Recruitment goes digital in the 21st century

New Delhi: Now you can be interviewed and hired for a job anywhere in the world right from your desktop.It begins by making your video resume on sites like whereismyboss, telecommentor or monster.com.

“Monster released the video resume concept very recently in India and we’ve had 1000 people load their video resume immediately. It’s a great way for call centers to see the body language and English, which they could normally not see unless the candidate comes in for an interview,” explained Monster.com’s head, Arun Tadanki.

Here is how to make that video resumé using a digital camera or web cam.

1. A good video resume is always under a minute long.

2. Always look your future boss in the eye, stay relaxed, confident and to the point

3. Showcase those talents that don’t quite stand out in plain print

4. Finally click upload.

“In my profession, which is sales, I don’t have Java or Oracle talents. Employers look to see communication skills, which they can do through my video resume. I’m sure it’s going to get me many more job offers. I’m sure many employers would reject my resume if they saw just the text version,” pointed out job-seeker, Jacob Verges.

Digital recruitment does not stop with video resumés. You can even do a live interview without shaking hands.The virtual conference room has been brought to India by companies like Polycom and Cisco. With one half of the room built here, and the other half at other cities around the world, when connected, you’ll feel as if you are sitting opposite the table from your interviewer. “Polycom’s telepresence lets companies save money and time in interviews and lets them conduct it remotely,” explained the company’s head, Yugal Sharma.Jobseekers aren’t the only ones you’ll find online; companies are also putting videos online to attract talent. So your next job could be a video clip away.

Source:CNN IBN

IT firms not to be affected by looming US credit turmoil

BANGALORE: The turbulence in the US financial services sector, hit by billions of dollars in losses owing to subprime and mortgage crisis, has not affected the fortunes of the Indian IT services biggies, at least for now. The BFSI segment has traditionally been the highest spenders on technology and it also accounts for significant portion of the revenues of India based IT services providers like TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Satyam, HCL and Cognizant.

For India based IT services majors, the latest quarterly results show that BFSI segment has recorded a very positive growth rate on a sequential basis, for some, in fact it has been higher than the company’s overall growth rate. Analysts felt they would be able to maintain the current growth rate even during the current quarter.
In the case of Infosys, the BFSI segment recorded 7% sequential growth while for Wipro Technologies, it was 9.8%. TCS CEO S Ramadorai said, “BFSI continues to be strong and it has grown above the company rate sequentially.” The BFSI segment accounted for 44% of TCS revenues during the third quarter.
However, the big question is whether, these IT biggies would be able to maintain this growth rate given the background of a likely slowdown of US economy and the large financial services giants cutting down on their IT budgets to cut costs.

Offshore advisory firm, Tholons CEO Avinash Vashistha felt that the worst of subprime crisis is over for the Indian IT services majors and they are likely to maintain the current growth rate, if not higher, from the BFSI segment. In case of Cognizant, the BFSI segment accounted for 47% of its revenue and it grew 7% sequentially.

According to its survey among its BFSI segment on the IT budget growth in 2008, 90% did not expect their outsourcing budgets to decline. According to Siddharth Pai of TPI India, it is very unlikely that there will be any change in the current growth rates in the BFSI segment as the compulsory IT spending will continue though there might be bit of an impact on the new projects.

The IT biggies felt that BFSI segment under pressure to cut costs will actually look forward towards increased spending on technology to deliver the benefits.

Infosys senior VP and head Ashok Vemuri said, “Challenges that they are facing are creating more opportunities and this will actually see an increase in the overall spend.” Though, Girish Paranjape, president, financial solutions, Wipro Technologies felt that a clear picture will emerge only in the later part of this year on the actual spending pattern in the BFSI segment.

500 TCS employees asked to leave

Mumbai: India’s leading software services firm Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS) said on Tuesday that about 500 of its employees were asked to look for another job after their performance was rated poorly.”Those who cannot meet the performance requirements of our company were asked to look for another job commensurate with their abilities,” TCS spokesman Pradipta Bagchi said here.In the quarter ending on December 31, TCS appointed 4,037 employees, taking its total headcount to 108,229, up from 83,500 a year ago.

The export-driven software services companies have been winning large outsourcing contracts from western clients, but recession fears in the US and a rising rupee against the dollar has considerably affected their profit margins in the recent past.

IBM dismisses 700 freshers in India

KOLKATA: This may literally be a bolt from Big Blue! IBM is learnt to have delivered the pink slip to a sizeable chunk of its entry-level trainee programmers (ELTPs) across major offices in India.

Most of these ELTPs, who were engineering graduates, had put in nearly a year and were working in numerous technology practice groups under IBM India’s global delivery business.

Though IBM is silent on the actual number of ELTPs dismissed, the total is likely to be in excess of 700 across company locations nationally, including 180-odd in Kolkata alone.

ELTPs, who were essentially freshers, were asked to go based on their performance in aptitude tests that were recently conducted in undisclosed IBM India locations. It is learnt that action on the ELTP front in major IBM locations was an ultra hush-hush exercise about which many senior IBM managers were in the dark.

At present, the IBM India management is reluctant to go into the details of its latest HR exercise. But in a written response to ET’s email query, an IBM spokesperson said, “IBM is driven by a high-performance culture, a place where employees are able to contribute at the upper limits of their potential and continually build market-valued skills and capabilities in both formal training and experiential learning. In support of that expectation on the part of our workforce, we are pioneering new ways for our people to certify their skill levels as both a validation of their value to clients and to reinforce the quality of our employees’ personal skill sets.”

IBM has strongly refuted any possible link in the latest action on the ELTP front, with industry speculation about IBM’s global services business suffering a cash loss in India in 2007.

-Kalyan Parbat & Sutanuka Ghosal, TNN