Anand Krishna’s musings

Over the last decade or so, leading global executive search majors like Egon Zehnder, Spencer Stuart, Stanton Chase and many others have entered the Indian market, in pursuit of business opportunities created by two major trends:

1. MNCs setting up shop in India, looking for local managerial talent at the senior and middle level. It must be said that increasingly, MNCs are also looking for talent to run their businesses outside India as well.
2. Indian businesses globalizing, and consequently looking for talent from around the world- not just for their India operations, but also for business overseas.

But typically, these top tier executive search firms only work to fill the creme-de-la-creme of openings. They research their clients’ needs thoroughly, develop a list of attributes and skills expected and then research potential candidates- often from very different industries as well.  These firms develop a dossier on the candidates and that is then used by the client (in collaboration with the search firm) to arrive at a shortlist and thereafter, make the final selections. When done ell, the process is discreet, effective and increases the odds of finding a good match for the position on hand.

But like every other market in India, the market for search services is also fragmented and fairly well segmented. There are thus many smaller firms (many of whom are one-person operations) that adopt a different approach to sourcing talent. Not for them the finesse of research, dossiers and so on. Their modus operandi seems to be to search job portals like Monster and Naukri for resumes with specific key words and then simply shoot out e-mails or call. This is not to say that this approach does not yield results; however, it can have the immediate effect of annoying the recipient of the mail if the position is grossly not compatible with the experience/profile. I know how I reacted when I got a mail asking if I was interested in a BPO job that required working in shifts. If the sender of the e-mail had spent 2 minutes glancing over my resume, s/he would have discovered that I had 18 yeas of middle/senior management experience and was a far cry from what his/her client was seeking- graduates with less than 1 year experience!

Dear Placement Consultants- every resume in your database is an executive waiting to be placed- or better still, a potential customer. Please treat them with care. And please read through the resume/profile rather than just relying on whether the resume includes words like “experience”, “manager” and “industry”!