IT's been showcased as India's biggest success story in the post-reforms era. IT's success story has meant that any number of private individuals and firms have launched IT courses at new engineering colleges(helped by the governement's policies on liberalising and privatising education), places where sometimes infrastrcuture is non-existent. The middle class takes bank loans to educate their childen in these 'cattle sheds' in the hope that their children might live better than them. IT firms, like most corporates recruit through campus placements. My grouse is about the kind of people they recruit and the kind of colleges from where they recruit candidates:
- IT firms recruit people from all backgrounds. For instance, B.Tech (engineers) people from any stream like electronics, civil, mechanical, chemical are recruited along with people with a B.Tech in Computer Science/IT. Now, how do you equate the two? There is no advanatge to being a Computer Scienec expert if you want to work in the It industry. Would IT companies not have to invest more time and money in training people from other streams? Wouldn't people from other streams get jobs in their relative fields? At least when the recession happened, IT firms should have started calling CS graduates (placed through campus interviews) before they called people from other streams. This way they could have saved money and time on training. I mean, supposedly, for these companies, profit is everything. Instead, some companies drew lots to decide which candidates to take! Also, they should have protected their own (CS graduates) during hard times, because people from other streams had other options. A mechanical engineer can always get a job in a company which makes turbines, but can a Software engineer get a job there?
- Now, to campus placements. HR from different companies scout for talent every year. Now there are two different types f colleges in India, well, at least in Kerala: 1) govt/ govt-aided colleges and 2) private colleges affiliated to one of the universites in Kerala. Most students in the first set of colleges are ones who have performed well in studies ( I do have problems with the Indian system of learning by rote and methods of evaluation, but that can be the topic for another post), have passed the entrance exam conducted by the goverenment and have got seats on merit(as defined by the government). So, you would obviously think these students have a better chance of getting placed. Well, you are wrong again! This is because govt/govt-aided colleges do not have properly functioning placement cells and can't be bothered to run around talking to HR people from different companies. You see, they have no incentives to do so. On the other hand, private colleges go all out to woo HR people because they can get more students in the next academic year if they say all their students got placed. More students=more profits. It is that simple! So, again the more intelligent students in Govt/aided colleges lose out. (Some students in private colleges are those who are able to pay the huge fees demanded by these colleges, some of whom are again merely doing the course till they get married or take over papa's business!)
- Now, some IT firms being very careful about their potential recruits set benchmarks for candidates to be able to apply for their firms. These benchmarks usually correspond to marks received so far during the B. Tech course. One leading IT firm for instance asks for 60% marks. A very good criterion indeed! But can marks alone be used to judge a candidate's intelligence? 1) Some universities give more marks, others less. It is like comaparing the Class 10 marks (in my time, now there are grades) of a CBSE student with that of someone who's passed the SSLC exam. The whole world knows that an average student can score much higher in the SSLC exam than a relatively more intelligent student sitting for the CBSE boards. 2) In Kerala at least the system of evaluation in engineering is that the student is evaluated both internally and externally. So what happens is that private colleges give more marks to their students during the internal exams so that even if a student scores a little less in the external exam, it does not affect his/her percentile much (and of course, the college can sell more seats based on the high scores achieved by past students). All things considered, can marks be a criterion then for judging someone?
- Many 2008 engineering pass-outs who got placed are yet to receive their Date of Joining. Many companies have not cancelled their offer letters and so these people live in the hope that the company will call them. This is also because these comapnies routinely send an auto-generated email to recruits telling them that they will get their DOJ soon. In fact, an HP company has started taking 2009 recruits without taking in all its 2008 recruits! Is this not cheating? Shouldn't the company at last have cancelled the offer lettters to 2008 recruits before it did this? Isn't that norml courtesty? What do these HR people learn in their MBA programmes anyway? The government of course will not take any action becasue it cannot and will not interfere in a company's recruitment process and moreover offer letters do not have any legal standing.
- I do hope some HR person will read this and think!
