Managing Talent crisis
Talent is the most difficult thing to find these days. Companies are lucky if they are able to get good talents, but even greater challenge is to retain the talents.
In my interaction with several companies, mainly IT Captive companies, I found that there are qualified and good teams doing jobs which are below their calibre. They were probably recruited with high salaries just because the companies had more money to spend on staffing and no one wanted to take chances with sub standard staff. Going forward, such a precaution becomes an issue for companies who find difficult to excite these talented staff with more complex and challenging work. Attrition becomes common and the exercise to refill the position with the same kind of talent again starts.
“ Talent is the most difficult thing to find these days. “
In my own understanding, most of the IT work is repetitive and routine and does not require high level talented people. The job, once streamlined can be carried out by teams with basic skills and robust processes. It is also seen that a lot of new development activities ends up with standard and routine maintenance activities, thereby leading to dissatisfaction amongst the talents who are capable to keep their value higher than what is being derived out of them.
The conclusion I have derived out of several months of similar experience is that it is always better to separate maintenance and development activities. While maintenance can be managed by process oriented standard skills, the development can be done by those who are better qualified and experienced for such work. It is also essential to keep doing the job audit to understand if the skills at play are adequate for the jobs being carried out or there is a mismatch. Correcting the mismatch and a distinct maintenance and development teams would help lower attrition and lead to better employee satisfaction.
Have something to add? Share it in the comments.
I really appriciate your blog but same time I would like to ask that person who are well qualified and doing regular routine job with good salary where to go? yes in this compition age no body is ready to take risk therefore they are not appoiting sub standard staff , small concern can give chance but big concern really don’t want to take risk……..but I like your blog …….whenever you post any blog pls sen a copy to my e-mail id.
rgds/Akesh
Dear Alok,
You have very precisely captured the common mistake which most companies make while trying to leverage India’s IT skill pool. However, root of this problem can easily be attributed to lack of a India specific and in general an overall IT strategy of the company. Adobe and GE are classic examples of how separating development from maintenance work can contribute to their global product portfolio & its optimization for emerging markets using the concept of applied innovation. In fact, many companies focus too much on retaining or attracting highly skilled employees without focusing on their talent acquisition methods. Development Center heads seldom get involved in shaping up or participating in hiring process and HR ends up using same methods to attract highly skilled employees (who demand more engagement) which they use for hiring semi-skilled IT professionals for maintenance activities.
With thousands of Indians returning and more waiting for right opportunities, its high time that business leaders take active role in defining a separate strategy for hiring highly skilled employees, if they want to leverage more from their India development centers. Right search and screening can go a long way in matching employees’ expectation with organizational goals instead of paying more to retain such employees after they get hired without proper assessment.
Regards
Pankaj Dutt
Welkin Partners
Hi Pankaj,
The underutilized brains can deliver far more than what they do now. However, the challange is initially in getting or creating such challanging work. Most of the Indian IT companies are no more than manpower suppliers. Very few really do the quality work, but we are still far away from what US technology companies have been able to do with the same Indian brains. The crux again lies in the leadership. I hope this will contine to improve as it has been over last decade.
In my company, my team has embarked upon a lot of innovation around better engagement through challanging work. This has worked wonders with low attrition and my company getting top of the line technology work in a short span of few months.
Thanks for your response.
Regards
Alok