 HR challenges in BPO industry
Sinduja Shankar, head, Human Resources, The World Bank, termed the ITES and BPO industry as magic due to the short gestation period. She was delivering the inaugural address on the first day of the intercollegiate human resources seminar conducted at the Madras School of Social Work, Egmore, Chennai, recently.
She said the main challenge for HR professionals lay in managing a large number of
people at a very short time. She also mentioned about the poor selection ratio and regretted that the hit ratio was only 6 per cent.
Further, she pointed out the shrinking base of talent in middle-level management and added that it was neither difficult to choose top-level managers nor freshers. She spoke about the certification launched by NASSCOM and said such parameters will help the employers go a long way in identifying potential
candidates. She also laid emphasis on the development of soft skills and the dearth of competence in other areas. She told the students to improve their employability in addition to seeking employment. Team work, language competence, inter-personal and intra-personal skills and communication are vital to this, she
noted. She said the core function of HR was in providing the human touch.
N Raghu Ram, general manager, Human Resource Development, Slash Support India Pvt Ltd, who spoke on HR challenges in recruitment and development, optimistically noted that the BPO industry will not burst like a bubble but grow to greater heights. He said the trends with regard to job preference were slowly moving to the BPO sector. A HR professional handles heavy pressures in the BPO sector as the requirement needs keep changing on an hourly basis.
Intra-BPO poaching and supply versus demand gap were the main challenges in this sector, he noted. There was a lot of myth, gossip and misinterpretation about the industry with regards to night shifts and monotony of work. He contended that there was no truth in them and recalled that there were lots of jobs which
involved regular shifts and repetition of the same work. He made out that there was no
tomtoming on those conventional jobs, but when it came to the BPO sector everything was hyped.
He warned that if people continued to look at the industry with this mindset then we are bound to lose a lot of business opportunities to countries like Jamaica, Latin America, West Indies and South Africa who also have a large number of English speaking people.
Jyothi Menon, vice-president, People Practice, Lason India Ltd, spoke on the challenges in attrition, retention and exit management. She said the BPO industry in India was estimated to grow at a rate of 50 per cent annually. She said the HR policies should be customised to brand building. Human resources is
becoming human relations with more and more thrust on emotional bonding.
She pointed out that the exit interviews provide a great source of information and the person who leaves the organisation is also its brand
ambassador. She also advocated the policies to be transparent, clear and devoid of procedural delays. She said, "People don't leave an organisation because they don't like it. They actually leave people whom they find difficult to get along and work with."
Srinivas Sasthri, vice-president, Human Resources, Global Reality
Outsourcing India Pvt Ltd, spoke on, 'Leadership in BPO'.
Fathima Vasanth, principal, Madras School of Social Work, and R Sampath, director of the Post Graduate Diploma Course in Personnel Management and Industrial Relations, praised the forum of the Human Relations Study Circle of the Madras School of Social Work for the efforts in conducting this programme.
M D S Prabhu
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