Employer Branding and Indian IT firms

Up to now, the business models of the large Indian IT services firms have allowed them to ride out the acute manpower shortage, by using mass campus recruitment to reduce raw material costs (manpower costs), lowering of entry level skill requirements, and large-scale training programs.These strategies, however, are not options for the thousands of smaller IT services firms and specialized software firms, who need to hire people with very specific domain expertise. The people shortage is hitting these firms the hardest, and we may well have a situation where entrepreneurial growth and innovation is being stunted because ventures are being starved of talent.
Going forward, even the large Indian IT firms will have to adopt new and novel recruitment strategies. As these firms move to different international geographies to de-risk delivery capabilities and widen the talent net, they will find the need for employer branding in these geographies – the reason that a Hungarian in Budapest joins TCS is not the same reason that a fresh graduate in Belgaum joins TCS. Employers will find that a focus on being a generic “employer of choice” is an inadequate vision for effective long term talent acquisition and retention. They will need to manage their brands as employers in individual niche areas and manage perceptions in new and diverse talent markets. The current job portals available in the market are really not much use outside of being searchable resume databases. To create a really useful job portal, something that will help both large and small firms find the right sort of people, one first needs to understand the problems facing them. Scarcity of resumes is not a problem, even for small firms. The web resume databases give you plenty of those. Nor is advertising cost a problem. The cost of putting out a job advertisement on one of the major job boards is negligible. In fact for both employers and jobseekers, the resume database search model has created a problem of plenty rather than one of scarcity. Employers get far too many resumes, a lot of them fake, and recruiters use the candidate database to spam jobseekers with irrelevant jobs.
The real problem lies in finding a person who is the “right match”, and then the greater one of being able to convince this “right match” to join you. What makes Company X the employer of choice for database administrators is unlikely to be the dynamic that attracts user-interface designers. So companies need to be able to get their job advertisements viewed by the right set of people and send the right messages to these “right set of people” and manage their perceptions. In other words, companies need to have the tools to be able to market themselves and to build “niche employer brands”.
Ironically, the print media did this in some ways. The very fact that print ads are more expensive and laborious to print, creates a certain value. It says to the jobseeker that the company placing the ad has the money and the resources to do so. It also indicates a certain amount of seriousness and in doing these things helps to build an employer brand. Note that classified job ads in newspapers by contrast lower the employer brand in that niche by indicating that either the company does not have the money or does not take the job seriously enough.
Using the internet to build employer brands for small companies is what the people at talentcommunities.com will be doing.