Pink-slipped personnel find new takers in job market

Source: TheEconomicTimes
India’s pinkslip brigade, sitting out in the cold ever since last October as companies began axing jobs to cut through the financial

slowdown , is now becoming the hunting ground for firms in the telecom, pharma and consumer goods sectors as they look for inexpensive talent that suits their expansion plans.

Placement firms that ET spoke to said that the firms in these growth intensive sectors had taken it easy on hirings for almost six months and have now totalled up around 25,000 vacancies. For them, the pool of laid off people is a hunting ground for ‘industry neutral’ executives in functions such as human resource, finance, system administration, marketing and sales.

“Lower recruitment during the slowdown hasn’t helped the talent crisis in India, especially in fastgrowing sectors. Several such companies are evaluating the laidoff talent pool to hand-pick niche skills,” said Andrew Heard, Asia-Pac head of Watson Wyatt, a global human capital consulting firm.

Headhunters estimate the pool of laid-off talent in India from sectors like IT, retail, banking and financial service, textile and others could be as high as seven lakh. “Of this, at least 15% would be in white-collar roles, and are the prime target for low-cost talent acquisition,” said E Balaji, CEO of HR firm Ma Foi Management Consultant.

This is a significant transformation for Indian companies who are perceived to have a mindset problem when it comes to hiring people who have been laid off. “We do not differentiate among professionals who may have lost their job,” said Vsevolod Rozanov, president and CEO of telecom firm Sistema Shyam TeleServices (SSTL).

“In areas such as customer service, we are indeed looking for people from other sectors and even the laid-off pool. We can always train them for our needs,” said Mr Rozanov. SSTL currently has 1,600 people and plans to ramp it up to 3,000 by December as it expands to four-six new circles.

FMCG major Marico CEO (consumer products) Saugata Gupta said several of its exemployees who went for more ‘exciting’ roles and are now victims of the slowdown are coming back. “We are getting several such people from sectors like retail. It’s a good time to re-calibrate talent,” he said.

Companies such as Dabur, which had posted handsome quarterly results recently, are now building a talent bench across key functions to tide over the crunch. “Since we have been clocking double-digit growth rate every quarter, we don’t mind having some flab in critical functions,” said Dabur India head (HR) A Sudhakar.

Companies in the pharma sector, widely counted as recession-proof , say shortage of good talent is an issue not just in research functions but also in sales. According to Prabir Jha, global head for human resources at Dr Reddy’s Labs, getting the right mix of skills is a problem. “In such a case, the laid-off pool can throw up interesting profiles,” he said.

Was Motorola’s CFO fired over a presentation?

Source: indiatimes.com

It's a white-collar worker's nightmare: giving a presentation that gets you fired. It happened to the chief financial officer of Motorola Inc this year. And the lawsuit he filed afterward provides a rare peek into dysfunctional relationships at the top of a major company.

Motorola has gone so far as to claim it fired the CFO "for cause" — a term often reserved for suspected embezzlers — while the former executive says he was canned for blowing the whistle on big problems.

The case represents more trouble for the cell phone maker, which has been struggling with billion-dollar losses and laying off thousands of workers.

Paul Liska, 53, walked into a board subcommittee meeting January 28 and fired a broadside at the Schaumburg, Illionis-based company's ailing cell phone division. Liska said a board member told him the next morning that the presentation "sure did poke a stick into the hornet's nest."

That was probably Liska's intent. But the hornets that flew out from that nest went for him, not his intended target — the head of Motorola's cell phone division.

Not all of Liska's presentation can be seen in the public records accompanying his lawsuit. Some parts have been blotted out by Motorola so as not to reveal business secrets. Liska and the company declined to comment for this story, citing the litigation.

But in the revealed parts of the presentation, Liska pointed out to Motorola directors that the cell phone unit, Mobile Devices, missed its sales projection for the preceding three months. Then, he said, the projections for the current year were based on rosy assumptions. In addition, he attacked the unit for lacking a forecast for 2010.

He finished by warning that with each passing day, Mobile Devices was making commitments and decisions "that will be increasingly costly to unwind should the board later decide on a different strategy."

New Lucknow centre of TCS to employ 1,500

Country’s largest software services exporter, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), has opened a new development centre in Lucknow to develop solutions for global corporations and support the e-governance initiatives of Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand.

Spanning over 3 acres of land, the centre is company’s second largest IT establishment in UP after the TCS facility in Noida. The centre which has a capacity of 1,500 seats is the latest addition to the company’s Global Network Delivery Model (GNDMTM).

Wipro Tech ties up with Oracle

Wipro Technologies said on Monday that its Business Process Outsourcing divison, Wipro BPO has partnered with Oracle for 'best-of-breed HR platform solutions.'

Wipro has also selected The Hackett Group, a global strategic advisory firm, to provide empirical data, best practices and world-class performance insights on the development of its innovative bundled solution platform, it said in a release here.

The solution simPlify, allows employers to reduce and control cost as it provides an opportunity to centralise and standardise processes while eliminating duplicative management structures.

The solution has the ability to leverage a many-to-one technology capability, while maximising service quality and HR customer satisfaction.

Outsourcing demand to pick up by early 2010: Infosys CFO

Infosys Technologies expects outsourcing demand to revive in early 2010, but the current business environment was challenging as slowing world economy crimped spending, its chief financial officer said.

India’s second-largest software services exporter is looking to spend between $200 million to $300 million to acquire firms and is sharpening its focus on newer markets such as Australia, India and China to boost growth, V Balakrishnan said.

Shares in India’s top outsourcers such as TCS, Infosys and Wipro have soared in recent weeks on hopes of a revival in sluggish business momentum later this year, but Balakrishnan was cautious about such a possibility.
“At the macro level there is some confidence back, people are slightly more comfortable, but on the ground things are still the same,” he said, referring to the global economic downturn that has battered information technology spending.

“People want a clear direction that there could be an economic recovery for them to get confidence and start spending. That is some way to go,” Balakrishnan said at the Global Technology Summit in Bangalore.

Last month, Infosys forecast its first decline in annual revenue as global demand for outsourcing slowed in a harsh economic climate, halting growth for India's once burgeoning technology services sector.

India’s $60 billion IT outsourcing sector, which provides services from software coding to managing computer networks and call centres, faces weak demand and rising competition from global rivals such as IBM and Accenture.
Balakrishnan said the pricing environment remained challenging for Nasdaq-listed Infosys, which counts Goldman Sachs, Philips Electronics, and BT Group Plc among its clients.

SumTotal to double revenues via SaaS

With the economic downturn forcing companies to look more seriously at alternative ways to invest in IT infrastructure upgrades, SumTotal Systems Inc, a US-based provider of talent development solutions that has its global development in Hyderabad, is shifting its focus on providing software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based offerings globally.

“Our primary target is small and medium enterprises, especially in developing countries like India and China where SaaS will be a good model to adopt as it gives low cost of ownership and high return on investments. As organisations in these developing countries are less mature, it makes sense for them to buy subscription of these applications versus upfront payment towards software licenses, databases, hardware and have a dedicated team to manage the system,” Anupam Pahuja, managing director (India), SumTotal Systems, told Business Standard.