“If we weren't still hiring great people and pushing ahead at full speed, it would be easy to fall behind and become a mediocre company,” commented Bill Gates sometime back. Information Technology firms have always faced greater challenges than other industries in hiring talent with its space being more lucrative prompting maddening job hopping and poaching amongst employees. Hence more and more IT companies are looking at outsourcing their recruitment needs to specialists. Their services are sought to hire right candidates aligned with the organizational culture and goals thereby offsetting attrition to a reasonable degree.

On the firmament of IT hiring in India, New Delhi based and 1993 founded New Era India Consultancy, an HR & recruitment solution provider with multi domain expertise, is making rapid strides. This is validated by Microsoft IDC’s award for maximum professional hire 2007 to New Era, which also had earlier won Freescale’s award for best performance of 2006 towards hiring, and Texas Instruments award for best performance of 2006 recently. “New Era’s award winning best practices which have worked in its favour include improving the client’s time to hire, identification of the best talent, specialized consulting even on niche requirements, latest methodologies and framework support for evaluation, working closely as extended HR arm of clients, provide verifiable metrics and reducing client cost,” says Ajay Dutt, Vice President, New Era.

Over 280 New Era recruiters involved in Executive Search; service global deliveries with offices in Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, Dubai and Singapore. Business interests are spread across India, South East Asia, U.S. and Europe. The prevailing vision of the company is to become the largest IT recruitment organization in India in terms of revenue. In 1997 it branched into three verticals—IT, non-IT and ITeS after four years of being a general recruitment firm. The IT presence of the company is within five domains—semiconductor, storage, networking, telecom and applications across India. The broad range of human resource solutions offered include Executive Search Worldwide, Recruitment Process Outsourcing, Campus Hiring, Bulk Staffing Solutions, Employer Branding and Behavioral Training.

Top-level talent for clients is handled through the CRC (Critical Recruitment Cell) Blue—where the stature of positions filled read as, Engineering Manager, Vice President, Director and Managing Director. Recently for a client in Romania, New Era recruited around 65 percent of the top-level talent. Microsoft, Texas Instruments, Philips, Polaris, Yahoo! FreeScale, ING Vysya, Novell and others feature in the company’s client roll. “Our clients’ confidence in us has enabled a great rapport with them,” mentions Dutt, on New Era’s consistent supply of great talent to their clients, which matches with their requirements. Clients operating in India with headquarters in the U.S. have outsourced entire HR operations to the company. The IITs, RECs and NITs are the educational institutions on New Era’s radar for recruiting top quality Indian talent. “The large number of highly qualified Indians returning from the U.S. and the upward number of foreign firms setting up bases in India makes the present opportunity here pretty exciting for New Era,” voices Dutt.

Another golden opportunity for New Era is the fabrication of India or to put it simply more and more installation of semicon fabs in India, taking for example the Nokia fab in Chennai. The company seeks to capitalize on the requirement of personnel for these new ‘fab’ulous ventures and is bullish about its growth through such new initiatives happening in the Indian IT industry. Growth of fabs would mean, growth parallely in other related domains. For example there would be growth for process engineering on one side and hardware engineering on the other side as demand for machinery within fabs is upped.

For the upside to its growth, New Era also faces challenges in their recruitment processes for clients, from online portals especially if the portals have duplicate profiles of candidates already existing with New Era. This creates problems, wherein the clients of New Era, sometimes search its recommended names in other job portals and recruit them from theses portals at a lesser cost, leaving New Era high and dry. Steps are being taken to combat this tight spot.

There are challenges to invite opportunities and every opportunity is a challenge. And New Era seeks to grow and prosper in this era of knowledge and communication opportunities.

PANEL:

New Era's Bouquet of Services include:
· Talent Management Services
· Executive Search Worldwide (Top Level)
· Talent Mapping & Compensation Benchmarking
· Recruitment Branding
· Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO)
· Turnkey lateral recruitment
· Campus hiring

Present Domain Expertise of New Era:
· IT & ITeS
· Telecom
· BFSI
· Healthcare & Pharma
· Services Sector (Hotel, Tourism, Travel, Aviation and Media)