Wipro scotches CapGemini buyout rumours

BANGALORE: Wipro came out very strongly against the news doing the rounds that it was looking at acquiring European IT services giants CapGemini. At the announcement of third quarter results here on Friday, Wipro chairman Azim Premji said, “You have seen the whole ‘nonsense’ about Capgemini which went on and on and finally we had to issue a statement, which we never do.”

There was enough news emanating in the recent past about both Wipro and Infosys looking at the possibility of acquiring the European major. There were even talks about the possibility of Wipro looking at acquiring a part of Capgemini, which is more strategic to them.

On its part, Wipro in a notice to the stock exchanges recently said, “Wipro, on behalf of all Companies in the Wipro group, including Wipro Technologies, its global IT services Division, at the request of French Securities Regulatory Autority Autorite des marches financiers (AMF) confirm that they have not recently been, and are not in discussions with and / or in relation to Cap Gemini, the French Euronext listed group, on merger / takeover of Cap Gemini.” Analysts were highly sceptical of either Wipro or Infosys acquiring Capgemini as there would be no financial or growth synergies.

Indian IT immune to US slowdown: Wipro

DAVOS: Worries over the impact of a US slowdown on India’s software services sector are exaggerated and Wipro’s clients are showing no signs of reducing outsourcing, its top official said.I don’t think it’s a situation of gloom for the industry. I think it’s a situation of cautiousness for the industry,” Azim Premji, chairman of India’s third-largest software services exporter said in an interview.

“Don’t get carried away. Run a tight ship. Have realistic expectations,” Premji said during the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in the Swiss resort of Davos.
Earlier this month, New York-listed Wipro reported a lower-than-expected 11 per cent rise in quarterly profit, its slowest growth in four years and said higher billing rates should help offset rising costs from wage hikes and a firm local currency.

Bangalore-based Wipro counts Cisco, Nortel and Credit Suisse among its clients. Premji said Wipro’s customers in the banking and financial services industry, hit by the subprime worries and wobbly market, were likely to drive global outsourcing even more aggressively in an uncertain economic environment.

“Trying do drive more offshore work on IT is one fairly effective methodology of cost takeouts without much risk because they are used to it, they are used to their partners, they are familiar with the system.”

“We are sitting pretty. I think global delivery companies such as ours will be the last affected,” Premji said, echoing similar comments made by other leading Indian software firms.

The banking and financial services industry accounts for about 25 per cent of Wipro’s total IT revenue. Wipro, a diversified firm with interests in computer hardware and consumer goods, is majority-owned by Premji.

Shares in Indian IT firms were among the worst performers in a booming local market last year, hurt by concerns over the impact of a slowdown in the US, rising local wages and an appreciating currency.

“I think there is an undue pessimism viz-a-viz the IT sector and I think it will correct itself sooner than later,” Premi said.

Indian IT companies tapping foreign resumes

BANGALORE: India continues to hire and train for its growing information technology industry, but a talent shortage is forcing it to look overseas. “We’re hiring from campuses in the US and Europe where we can hire people from the local environment,” said Suresh Senapaty, Wipro Ltd CFO at a television interview during a Summit in Bangalore on Friday.

“We get them to Wipro, get them to India, get them to understand senior leadership and do the packaged induction program,” he said, adding that they go back after a two-week program.

Supplemental hiring, or hiring employees in and from America to do jobs offshored to India from the US, is becoming an option for a lot of Indian companies.

While some companies choose to let these foreign employees work from their respective home base and pay them more than their counterparts to compensate for the cost of living, others relocate them to India with hefty packages.

One of the main reasons for supplemental hiring is to have a diversified global footprint and also make customers comfortable that they are dealing with a local person who understands their needs, said Senapaty.

“We are seeing a reverse trend trickle right now of people around the world wanting to work in India,” said S Gopalakrishnan, Chief Executive of Infosys Ltd., India’s second largest software exporter that also runs an internship program for 136 students from universities abroad, including MIT and Stanford.

Hiring from abroad may also mean that companies are looking at various levels of work ethics and professionalism.

“Weakening work ethics is a concern,” said Avinash Vashistha, CEO of Tholons Inc, an outsourcing advisory firm in India, who thinks the amount of IT employees on contracts without projects, or bench strength, is huge and will have to change as companies stop hiring more than they need.

CV/Resume forgery

There are over 450,000 technical graduates every year in India and companies like Infosys received about 1.3 million job applications in the last 12 months, of which 30,000 got offer letters.

Unfortunately, not all of the applications can be trusted.

A lot of freshers forge their resumes with work experience in non-existing firms, names of which are slowly being identified and blacklisted by companies like Wipro.

