruitment as explained here are moving towards extinction. Why? Because of the very nature of the recruitment consultants.

In the mad rush to fill positions in  companies today, there is corporate tolerance towards any avenue of recruitment. This is why India is perhaps one of the few countries in the world that has recruitment consultants ranging from professional run companies to housewives. But going forward, when there is a shrink in recruitment, and the recruitment industry becomes more mature, unprofessional companies, one-man shows and housewives working from home would not survive, as they would have lost their resilience.

Excellent consultants
Ironically, recruiters would prefer to work in a dictatorship rather than a democracy, which means they would prefer to work in a corporate than a consultant.  This is perfectly understandable in the Indian recruitment scenario, as a majority of consultants are poor employers, bad paymasters, and do not deserve to be in business. But saying this, there are a number of excellent consultants, and by excellent we don’t mean big, as some of the big consultants are unprofessional in the extreme.

The excellent consultants are in many cases not the most profitable, but they are the ones to watch. They are the ones offering quality, added value, and have high levels of organisation. They are the ones who will make a difference to the industry and will survive when the downturn to the industry will happen. They are not the largest, or the most profitable, or the ones with multiple offices or brand names. And how do we find these ‘excellent consultants’?  These consultants are the ones with the least attrition. Because this is the real determining factor on how good a consultancy really is. A recruiter is a final judge of his company, large numbers of people leaving on a regular basis should be a cause of concern.

In retrospect, we must say that the rule of thumb that should be used to analyse the state of mind of a corporate recruiter is his shelf life, and for recruiters in a consultancy - attrition.

The writers Joseph Rasquinha and Mohammed Hussain are HR Consultants. Email: joe@truemenconsultants.com or Zaheer@truemenconsultants.com