Indian Cos. tap foreign resumes

By Kavita Chandran

BANGALORE (Reuters) -- India continues to hire and train for its growing information technology industry, but a talent shortage is forcing it to look overseas.

"We're hiring from campuses in the U.S. and Europe where we can hire people from the local environment," said Suresh Senapaty, Wipro Ltd (WIPR.BO: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) CFO at a television interview during the Reuters India Investment Summit in Bangalore on Friday.

"We get them to Wipro, get them to India, get them to understand senior leadership and do the packaged induction program," he said, adding that they go back after a two-week program.

Supplemental hiring, or hiring employees in and from America to do jobs offshored to India from the U.S., is becoming an option for a lot of Indian companies.

While some companies choose to let these foreign employees work from their respective home base and pay them more than their counterparts to compensate for the cost of living, others relocate them to India with hefty packages.

One of the main reasons for supplemental hiring is to have a diversified global footprint and also make customers comfortable that they are dealing with a local person who understands their needs, said Senapaty.

"We are seeing a reverse trend trickle right now of people around the world wanting to work in India," said S. Gopalakrishnan, Chief Executive of Infosys Ltd. (INFY.BO: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), India's second largest software exporter that also runs an internship program for 136 students from universities abroad, including MIT and Stanford.

Hiring from abroad may also mean that companies are looking at various levels of work ethics and professionalism.

"Weakening work ethics is a concern," said Avinash Vashistha, CEO of Tholons Inc, an outsourcing advisory firm in India, who thinks the amount of IT employees on contracts without projects, or bench strength, is huge and will have to change as companies stop hiring more than they need.

CV/RESUME FORGERY

There are over 450,000 technical graduates every year in India and companies like Infosys received about 1.3 million job applications in the last 12 months, of which 30,000 got offer letters.

Unfortunately, not all of the applications can be trusted.

A lot of freshers forge their resumes with work experience in non-existing firms, names of which are slowly being identified and blacklisted by companies like Wipro.

"It is rather unfortunate because the pressure from society for people to get into this IT industry, to get into a global career is making them do it," said Infosys' S. Gopalakrishnan. "I feel bad about it. We have to put processes in place to filter this out."

Nasscom (National Association of Software and Service Companies) launched the National Skills Registry (NSR), a database of all industry employees, to prevent any recruitment fraud.  Continued...