“It is rather unfortunate because the pressure from society for people to get into this IT industry, to get into a global career is making them do it,” said Infosys’ S. Gopalakrishnan. “I feel bad about it. We have to put processes in place to filter this out.”

Nasscom (National Association of Software and Service Companies) launched the National Skills Registry (NSR), a database of all industry employees, to prevent any recruitment fraud.

Lack of knowledge and expertise in some sectors, including biotechnology, has compelled management to fill positions by tapping talent abroad.

“Some of the capabilities we need in our business, especially in the area of new drug development, have huge gaps and therefore we’re looking at filling up those gaps by getting the right kind of people,” said Biocon Ltd. Chairman, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw at a Summit. “There are not too many of these people available in India, so we’re trying to get them back from the US and other parts of the world.”

MphasiS Ltd., a subsidiary of Electronic Data Systems, is also bringing expertise back to India to groom and train local talent.

Like others, MphasiS is bringing back Indians abroad who left the country to gain work experience in other parts of the world.

“But it is in dozens rather than thousands,” said Deepak Patel, Managing Director of Mphasis Ltd.

Infosys Technologies to hire more BSc graduates

BANGALORE: Infosys Technologies is upping the accent on right-skilling in its hiring drive as a way to combat attrition and wage inflation. What this means is that the company will dip into the vast pool of BSc graduates for job categories like testing and infrastructure management rather than recruit people who are over-qualified.

Infosys Technologies board member and head — HRD and education TV Mohandas Pai said, “We are really into right skilling where we match skills rather than getting people who are overskilled for the job. We will tap into the pool of BSc graduates and expand the labour pool both in depth and width.”

The company has hiked its head count target for 2007-08 to 31,000 people on a gross hiring basis. It had earlier projected recruitment of 30,000 people this year.

The Bangalore-based company saw a gross addition of 11,683 people (net addition of 8,100 people) in the third quarter of fiscal 2007-08. Lateral recruitment accounted for 2,570 employees. As of December 31, 2007, total staff strength stood at 88,601.

Meanwhile, attrition for the third quarter decreased to 13.7% from the 14.2% figure in the previous quarter.

During the quarter, Infosys voluntarily settled with California Division of Labor Standards Enforcement (DLSE) towards possible overtime payment to certain employees in California for $26 million.

The payment pertains to the past three years and these back wages will be paid to employees in due course, the company said. Infosys BPO CEO Amitabh Chaudhry said there were no signs of any slowdown in demand for BPO services on account of the US subprime meltdown and recession fears.

Infosys BPO recorded revenues of $64 million and net income of $7 million in third quarter. The subsidiary’s turnover for the nine months ended December 31, 2007 stood at $157 million and net at $26 million.

Mr Chaudhry said, the margins for the company excluding the Philips unit, was in the 21% range. “We see a good pipeline of deals. The Philips acquisition helped us add domain expertise in F&A, which means that more customers are ready to consider us.” He added that the company intends to take some work of other F&A clients to the three new centres taken over in Chennai, Bangkok and Poland.

Cognizant finds new brand ambassadors in employees

KOLKATA: With 16,000 new recruits in 2007 globally, Cognizant Technology Solutions (CTS) can hardly rely on campus placements alone. The software major has launched a Back2Campus programme encouraging its employees to visit their respective colleges as CTS brand ambassadors to interact with students. The mission is three-fold — to look out for prospective recruits, share industry knowledge and increase their employability.

Talking to ET CTS human resources vice-president Bhaskar Das said: “Our Back2Campus is not entirely a recruitment programme. According to Nasscom, 25% engineering graduates are directly employable by the IT industry and 15% can be groomed to be made employable.

This is one such initiative to groom these 15% graduates who can be trained to meet industry needs. By interacting with their college seniors who are working with Cognizant, students gain a better understanding of industry requirements which helps them make a smooth transition from the campus to the corporate world.”

Incidentally, CTS had projected that its the global headcount would increase to 55,000 by December 2007 as against 38,000 in the beginning of the year.

The final figures will be released shortly by the software major. Commenting on CTS’ initiative, senior IT professionals said: “Each year, the great Indian recruitment yatra of IT companies gets fiercer with major domestic and global players vying for the right talent by often devising new strategies that go beyond mere campus recruitments. Cognizant’s initiative is one such move.”

During 2007, Cognizant visited nearly 150 B-schools and T-schools for recruitment and campus recruitment will continue to be the top priority. However, initiatives like the Back2Campus brings in the added advantage of reaching out to talents in institutes that are not on the regular list on one hand, while on the other, the alma mater bond helps forge strong ties that translate into new talent coming on board.

