Finding Skilled Manpower the Web 2.0 Way

I'm reminded of this quote from the ancientmariner Samuel Taylor Coleridge's

poem every time I hear about the shortage of skilled manpower in India.

Sadly, I've been hearing of it too frequently from too many people lately.

This is rather interesting, considering that most jobsites today are overflowing

with resumes.

A quick check on monster.com revealed that they have over 1.2 Crore resumes!

Naukri claims that you can reach over 12million job seekers, and likewise for

other job sites. So one thing for sure is that thereare enough people and jobs

around. In fact, people today walk around with multiple job offers in their

hands, and bargain for the best possible salary from their prospectiveemployers.

Why then is it still so difficult to find the right candidate?

A close friend in the HR department of a company told me that it's not as if

you can't find resumes on job sites. You'll find plenty of them. The problem is

in finding the right candidates for the core functions of the com-pany. Either

they just don't fit the bill, or if they do, then they demand a mammoth salary.

So the only alternative is to go through head hunters or HR consultants.

Recentlyhowever, a third channel has been slowly gaining the attention of HR

heads and even the head hunters themselves-the Web 2.0enabled social networking

sites. Several new opportunities have opened up there.

One such site, Linked In for instance, specializes in creating networks of

professionals. Part of their tagline itself reads “dis-cover jobs and business

opportunities”. With their claim of having more than 19 mil-lion registered

users, you have to believe them. Another site, Jobster.com has intro-duced a

feature that helps organizations build and manage their own talent networks,

which basically works on promoting referrals from new candidates or from the top

performers of the company.

Similarly, other social networking sites like Face book, You Tube, Orkut, etc

also have their own advantages. Since people don't come to these sites hunting

for jobs, but only to socialize, a smart recruiter can actually find the perfect

candidates there. This of ourse is good for both the recruiter and the person

being recruited. Talent can even be found on forums that have specific

communities such as marketing, gamers, etc.

This is still a relatively new channel for recruiting the right talent, so we

haven' theard any major successes or failures to this approach yet. But if you

have any experiences to share, then do let me know.

Incidentally, starting this month, we'll have a regular section on IT

careers, in which we'll be covering the hot opportunities in IT, certifications

you can do, skill sets to build up, training, and much more.