WWJ.COM PROJECT PREPARE

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To All Consultants Mar. 17, 2004

Project PREPARE

(Our Competitive Advantage)

It is quite possible that when you send a candidate for interview with your client, candidates recommended by other placement agencies (our competitors) are also waiting to be interviewed for the same position.

So, how do we ensure that, our candidate gets selected, & even if he is no better than the candidates referred to by our competitors?

Of course, there is no way to ensure - but there is a way to increase the "probability" considerably.

It is quite simple.

Ask our candidate to thoroughly "research" our client-company before appearing for the interview.

Even for that one hour, if he can muster/display an amazing "knowledge/Info" about the client-company, then he cannot fail to impress the interviewers.

He must know more about the client-company than the interviewing executives themselves!

In my 45 years, I have come across thousands of candidates, who cannot proceed beyond 4/5 sentences, when I ask them, "What do you know about our Company?"

One can forgive such stark ignorance at junior levels, but, what message is a Senior executive conveying to the

interviewer, with such a response?

I suppose, he is trying to tell the interviewer,

"Look, I am a very busy man and I am not all that interested, either in your Company or in your job."

Now contrast this with a candidate who can tell you all about your Company's

Products/Services

Plant locations

Joint Ventures/Technical Collaborations

Names of Senior Executives

Sales Turnover & Compound growth

Financial Ratios

Share-price movement

etc etc.

If I was an interviewer and discover that the Candidate knows more about my Company than I do so myself,

that would have a devastating effect on me!

I suppose, all Senior Executive candidates realize the importance of being "knowledgeable" about their prospective employer. There problem is, where & how to get hold of such client-company data.

This is where you come into the picture.

You can use "HARVESTER" to dig up info/data about the company - then email it to your candidates.

All you have to do, is to enter "website www.Companyname.com" (Company URL) +

"About Us"

or

"Products/Services"

or

"Company History"

Then hit "EXTRACT" button.

Then email the extracted links/pages to your candidate with following message: -

Dear Sir/Madam:

We have organised your interview.

Enclosed find info/data links about the client-company.

It would be in your interest to study this material thoroughly before going to the interview. Such a preparedness would dramatically increase your competitive advantage vis-a-vis other candidates. With this knowledge you would be in a position to impress the interviewers and be in a much better negotiating position in respect of salary/designation etc.

Wishing you good luck with regards

To facilitate your job of searching client-company info/data, within 2/3 weeks, Deepa will add to the HARVESTER,

URLs of 1000 large Corporate websites

URLs of 40/50 magazines/newspapers where news-items keep appearing regarding these 1000 Companies.

In the meantime, I am evaluating the possibility of subscribing to CMIE's products, PROWESS and CAPEX, which provide structured data/reports for some 2000/3000 large companies. This subscription may cost about Rs. 1 lakh/year, but I think, we can recover it many times over, if, as a result, we are able to place 10 more candidates during 2004/05.

HCP

cc: Abhi

cc: Vikram

cc: Deepa for doing the needful.

cc: Ashutosh

 

Kartavya

Abhi

Inder

Vicky

28/06/03

Project PREPARE.

We are in the business of solving (providing solutions -) recruitment-related problems, whether such problems are faced by recruiters or by jobseekers.

One such problem - and a quite CRITICAL too - faced by jobseekers is to prepare themselves well for an interview. Everything hinges around their "preparedness". If they are well-prepared, they will be able to impress the recruiters - and their probability of landing the job goes up.

Jobseekers need to prepare (before the interview) in following areas:

A deep/current knowledge about the Company (where they are appearing for interview)

A reasonable knowledge of the "Industry" in which that Company is operating (- this knowledge/preparedness is crucial for Senior positions)

Knowledge/Skills of "how to behave" during the interview, how to speak/sit/listen/ask/dress/answer etc. in front of recruitment-panel.

"Subject/Topic/Function" Knowledge

How much do you know of the "function" in which you claim to be a specialist/expert?

