I decided to write this post, even if it looks unrelated to this blog, to share some of the aspects of hiring practices followed by Indian companies as well as the multinational companies operating in India.  Companies should respect potential new hires and value their time, effort and monetary contribution involved in the entire process of interviews.  But, for some of the companies in India, it is not the case.  Most of the companies throughout the world feel that there is a shortage of talent, however, for Indian companies it seems otherwise as they treat an interviewee and an employee as someone who needs them more than companies need an employee.

Let me share some of the experiences from the recent past.  These are true and real-life experiences shared by the people I know.  I am also naming the companies just to make sure that the effect does not get diluted and show that this is widespread and not limited to one company.

1. Bank of America (BA Continuum Solutions): It is a company which just doesn’t value the candidate’s time.  This candidate gets a call from a recruitment consultant about an opportunity with the company and fixes a telephonic interview.  The candidate waits for the interview call on the scheduled date and time but does not get a call from the company.  After five hours of the scheduled time, the candidate gets a call from the consultant saying that the interviewer got busy and hence could not call and then fixes up a new time for the telephonic interview.  This time also the call doesn’t come and no information from the consultant either.  This process goes on for 10 more days in which the the call is fixed two more times but both the times, the company forgets to call up the candidate.  Anyway, the candidate gets lucky the fifth time when he finally receives a call from the company’s HR department but only after reminding them through the consultant when it was already 30 minutes past the scheduled time.  The candidate goes through this round of interview and the time for next round of telephonic discussion is fixed.  This time, the interviewer was a gentleman who called up the candidate on time and at the end informs the candidate that the HR team will be in touch for fixing the face-to-face round of interview within that week itself.  The candidate never gets to hear from the HR team.

2. IBM Daksh:  A poster child of Indian BPO growth story and one of the most respected companies in this space.  They interviewed a person who had already spent a long time with IBM Daksh before moving to another company.  This time round, it was a home coming case in which the person received a call from the company’s HR team for a matching position.  Since it was with a different unit than the one where this person worked in the past, it was asserted that he needs to go for more than one round of interview.  After four rounds of interviews, where the fourth round was supposedly the final round, the company realizes that they need a person with a different skill set and this person is referred for a position with another unit within IBM Daksh.  The company had the candidate’s entire work history with them but nobody cared to check it before interviewing the person.  Moreover, the skill mentioned as the sole reason for not selecting this person was very objective in nature and could have been easily identified during the first round of interview itself.  This would have saved everyone’s efforts and time but the company did not seem to care about it.

3. Barclays Shared Services:  This is a classic example of how companies can mess around with their existing workforce; the talent which they have been able to hire.  Recently, the company had hired a set of Team Leaders for their operations team.  After two months of hiring, the company organizes a workshop in which all the team leaders including both the old and new hires are put through a leadership skills test conducted by an external agency.  According to the results of the skills test, the company decides to demote certain Team Leaders to a lower position which does not involve team handling and makes them report to their peers.  Isn’t it humiliating for an employee.  I wonder what could have changed in those Team Leaders during their tenure of two months with the company.  Even if the company feels that some of the Team Leaders lacked on few aspects of leadership skills, they should have been put on a development plan under their supervisors rather then demoting them.  I would say, the company should also put the HR team and the hiring manager through the skills test as they are the first to be blamed for hiring people who did not meet the company’s requirements.

4. Honeywell India:  A classic example of how the hiring process at some companies can be extremely bureaucratic, painful and complete waste of time for both the company as well as the interviewee.  Honeywell India was in the process of hiring for a middle level position and this person was interviewed for the same.  Can you imagine an IT Head interviewing a candidate for Finance function and driving the hiring decision?  Can you imagine a candidate being cleared on telephonic interview but failing in the face-to-face interview with the same person and if you can, won’t it be a case of discrimination on the basis of appearance?  Can you imagine a candidate being asked to go through few more rounds of interviews after being informed that he will be made an offer?  If you can’t, just check out Honeywell India where all these things happen.  I fail to understand, how a company as big as Honeywell could be so bad in deciding on a candidate.  The entire process wasted over a month’s time for both the company as well as the candidate along with the candidate’s effort and money involved in traveling five times to the interview location.

Will these people who have had such poor experiences with the above mentioned companies ever think of working with them or suggesting people to join them?  On one hand, the companies talk about lack of talent and on the other hand they have such ill managed hiring processes.  It is high time that these companies start improving their processes and start respecting potential candidates and valuing their time and efforts.

If you know of any such incident or have experienced yourself, please share with all of us.

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