To create campus brand ambassadors and recruiters, Cognizant has also instituted the “Campus Bandwagon” initiative. Under this programme, experienced campus ambassadors interact with a new batch of ambassadors and share their experiences and learning. “We have also developed an e-learning module on campus recruitments. Every recruiter is required to complete it before stepping out for campus recruitments,” said Mr Das.

CTS has also signed a memorandum of understanding with 30 select colleges across the country to create rapport with aspiring IT professionals. For instance, it has tied up with Calcutta University, BHU and Jalpaiguri Govt Engineering College among others. “More such MoUs are in the offing,” Das added.

Meanwhile, on Friday, CTS tied up with Singapore-based linguistic services provider Nihongo Bashi to offer training in Japanisation skills to some of the company’s 2008 batch of campus recruits.

The first batch will consist of 25 third-year engineering students from Kolkata’s St. Thomas College of Engineering and Technology, who will avail of a six-month Academic Japanisation Programme (AJP) in Japanese language, business and management, designed specially for the business needs of the IT industry.

Source:Economic Times

Referrals cut cos’ recruitment costs

HYDERABAD: Referral recruitments are nothing new. But what’s new is India Inc’s willingness to pay astrnomical referral bonuses to the existing employees. Many are banking on such a system to hire recquired talent.

At the Hyderbad-based Juniper Networks, the referral system accounted for 50% of the 290 employees hired this year.
“Being a product development company in niche areas like IP platforms, finding the right talent is key to our progress. Referral bonus helps encourage employees to bring like-minded people to our company. This, in turn, will improve retention rate,” says Sridhar Sarathy, the company’s managing director for India. Besides monetary benefit, ‘successful recruiters’ within Juniper also hold a chance to win gifts like motorbikes and flat screen TVs every quarter.

Ditto for Virtusa. Employees at this Hyderabad-based company can win a holiday to any Asian country or a Maruti Swift every quarter, apart from cash incentives. The rewards also consist of gizmos such as iPods and DVDs. While middle-level referrals at Virtusa can fetch Rs 50,000, those referring a person with 10 years of experience can earn Rs 75,000. “It is cost effective for us to offer incentives to our employees as this system is 25% cheaper compared to third-party recruitment. This year, 40% of our recruitment was done through referrals, against 25% last year,” says David Raj, associate HR, Virtusa.

The story for the big players, however, is not quite the same. Satyam, for example, offers about Rs 25,000 for an employee referral in India and about $500-$750 for a referral in the US. At Infosys, referral incentives range from Rs 15,000 to Rs 50,000 depending on the experience of the recruit.

Cognizant CEO Lakshmi Narayanan admits that the company’s referral incentives are nothing substantial though 50% of its lateral recruitment needs are met through this system. “Wipro offers Rs 5,000 to Rs 10,000 for a middle-level recruit, which is considered to be the industry average, but MNCs like IBM are known to offer double the industry average,” say sources.

While cash incentives are given along with the monthly salary, as and when the person referred is recruited, one might have to wait for the end of each financial quarter or year for the gifts, which are based on lucky draws. Referral systems help minimise risks in a stiff job market. Most companies allow employees to refer another person on the first day of the appointment itself in the form of a buddy list.

Apart from lower costs, the referral system helps companies ensure the new recruit’s credentials are good. “A referred person is considered to be more reliable as employees also tend to share a certain responsibility. In 2006, 34% of our recruits were through referrals against 26 in 2005,” says Lekha Sishta, senior director (HR & performance development), SumTotal Systems.

Source:Economic Times

Job Referral Sites The Next Wave In E-Recruitment?

A recent survey conducted by Yellojobs tried to uncover the reasons why people are leaving companies. Besides for the money factor the other factors that listed high were non co-operating, bad superiors, no further growth and remuneration, uninteresting job profile, office politics and work environment were the other reasons cited for changing jobs.

 

Jobsites have been solving the problems of recruiting staff since a decade now but still with the competitive job market attrition seems to be so high that most companies are losing more money hiring and paying jobsites and consultants than doing anything else.

 

We had previously on WATBlog listed down 5 reasons why social networking sites are a threat to jobsites. Also last year a bunch of job referral networking sites had sprung up. So there is techtribe.com, reffster.com and even a yellojobs.com which seem to be catering to this space. Even Infoedge Ltd the parent company to Naukri has launched Brijj.com last year to leverage the power of networking for jobs. Though e-recruitment is still a small part of the overall recruitment spend in India to give you some statistics according to Ma Foi-India Today survey, recruitment fees in India stood at Rs 4,500 crore in 2006, out of which only Rs 500 crore was through e-recruitment.

 

Incentivised employee referrals was always a part of the recruitment spend since BPO’s came to fore and huge manpower recruitment became a big task for companies. With online job referral companies like techtribe, yellojobs, reffster and brijj coming to the fore such referral based recruitments are bound to rise.