This last one is very vast and most difficult to impart to a candidate and we will keep out of this for next $2/3$ years. Of course, we can always tie-up with a number of websites/webservices, which offer ONLINE, coaching/learning/testing to jobseekers. We do not need to re-invent the wheel! Nothing that we may try to develop inhouse, can come anywhere close to what experts - in - the - respective fields, have already developed.

Similarly, there are dozens of (HR related) websites, offering all kinds of "tips/advice" on how candidates should conduct themselves during an interview. Once again, in this area too, we should stop at providing "Links" to appropriate websites/webservices.

But it is item #1 (Company-related info/data), where jobseekers have none/hardly any, web-based resources, to refer to.

Organisations like CMIE/Indiainfoline/Matrix etc do have very valuable info on large no. of companies, but this is only available to registered (Corporate?) subscribers, who have to shell-out, Rs. 50K - 100K per year to "access" this data - and of course, download, if desired.

No individual jobseeker can afford this price.

But Recruit-Gum can!

We can subscribe to these "services" & download "DATA-SHEETS" for thousands of Companies on our local server. We can do this (downloading) on a continuous basis, so that no "Company Datasheet" is more than 6 months old.

Now, how to "leverage" this investment/this subscription, to our advantage - and to jobseekers' advantage?

As follows:

Everytime, a recruiter uses "Interactive Response Page" to communicate to a jobseeker, we get to know

WHO (which jobseeker), is going to be interviewed,

by WHOM (which Company), and

WHEN (Date/time), and for

WHAT (position/vacancy)

Now all we need to do, is to pick-up from our CORPORATE DATABASE, the "DATA-SHEET" of that Company and email it to the concerned candidate, along with a covering letter, wishing him/her "Good luck" in the interview! This process MUST BE AUTOMATED (no human intervention at all).

If a recruiter calls 10 candidates (using our Interactive Response Page) for same vacancy/position (even on different dates), we should confine ourselves to sending "COMPANY DATA-SHEET" to only the top/best 3 candidates (as per their percentile Score). We want to coach/prepare top 3 candidates only - much like coaching-classes, not admitting students who have scored less than 60% in SSC/$12^{\text{th}}$ std!! Because such "admission-rule" improves the chances of students of that coaching-class, scoring $90\% - 95\%$ and thereby increasing the "Reputation" of that coaching-class!

It is no different with us!

We want to ensure that, at least one/two (out of the three) of OUR candidates are able to impress the recruitment-panel, so much with their "deep/current" knowledge of the Company that they are bound to get "shortlisted". Eventually, one of these 3, will get appointed.

When this happens, the candidate who gets appointed (

(or even get shortlisted) becomes our greatest Salesman! From that point onwards, he would "market" RecruitGum/ImageBuilder to his friends/colleagues. Remember Tom Peters advice on "Word-of-Mouth marketing"? Not only, it is the cheapest but it is most "trusted/credible" (because the praise comes from a friend/colleague) and, therefore most "Lasting".

Every shortlisted/appointed candidate would credit our "Company Datasheet" with his success and become our BRAND AMBASSADOR! And when we get thousands of Brand Ambassadors, we don't need to advertise RecruitGum/ImageBuilder.

From my 44 years of experience, I can tell you that nothing impresses a recruiter more than the dazzling display of his own Company's knowledge by a Candidate!

Imagine a Candidate, telling you all about your Company's

Products/Services/Market share

Factories/Branches

Sales Turnover/Financial Ratios/EPS/Mkt Cap/Dividends/$D:\text{E}q.$

Technical Collaborations/Joint Ventures

Names of Directors

Cost of Production/Inventory Turnover ratios/Royalty-payments

Exports/Imports

Manpower Costs & their $5$ year trends/Interest costs

of L&T

CMIE's datasheet (downloadable under PROWESS for Rs. $50\text{k}/\text{yr}$) runs into $30$ pages! Can you think of any other marketing initiative that is so cheap - and so CERTAIN TO SUCCEED?

[Signature]

28/06/03