The Global Talent Crunch

You are the manager of a Global organization and are seeing a huge traction in new business opportunities for your organization as a whole . The proactive person you are, you want hire the best people in the business and build the team and the processes so that when the time comes, you are ready to grab the largest share of the opportunity pie. So you hand out a job description to the company HR manager/Recruiter asking him to hire the "best" available talent in the market.

The recruiter puts out the job postings in the local and national Newpapers(the conventional way), searches for profiles matching the requirement in jobsites like Monster.com, Naukri , Time jobs(Web 1.0 way) and finally even conducts a Virtual job fair on Secondlife.com (the web 2.0 way). And the end of it, you are handed out a set of resumes which more or less matches what you need. You interview a few of them, junk a few and finally put out an offer for a select few with joining Date :DD-MON-YYYY.

Come DD-MON-YYYY, out of the P number of people you offered the job to, only one of them joins the organization with the remaining P-1 being what is called as "no-shows". You as the manager had planned out the on boarding for P people ( Hell even the lunch table for P people was booked ) and are frustrated that P-1 people did not join your team . You reprimand the HR manager for not doing his job well and set him a deadline of having the P-1 people on-board by end of this week !!!. The poor HR manager panics and in turn takes his recruiting team to task for not having followed up with the potential new hires.

Finally what does the helpless Recruiter do ? Damned as he is,he starts contacting the remaining P-1 people and threatens them with Dire consequences like blacklisting,abuses thems and talks to them in a very unprofessional way while coaxing them to join the organization at the earliest. Do you think the any of the p-1 people will ever join your global company ? Not in their life !!. The recruiter is the one point contact for the new hires to understand the work culture and environment of the company and any sane job seeker would not like to join an organization which has a rude and unempathetic HR team.

So my dear Recruiter and the HR team, while I do understand your frustration, I believe you need to come to terms with the fact that good talent in today's booming times indeed scarce and this game of "no-shows" is going to continue for sometime to come . The Reality today is that we have a set of customers who are expecting innovations in product development and service delivery every single day, but unfortunately we do not have the set of people with the skillsets to deliver these innovations to the customers !!. So you have companies poaching people from each other and offering big carrots for hiring the "right" people. But what do you do if the "right" people are not available ? Afterall you have critical Client deadlines to meet.

Well the need of the hour is Re-training the existing human capital to suit the new world business innovations while at the same time hiring people who may not have the skills you require but have the smarts to learn the business skills you need and deliver the required Customer focussed solution. Easier said than done but it is always better than threatening potential new employees at Knifepoint.

PS : This threaten/abuse incident is true story and happened with one of the Big Four Audit Consulting Firms(Take a guess ,which one) recently when my cousin was looking for a job-switch. Do you think you and me ever join this organization ?