HR Factors in a Slowing-Down Market

Industries and Moderation: -

• We all know that the industry is heading towards recession and we see organizations preparing themselves for a market slowdown.

• Slowdowns in specific industrial sectors have ensured that the Tech and IT industries do not remain untouched from negative sentiments.

• EdTech/Game Tech/Entertainment Tech/FinTech/Startup community drying out and there has been a lot of downward news recently.

Moonlighting:-

• During the peak of hiring, predominant industries built a lot of unreasonable expectations, such as, giving Work From Home, leading to increased reluctance of candidates/employees to relocate, etc., which now has given rise to a new phenomenon called “moonlighting” where employees are exploiting the opportunity by taking up multiple jobs at the same time.

• However, some large organizations like IBM, Wipro, Infosys have taken a very strong stand against moonlighting, which resulted in a lot of terminations. But there is still a large section of money-minded and self-centered software engineers who have zero work ethics, and their only agenda is to get Work From Home without any relocation, doing multiple jobs simultaneously, and working on their own terms.

• While, it will take some time for such folks to develop a realistic expectation, organizations cannot keep waiting for them to correct their ways. So, the alternative for organizations is to get into better HR Screening practices.

Better HR Screening:-

• Advise your recruiters to avoid shortlisting outstation candidates until and unless the pool availability is extremely limited, because it has been observed that candidates, no matter what, make tall claims to shop an offer and go ahead to renegotiate with their current employer. Moreover, their probability of relocation is also very low as this is the same community which is not willing to work from office in the same city, let alone willing to move outstation for work. So eventually, Hiring Managers see 80-90% candidate declines due to this.

• It’s crucial to ask your head-hunters to be extremely careful in analyzing, asking, and probing the candidates about existing offers in-hand, or other offers in process. If candidates are holding multiple offers, or multiple offers are in process, it is ideal to avoid such candidates because eventually those candidates turn it into an auction and put a lot of T&Cs, which again leads to a lot of negative conversions for the HRs.

• A lot of TAs drastically ignore HR Factors. For many job roles, a lot of attention is paid to a candidate’s stability, until and unless the required skills are super niche or super in-demand. So, employment stability is something that HRs should not ignore anyhow.

• Train your HRs to do effective negotiation of the location, expectation, etc. There should be no hesitation in probing or confronting the candidate, if needed.

• If the candidate is putting too many T&Cs in terms of salary expectation, job location, work from home, non-flexibility, non-availability, then advise your HRs to reject such candidates at their own level and refrain from processing the candidature further. Because, at last, quality is what yields and maximizes the end results.

Conclusion:-

There should be a reasonable amount of scrutiny on HR Factors going further.