"The challenge is to increase the manpower pool"

In the third session, Bhavin Shah, M&A and head
corporate development, SPI Tech said, manpower is one of the key elements of
growth or key elements of the company. "Any transaction that we do, any
company we evaluate, at least 50 percent of the value of the company is derived
from manpower, most people term it as cost, we term it as values," he said.
Focus goes on evaluating the whole process. The people in place, the management
team in place, the functional expertise at each level as well as the processes
in terms of recruitment, training, continuous improvement, motivation,
motivation plans, entire gamut of activities are looked into plays a key role in
any transaction.

Yogesh Patgaonkar, associate VP and head HR, Zensar said,
apart from the normal challenges that any company faces, is that on one hand you
have a crowd, you have profile of people for whom excitement matters, and who
want to look forwards to get job, they want to be happy and they want to be kept
happy. On the other side, the core of BPO business is also about extreme process
disciple, and extreme discipline in terms of security and the delivery quality.
Balancing these two was a big challenge, he said.

Panelists at the session on Manpower

Diana Christian, EVP training, Infowavz said, the fact
that we have a lot of people out there who are willing to work in our industry.
They come to work in an industry that they seem to have extremely high growth.
She said, that the BPO organization is fairly large today. In two or three years
we recruited about 5,000 people after screening around about a hundred thousand
peopl. One of the key challenges is actually the current education system in
India, she said, "China came into the sphere long time after us and they
have really done something about their school system."

Salil Agrawal, head of HR, head, telecom, IT and BPO
practice, ECS said, the first issue that the industry faces is how do you
keep getting the hundred thousand people if your selection is going to be at 5
percent. "How do you actually increase that pool and how do you actually
increase the 5 percent to may be 8 percent. That is one dimension that is a big
challenge to the industry as a whole and I don't think any individual
organization is away from this. The second huge issue is around the entire
context of attrition and the first issue is linked to the second and vise-versa.

Anuradha Rao, director HR Mphasis BPO Services said
"one thing we are practicing every day is to keep a smile on the face and
have loads of patience. In terms of the key challenges in the industry,
especially for HR, when we are talking about quality, we are talking about the
quality of resources, we are talking about those resources which are responsible
for recruitment and training, how much of time do we devote towards their
training, towards recruitment, towards their career development, because that is
one of the biggest challenges." The second thing was the security of all
employees within an organization, she said.