Talent Woes Of IT/Telecom Sector

Industry experts highlight the talent woes faced by them and share some possible strategies to overcome them.

Rahul Raj, TimesJobs.com Bureau

IT/Telecom is one of the leading employment generators in the country. Handling a large talent pool, can never be easy. As the industry grows, the challenges also evolve. The sector has to continually come up with innovative solutions and keep updating them, to overcome their manpower woes. Let’s find out some of the key challenges faced by the IT/Telecom sector, and the possible solutions for them.

According to Ramana Vemuri, VP-People, Process and Operations, Cigniti Technologies, the major challenge faced by them is to find the right talent that is compatible with company’s culture. This requires a combination of skill, resourcefulness and brand recall. “Hiring and retaining top talent is another challenge that demands continuous engagement. Ensuring adequate growth opportunities in the chosen areas of specialization is the biggest employee engagement challenge that companies are facing,” he stated.

According to him, some possible strategies to overcome the mentioned challenges are:

·         Adoption of social recruiting through highly intelligent platforms, which can look at analytics and help clone talent, is one of the best initiatives to source great talent

·         A key engagement strategy is to ensure continuous investments that upgrade your talent’s skill sets

·         Focus on leadership development and efforts to maintain the work-life balance will not only retain talent but also enrich the work environment

·         Global thought leaders and technology specialists in mentor roles will attract the younger lot to set pragmatic goals and realize their potential. This helps in crafting a harmonious relationship between the employer and the employee

Rajeeb Biswas, director-HR, Q3 Technologies, laid down some key challenges faced by them:

·         Improving employee retention

·         Difficulty in recruiting quality candidates

·         Increased competition

·         Being proactive and hiring within timelines to meet business needs

·         Hiring of Java and .NET professionals between 3-8 years of experience remains a challenge, due     to increasing demand in quality IT professionals

He believes the possible solutions could be to adopt a mixed bag of conventional, vintage and proactive hiring practices:

·         Designing innovative job posting (internal and external)

·         Using different search engines

·         Encouraging employee referrals with various reward mechanisms

·         Using social networking websites 

Sunil Goel, managing director, GlobalHunt, believes that skill deficit is a major crisis plaguing the IT/Telecom sector. The current education system is not equipped enough to scale-up the employability quotient of candidates, to match the industry requirements. “It is important that the industry starts adopting colleges and universities and train the students based on the organization's need and requirements. This would really help plug-in the skills gap,” he said.