Sunday, January 26, 2014

Overqualified, unfit, semi-skilled…

Do we have a real talent crunch in India as projected by different professionals and consultants? Or do we have the crunch of RIGHT talent? Or is it artificial scarcity of talent? Anybody coming out from the school needs training, how our skill development programmes are? There are lot of questions and we need to address those with right mindset.

There are lot of hiring mistakes which we do tenaciously. I have seen, hiring manager hiring CA for account keeping jobs, diploma for  doing workmen job and engineers just for supervisor jobs. 
Do really we need overqualified candidates for filling moderate jobs? If yes how you address their aspirations? And if you have highly aspirants people do you have opportunities for all?

I think we have upgraded the qualification for the positions. Earlier there would be only one CA in team, today there are almost all CAs in account function doing the job of accountants. There are companies who have hired diplomas for doing workmen jobs, MBAs just for salesman job. Candidate are highly qualified but not employable, however their expectations have been increased a lot. This is resulting high employee attrition, dissatisfaction.

This is a real time to correct this and have a moderate expectations from candidates. If you hiring MBA, just expect that he is just qualified, but ask the question, is he employable for the job?  Simple graduate may be smart than the MBA graduate. Anyways you have to spend lot of time to develop both.

I have challenged my functional managers on hiring overqualified candidates. Earlier we used to hire Engineering or MBA graduates for SCM who were doing customer support and commercial jobs. The attrition was high, employees were not happy. They were just speaking with customers, planning deliveries, scheduling production and arranging documentation. Can’t graduate employee perform this job? Yes. We changed the hiring strategy and today this group is most engaged and doing good job.


We should not blame the market, colleges. We have to find out the mid-way and educate, sometime challenge hiring managers with right perspective. 

5 comments:

Anil Pandey CPSM said...

One of the most engaging and thought provoking articles I have read recently. I myself wonder at times. Do you really need a BE for a stores, inventory or purchasing jobs all the times? I don't think so. To an extent yes, but not a engineering degree or diploma as the basic qualification. Its pathetic. In my earlier company where I worked as the Senior Purchase Manager for a power plant building company, most if not all sales people from the suppliers were engineers. And we also complain about scarcity of qualified people. No wonder that people keep on hopping from one Job to other.

Suresh Kumar Jain said...

Vinod you are quite right to greater extent as this is a general scene across India. we are having right talent crunch in India as Universities / Colleges are not updating the teaching curriculum with respect to industry requirements.

vish103 said...

For the very same reason, A person working in a startup/SME is much more sought after than a person of the same qualification having worked in a large MNC. You get much more talented and multi a functional candidates with the kind of grooming employers look for from these employees. But yes qualification should not be underestimated at the same time.

Anonymous said...

If you have proper competency descriptions for each skill that you require and tie these to actual positions, you can make more sensible recruiting and career planning decisions.

Ron Wheeler

Sebastiaan de Reede said...

very good comment Vinod. We're having the same discussions with our clients. It's the so called other side of the medal in this crisis. We predict that as we climb out of this crisis at least 50 procent of these people will seak more suitable and challenging jobs. In combination with a high number of people that will leave companies due to their pension age, a new sort of talent shortage will appear. Smart companies will adjust their hiring strategy and start hiring people that have to grow in to their potential. Focus on talent and development and less on diploma's

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