Are you being served?

In an employee-driven market, some service sector companies are trying to work their way around the acute talent crunch.

You must be joking." K Ramkumar is completely serious. "There is no human resource crunch in India. The talent issue is a lame excuse," declares the chief human resources officer, ICICI Bank.

That may be flying in the face of all conventional wisdom, but Ramkumar isn't the only one to believe there is no dearth of "employable" people in India.

Hear H N Shrinivas, senior vice president, human resources, Taj Group of Hotels: "There is no talent shortage in India. In fact, we are among the few countries in the world with a surplus of raw talent."

"Raw talent" is a new one for the books, but it is precisely what keeps HR heads of some service industries optimistic, at a time when most corporate chieftains are busy predicting that the next world war will be fought over talent. A growing tribe of companies are taking small, yet sustainable, steps to counter the paucity of people (it does exist), especially in the services sector.

Most services industries are growing at over 20 per cent, compared to the overall economy's under-9 per cent. With that explosive growth comes a relentless thirst for manpower. Consider the banking sector.

In 2000, the sector employed about 800,000 professionals. By 2007, that number had gone up to 1.2 million and industry estimates place the manpower demand at 1.6-1.7 million by 2012. The hospitality and tourism industry isn't much different.

Between 2007 and 2017, India-bound tourism is expected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.9 per cent, according to estimates by the World Travel and Tourism Council.

The sector employs close to 42 million people, but faces attrition rates of close to 30 per cent. And even as India added over 67 million new cellular phone connections last year, the telecom industry is losing people at 30-40 per cent.

Most companies tackling employee exodus have tried the usual strategies to hold them back "" out-of-turn promotions and pay hikes, flexible timings, greater empowerment and interaction. Now, they are throwing out the rule book and are banking on more unconventional tactics.

So, fluency in English "" once a necessary condition "" is no longer the primary requirement for employment in some banks, and if you're from a semi-urban area, you probably stand a better chance of working in a five-star hotel. Take a look.

Increasing bankwidth
For ICICI Bank, it all started with a small but important realisation. "Often, we find that the requirement for the job is overstated," says Ramkumar. On occasions, India's second-largest bank found that employees with post-graduate qualifications were doing jobs that could be easily handled by an undergraduate "" which meant the post-grad worker could all too easily quit in frustration.

That is when the bank decided to rationalise its requirement to hire from graduate colleges, tie up with universities and even get into recruitment agreements with training companies like NIIT.

The second pillar of ICICI's strategy was to move recruitment away from an urban-centric focus to scanning the entire country, which automatically expanded the pool of available talent. The biggest change, though, came last year, when the bank de-emphasised English as a primary language skill.

The argument in favour: the average retail customer speaks the language of the region and the customer intimacy created by speaking that language was equal, if not far superior, to that created by speaking

English. "We do not require Shakespearean or Victorian skills in English. The instant you take away proficiency in English and instead focus on comprehension of English, the potential in semi-urban and rural India opens up," says Ramkumar.

Axis Bank (earlier UTI Bank) agrees with that thinking. S Bhattacharya, president, human resources, Axis Bank points out that even customer needs in rural areas are much different from urban areas. "In rural areas, customers prefer spending time in the bank to become more comfortable with it. In cities, customers prefer to walk out fast," he says.

Naturally, then, both formats require different service standards. Hence, the bank is trying to cater to specific needs of semi-urban customers and ensure that employees are adequately trained to meet service standards, like detailed explanation of procedures and so on.

It's not just the banks, of course. Even the hospitality sector believes there are advantages to hiring certain groups of employees "" especially for housekeeping duties "" from non-urban areas. Both the Taj and Oberoi group recruit from a mix of metro and tier-II towns.

"Our experience has been that the attitudes and values of employees from semi-urban centres is far better," says Shrinivas. "Skills can be imparted, attitude is ingrained," agrees an Oberoi Group's spokesman.

Airtel, on the other hand, defines its recruitment policy according to the needs of different telecom circles. Still, the company is arriving at one common language to identify and promote talent across the organisation.