 

Though according to me the consumer internet model of job referrals might be plagued with people referring unknown individuals. Maybe if someone explored the same model from a enterprise solution point of view targetted at a top down model for enterprises then it may just bring far more credible results.

 

But nonetheless it does look like online job referral sites are here to stay and will surely cause a few waves in the e-recruitment industry.

Source: www.watblog.com

Big Jobsites still Innovating? Naukri launches Asknaukri and Monster launches Video for Recruiters

Internet is a space of constant and persistant innovation.. Now whether that innovation is borrowed, inspired from somewhere else is a different issue. So Jobsite whih have been around for almost a decade now still continue to come up with new things that would attract the Indian audience.

In a move to answer all the career questions that a job seeker might have Naukri has followed the yahoo answers model (though in this case users dont answer users but panelists from naukri do.) by launching AskNaukri.com a website that offers ‘relevant, researched, and customized’ counseling on all work-related queries.

This is what Sanjeev Bikhchandani, founder and chief executive officer, Naukri.com, said, “Career guidance is a natural progression, and with ‘asknaukri.com’, we want to emerge as the definitive face of career guidance in India.”

AskNaukri is powered by Workeasy solutions a career planning and development firm. AskNaukri is a great way to attracting more resumes as those who might register here (many of them being freshers) and whose questions might be answered well would in effect start to trust the naukri brand.

On the other hand Monsterindia.com has launched video for recruiters a way to help recruiters to profile their companies in more interactive manner.

According to Vikas Agarwal, Vice President-Product and Technology, MonsterIndia.com, said, “The Monster video profile is a great opportunity for employers to market themselves in a job market where demand for talent is outpacing the supply. It is a good way for employers to showcase their work culture, and it would help them to hire people suitable to their corporate culture. Audio-visual presentation of a workplace is more emphatic than the traditional means of communicating through just text. This tool will ultimately help jobseekers understand their prospective employers better.”

Its would be useful tool for those employers who would like to showcase the fun elements and the working culture of their organisation, very much like this video by google employees which was used to highlight gmail features.

Both these giant jobsites seem to be still innovating in the jobs space where other players are using below the belt marketing gimmicks to win users. I think Jobs as a space has still scope left for improvement and also innovation as more more companies are finding it difficult to find the right people and in the shortest possible time.

(Via Techtree & Exchange4media)

Naukri Goes International! – Targets 15 Countries.

Naukri.com India’s largest job portal has gone international. Even earlier naukri.com had job postings from overseas locations but now it has acknowledged the overseas potential and created a separate section for international job postings. After study abroad if there is another trend thats catching on really fast in India is Work abroad. Lots of Indian middle management staff in financial, it services sector are being offered lucrative positions in UAE, US and UK countries and the demand is just increasing day by day.

 

This initiative by naukri is been taken specially to position itself as a jobsite that can cater to this increasing demand. According to Mr.Hitesh Oberoi, COO, Info Edge (India) Ltd “With globalization of services, there is a lot of requirement for white collar talent across countries. At Naukri, over 10% of individuals are open to working abroad. At the same time, there is a huge demand for Indian talent. Thus, creating this new section is a logical step to cater to the demand and simplify search further.”

 

We have written about earlier of how social networking sites are a threat to jobsites and naukri seems to be acknowledging this fact by both investing in business networking (Brijj.com) and also going international with its job portal (As social networks like facebook, orkut and business networks like linkedin are inherently global in nature.).

 

The problem naukri faces is that its domain name naukri (which means jobs in hindi) would be understood by primarily by an indian audience even in US, UK and UAE. Its difficult for naukri to become a truly global brand for jobs which will become a certain gap that these social networking sites are able to service especially at middle and higher level positions in companies.

Source: www.watblog.com

Anil Ambani Floats Tech Reliance For IT Foray; May Invest $2 Billion

At least one faction of the Reliance Group has realised IT is an opportunity they missed out on. Anil Ambani’s Reliance ADA Group has decided to enter the IT services business by floating a new company – Tech Reliance (does it sound like the IT foray of another major industrial group – Tech Mahindra?).
It plans to provide IT consultancy, business process outsourcing and software development, among other services.
It will initially look at providing services to industry sectors such as telecommunications, financial services, utilities, entertainment and healthcare. The group is reportedly looking at investing $2 billion in the business.
Apparently the company is on the prowl for top management staff from major IT firms in the country, according to a report in Business Standard. Anil Ambani has already hand-picked a core team of 15 members, including employees working within the group, to head the initiative, says the report.
It remains to be seen if Reliance entry can make life tougher to existing biggies like Infosys Technologies, Tata Consultancy Services, and Wipro.