As legions of economic studies predict that India will be among the top economic powers in the world within the next 20 or so years, corporations are increasingly turning to recruitment agencies for hiring people to work with them. “Twenty years ago there would have been few who would have thought of placement consultants in India. But today the recruitment industry has achieved significance as a career option,” says professor Vidyanand Jha of the Behavioural Science Group at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. Jha’s assertion came during a meeting called “Recruitment: New Challenges and Solutions,” organised at the Rotary Sadan in Calcutta on January 24, 2007.

Headhunters are now in high demand all over India and there are almost 3,000 placement consultants in the country. The nature of hiring people for industry seems to be changing. Gone are the days when one could apply to a limited number of companies and stick on almost for life. The nature of jobs offered has evolved with the advent of business process outsourcing (BPO) companies and with the increase in the number of part-time and temporary jobs. The scope for making a career in the recruitment industry has never been brighter. “There is a huge requirement of people that the recruitment industry can cater to,” says S.B. Ganguly, chairman and chief executive officer of Exide Industries Limited in Calcutta.

RP. Yadav, founder and managing director of Genius Consultants in Calcutta, says, “The recruitment industry in India is estimated to be worth $1.5 billion and rivals the advertising industry.” He states that recruitment takes places at the executive, selection and staffing levels. While the search for executive level employees is principally based on networking, selection level employee hunts are based on the data they provide.

What are the requirements of a good headhunter? “I would say that academic credentials are really not of much importance for those who wish to make a career in headhunting,” explains Siddhartha Vardarajan, chief human resource officer of Quattro, a BPO company. He says that a good recruiter has to be a good human being who can empathise with the needs and expectations of clients as well as prospective employees.

But Yadav says, “It helps to have a graduate degree and a postgraduate one is even better.” An official of ABC Consultants also mentions that engineers and MBAs are particularly useful in hiring individuals for their professions.

“Analytical skills, reasoning and communication, along with enormous patience are necessary to be a successful recruiter,” says Yadav. The executive director of the Executive Recruiters Association, B.R. Muralidharan, says that those who want to become recruiters must always be ethical.

A headhunter has to be acutely aware of the nature of modern business and the quality, diversity and ambiguity that come into play when companies deal with people. “The
velocity of the relationship between the employer and the employee has to be properly gauged by a headhunter,” mentions Vardarajan.

Important components of recruitment include both IQ (intelligent quotient) and EQ (emotional quotient). “It is extremely important for a recruiter to understand the cultural values of an organisation that is seeking to hire employees,” stresses Exide’s Ganguly. The best recruiters are often those who have studied psychology and sociology.

Anindya Dey, director of RM Consultants, a placement agency in Calcutta, says that universities might start courses in recruitment. “This is a real possibility since the roles of human resources and recruitment would begin to be diversified,” he notes. A good recruiter has to find ways to reach passive candidates. Hiring should focus on attitude, not on skills, since a person can be trained for a job but it is
more difficult to change a person’s attitude.

Salaries in the recruitment industry can be lucrative, starting from Rs 10,000 to Rs 15,000. A recruiter can go all the way up to become a general manager or a director within a span of 8 to 10 years. Recruitment as a career can result in dual growth for both the recruiter as well as his client. And who knows, tackling individual traits in prospective employees professionally may make one realise that headhunting is not restricted to tribes in remote places!