"When an organisation grows extremely fast, it becomes a challenge to have a similar understanding of the parameters of talent across the group. We are concentrating on that front," says Krishnamurthy Shankar, director, human resources, Bharti Airtel. The company, for instance, adheres to a five-point competency-based framework on which people are assessed for recruitment, appraisals and retention.

Smart investments
As service industries mine for prospective employees in what management guru and Harvard don Krishna Palepu calls "the next concentric layer of the Indian market", the strategic challenge is in ensuring that recruits are job-ready. Even hospitality, which unlike the banking industry, has more employment-oriented training schools, Shrinivas points out that prospective candidates are only 50 per cent job-ready.  That's because the service architecture is different in different categories of hotels (budget, luxury and so on) and the syllabii do not keep pace with the changes. "There is a huge vocational training gap," agrees Ramkumar.  That is because there is no time-tested training model in the services sector comparable to what the ITI (Industrial Training Institutes) contribute for the manufacturing sector. Of course, that doesn't stop services companies from trying to replicate that model.  Hotel management schools like the Oberoi Centre of Learning and Development and the Indian Institute of Hotel Management, run by the Taj group in Aurangabad, have been around for years. But that's not nearly enough to meet the escalating demand for people.  Which is why the Oberoi Group introduced a three-year programme called Systematic Training and Education Programme (STEP), the course trains college drop-outs in kitchen and other hotel operations.  Students are simultaneously enrolled in an all-expenses paid Bachelor of Tourism Studies (BTS) degree from the Indira Gandhi National Open University. The first batch of STEP graduates joined the industry last year.  Similarly, Taj Hotels has established 15 centres across the country to impart training in non-executive jobs. Called Craft Centres, these institutions run six-month programmes in skills ranging from housekeeping to salon services. "With proactive and systematic training initiatives, we can release a stream of talent into the operations," says Shrinivas.  In the banking sector, meanwhile, ICICI Bank has latched onto the ITI model. In September 2007, the bank tied up with Manipal Academy to launch a co-branded academy of banking and finance.  The "captive centre" runs a year-long probationary officers' programme positioned as "three years to become a graduate, but one year to become a first-level manager". Over 100,000 candidates appeared for the entrance test (designed on the lines of the Common Aptitude Test for MBA programmes), of which 1,000 have been selected for the first batch.  "We decided to offer a bridge course to offer training in sales and service operational skills to create a ready-to-deploy workforce base in the country. We will teach banking not as a theory, but as a vocation," says Ramkumar.  The bank has also tied up with NIIT to set up the Institute of Finance, Banking and Insurance, which offers programmes in banking operations, and is working with Delhi University and Osmania University to develop curricula for courses on banking. Naturally, then, recruitment opportunities from these institutions is increasing.  Flow the leaders
Recruiting large numbers is not enough. It is also important to keep the flock together. Which is why service industry majors are also focusing on developing an effective leadership pipeline. "You get more bang for your buck if you develop good leaders," declares Shankar of Bharti Airtel. Keeping that in mind, the company organises leadership development modules for its top 200-300 executives.  Recently, senior executives attended a week-long, customised programme at the Insead business school that focused on growing in the current competitive environment. Bharti also helps potential leaders choose their career path (such as heading a circle or a given business unit) and builds that expertise into them.  The Taj Group's strategy to build a succession pipeline is somewhat different. It divides the roles of its middle management into "critical" and "important", moving promising executives from important to critical functions on the basis of their performance in their current assignment.  For Axis Bank, employee attraction surveys conducted every year indicated that employees' mainly desired to be employable at all times. The bank now encourages employees to apply for internal postings, even if it's a new role.  For example, vacancies are first advertised internally and after assessing if the applicant is fit for the post, the particular employee is transferred. "Employees prefer change of roles to ensure their job stays enriched," says Bhattacharya.  Also, companies are becoming more tolerant of mistakes. "People at every level must be empowered, instilling in them a sense of ownership. Mistakes do occur. But when people are empowered, they can turn a lapse into a new service opportunity," says an Oberoi spokesperson. Bhattacharya and Ramkumar agree that well-meaning mistakes will be tolerated. And they are serious.