Microsoft Support Centre in Mumbai?
India’s outsourcing industry is battling a rising number of “résumé cheats” – recruits who lie about their experience or qualifications – in a struggle that could be critical to the long-term prosperity of the business.
Recent high staff turnover at large outsourcing groups has been partly owing to the weeding out of résumé cheats who were able to penetrate the industry during the past two years when growth was high and companies were hiring tens of thousands of people each quarter.
“As the war for talent picked up and we kept looking for people with very specific experience and the talent pool became narrow, other people wanted to jump into that talent pool by embellishing their résumés,” said Girish Paranjpe, joint chief executive officer of Wipro Technologies, India’s third largest computer services company.
The integrity of recruits in India’s outsourcing industry, which employs about 2m people, is a concern because they are often entrusted with highly sensitive information and processes from multinational clients, including the world’s leading financial groups.
The faking of curriculum vitae and work experience has long been a problem in the industry but it has become more critical in recent years, when the top outsourcing companies stepped up recruitment. A common deceptive tactic among those applying to Wipro or its rivals, Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services, is to claim to have worked for one of the other members of the big three since their fierce competition precludes much sharing of data.
First Advantage, a US-based background screening company with operations in India, found that “education discrepancies”, or misinformation provided by recruits on their educational qualifications, rose 80 per cent in the first quarter of this year compared with the final quarter of 2007.
“In percentage terms, this [the number of CV liars] might just be something like 1 per cent of the [applicant] population but it is still a significant figure given the kind of trust-based work that we do. We do not want this happening,” said Som Mittal, president of the National Association of Software and Services Companies, the Indian outsourcing industry body.
In the January-March quarter, Wipro experienced a rise in staff turnover, to 18.5 per cent. Up to three percentage points of this related to an exercise in weeding out people who had lied about their qualifications.
“It’s not good either to have 300 or 400 people out of the few thousand people that we get in every quarter who have not made the grade,” said Suresh Vaswani, the other joint chief executive of Wipro.
Nasscom’s Mr Mittal said one initiative, the setting up of a “national skills registry” to screen employees’ credentials, was gathering steam, with about 322,000 people signed up, but registration was not compulsory and there were concerns among some employees about privacy.
Joe Leahy, August 25 2008 The Financial Times
