I have worked in various organizations ranging from startups where you need to buy napkins, salt and other materials and get the costs reimbursed, and companies who happen to be the largest or leading in their respective businesses.
Presently, as I write this article, I am working as a placement officer in an engineering college. So, functionally, I need to stay in constant contact with various types of companies for different streams.
The views I am presenting in this article are purely observational and don’t intend to proclaim or defame anything. The observations are obviously related to recruitment of fresh graduates and post-graduates.
I have seen and observed the HR (Human Resources) department from close quarters. Startups often don’t have them. They don’t need them initially and there is no point in spending money to run such a department. However, small, mid-sized and bigger organizations can’t survive without a good HR department. In fact, if the HR department is not effective, the success of organization is going to falter. Getting good employees, facilitating them with conducive environment, solving the question ‘how to retain key employees‘ by ensuring the retention rate with proactive strategies are all crucial functions performed by the HR department.
This is what I observed as a placement officer:
- Small companies often make promises but they don’t keep them. In order to build a name in the area, they go and conduct placement drives but due to lack of strategical approach, they are not able to fulfill the promise. It is better if they commit less but deliver their promises.
- Mid-sized companies waste a lot of time in recruiting new people. They are not able to maintain the ultra-high standards like bigger companies but at the same time, they can’t stoop to low standards or hurried-up processes. In my talks with various HR personnel, I have figured this out that they feel stressed and frustrated as they don’t good employees.
- Bigger companies recruit a large pool of freshers. In order to show that they are generating employment, they end up hooking students with high hopes but unrealized dreams. I have seen MNCs and very large organizations doing this on a regular basis. Almost half the number of total recruitment does not get joining.
- In fact, a very strange process was adopted by one of the companies: They conducted pan-India online test for recruitment. However, they could not manage it and did not offer joining letters to students even till the next year. Interestingly, they conducted the test next year also. What’s the point of doing this? You have not cleared your back-log and you are piling more? If you need employees, why don’t you ask the ones that you already selected. It can be easily seen that they have some obligations that they want to fulfill at least on paper.
Overall, the recruitment process of any organization sends waves of joy for prospective employees. But organizations should make sure that they don’t over-commit and even if they do, they try to clear the logs.
For startups, such lessons are crucial as if they want to make their business idea work, they can’t afford creative a bad name or generating hue-and-cry about not fulfilling their promises.
