REMOTE ACCESS

Job opportunities through internet

By A Correspondent

F a Fortune 500 company has to look up for competent IT talents from India, all he has to do is to browse through the Net, says Manoj Gursahani, chairman, Sound Electronic.

Internet is gaining wider visibility everyday. "Currently there are around 15,000 subscribers to the Net and with the turn of the century the number is expected to rise to 10 million", affirms Ms. Parul Chheda, CEO, Arnitec Software Private Limited.

There is a recent trend among IT professionals, both in India and abroad, to advertise resumes on the Net as it gives a wider visibility.

In Mumbai, Arnitec and Sound Electronics were quick to realise the potential of the Net. These agencies offer job seekers the opportunity to advertise their resumes on the Net. This goes hand-in-hand with the reverse brain drain. It is a faster and cheaper means for NRI professionals to communicate with the parent company here.

The trend is however more prevalent among IT professionals abroad rather than in India. The organisations like Tek India, Arnitec or Sound Electronics mainly depend on applications from all over the world and not so much on India. To this Ms. Chheda retorts by saying that three to four years back even in America no one understood the Net. "Microsoft could not measure the potential of the Net and so was superceded by Netscape that had the browser. Now Microsoft is catching up", says she.

Satish Doshi, managing director of Sampoorna is however sceptical about the whole scenario. "A person might change his sex while advertising on the Net. There is no way to verify him or her on the screen", he says. On the same issue, Manoj Gursahani says that a person is not recruited on the basis of his resume on the Net. "It only helps a company to shortlist the candidates which is followed by the usual procedure of personal interview or written test or group discussion", says he.

Bharat on line of Arnitec provides international data bank on companies as well as candidates seeking jobs. While there is no subscription

[Image with the caption: "That's today's job ratio. If you apply for eighty-five, you might land two."]

Jobs through Internet

charges for advertising bio-datas on Bharat on line, Sound Electronics charges a minimal of Rs. 250 for six months and Tek India charges Rs. 500.

On the Net, the companies can advertise for vacant positions and job seekers can advertise their resume. So on a screen, it is a meeting ground for the employer and the employee that "cuts off the middle-man role played by the agencies and establishes a direct rapport between the two", says Mr. Gursahani.

The agencies mostly restrict the applications to IT professionals or that pertain to IT industry as all IT companies are connected on the Net. "The rate at which Net is spreading in India, it would soon cover a spectrum of companies. This trend might have a meagre impact in India now. But anything new begins in this fashion", says K. P. Bhalerao, director, human resources, Tata Unisys Limited.

Nismit / Mr. Nagle / Hagh

Online Recruitment - A Boon For HR Managers

By K R Ganesh

MUMBAI

WITH online recruitment gaining popularity on the World Wide Web (WWW), it is really hard to say, who will benefit the most out of it—the employer or the employee. While, on the one Rand, a whole new flood gate of opportunity seems to have opened for the HR fraterni-ty, on the other hand the moment seems just opportune for potential employees as well.

Reports from IDC indicate a dramatic change in the nature of employee recruitment in the west for all kinds of positions ranging from technical to non-technical. Around 54 percent of the companies in the US today seem to rely on electronic job postings for recruitment.

With this number set to grow to around 95 per cent by the turn of this century, it is only natural for any web-user in India to wonder why the concept has not triggered-off in India yet.

While the main reason seems to be the number of Indian companies on the Web, which is prohibitively less to embark on online recruitment, analysts also feel that gripping roots of tradition and culture has a role to play in the lack of online recruit-ment culture in India.

According to analysts, Indian companies have loyally stuck to the traditional methods of recruiting employees such as advertising, word of mouth and employee search firms. However, considering the merits of online recruitment over the traditional methods, analysts opine that it is high time Indian companies get accustomed to the new culture.

With more than 500 recruit-ment sites such as Online Career Center, Monster Board and Career Path on the web today, not only does a company have the choice to employ a suitable candidate for an opening, even a potential employee has the free-dom of choosing a company from a lot.

Any compa-ny, which today wishes to post positions on these recruiting web sites, can do so at a minimal expense. Also, companies with home pages can hyperlink to one or more of these 500 web recruitment sites to attract and address a wider audience.

Market reports say that online recruitment could be much less expensive than running a typical newspaper or magazine ad which can cost hundreds and thousands of rupees, only to target a limited number of audi-ences.

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Online recruitment...

Recruiting online not only ensures a faster dissemination of information to a large number of candidates, both local and international, but also allows for a greater degree of control in the process of the information pool. It is flexible, fast, ethical and virtually nil in the use of news-paper or magazine ads.

Also, since the Web is acces-sible 24 hours a day, online recruitment zones offer job-seekers postings of any compa-ny at any point of time from any-where in the world.

Online recruitment also enables the job-seeker to screen, select to identify suitable require-ments and fill status quo with the information available.

With standard Searcher, Screenasian, Resumematch and Head Hunter being cor-porate driven recruitment pro-grams ported from these recruit-ment zones to the Net.

Employers can also perform search, track candidates, short-list, pre-qualified personnel, and se-lect them for the interview to undertake new hiring initiatives.

Virtual Rendezvous

With an interactive nature, the Web today lies open to a new dimension for the employer and the employee through the Mon-ster of the leading career hubs who provide in-depth information about both the oppor-tunities and potential employees.

With facilities to scan and search the site's database by industry, company, skill set, area and location, Monster Board today has over 1,50,000 job postings from over 1,300 companies at their disposal.

As if that is not enough, it also allows a visit to the Resume City which is an online database of over 100,000 résumés accessible to all its clients, free of charge.

Monster Board, with Resum-ing and E-Recruiting has streamlined the staffing process. It helps by converting and filter-ing Resutrac's database for par-ticipation in interviews.

Companies like IBM have already taken the liberty to use this electronic medium of recruitment to find the right victim.

IBM has posted more than 10,000 job openings seg-mented by their IT skills set such as 3 lacs computorised job bank owned and operated by the US Labor department.

It has been a tool of time when com-panies were opening new global operations and are in the look out for international man-power. Baffling thousands of agency officials, the on-line method of branding would be an attractively time-consuming task.

Click and send has proved to be the solution for the HR managers of these aspiring companies.