Challenges for BPS industry in Entry Level Hiring of College Graduates

There is the positive side when it comes to talent in India... there is a huge supply, with over 28 million students enrolled at any point of time and about 9 million students graduating each year.  Of this 9 million+ graduating about 15% are from engineering streams and about 65 to 70% are from graduate streams like commerce, economics, arts, sciences, and so on.   

Business Process Services industry hires graduates, post graduates and PhD's from across streams such as Commerce, Accounting, Economics, Sciences, English, Art and so on.  This industry has one of the most diverse need when it comes to college graduates for entry level jobs.  Their skills are needed to cater to several hundreds of business process across over 20 industry verticals that the BPS industry caters to.  Year after year the competitiveness of the industry is being 

the last two days I  was surprised to read the buzz in social networking and messengers like Whats App around the fact that Ernst & Young decided to dump their degree classification criteria at college entry level hiring.  But the way it was interpreted based on news reports is very different...Looks as if you no longer need a degree to get into E&Y.  And already this decision  (interpretation of no need for degree) is getting huge thumbs up in Social Media forums.

This goes to show how naive people can be and how quickly they start jumping to conclusions and also how something like this becomes a thing everyone's thinking of copying without even understanding.

Life Without Bell Curve? What Should You Expect

In a previous post  I had written about factors to be considered before just doing away with the Bell Curve.  Organizations need to understand how it would impact them. In many organizations the data from Bell Curve is used to drive many key HR processes therein... from promotions,  to rewards and compensation, career movements,  attending key exciting training programs and also your next transfer....  all these possibly have been linked to outcomes of bell curve ratings.   In short some say.... "It's like a Visa to Many Exotic Destinations in the organizational journeys".   It is like the DNA that defines genetic instructions for functioning of living organisms. 

That's why many a organization men hated it.  It brought in a class system within the social strata of organizations.  One who was at the D end or left trailing end of the curve ended up feeling left out.   Also some managers took solace in the fact that they were basically good to their teams but the damn bell curve drove them to assess someone as "needing improvement" or "not meeting expectations".  

So what would life be after an organization gives up forced ranking based on a Bell Curve?

a) For sure you will find that unless you have factored downstream impact,  most of the other processes now see some challenge and their structure and form would be under pressure..... if you don't have other measures and decision factors... beyond those which depended on inputs from forced ranking ratings.   So you would now need different yard sticks for compensation, promotion, career movements and so on.. easier said than done.   If not taken care well at design you would end up by shifting the irritant from forced ranking outcomes to something else that becomes the dreaded word.

b) Distributing pay increases would become the next big challenge.  Today it was easy to promote a culture of performance (at least that's what most said)  driven pay saying that one section (lowest banding)  got zero increases or even saw a dip and to the other extreme you paid our above average increases with the spread in between.   Now with the forced ranking buckets gone, managers would need to play the role of  clearly distinguishing performance, breaking the pie to be distributed into seemingly appropriate bits that show a recognizable link with performance and not border on egalitarian approach to rewarding employees.

c) Large focus will have to be dealt on setting right goals, specific, measurable and verifiable (not necessarily quantified in numeric). Agreeing what would be right goal, achievable and doable would be the bone of contention.  The disagreements will shift from performance grade or class to goal appropriateness unless handled well by managers and leaders.   Goal setting and its evaluation will have to be absolute. 

d) There will be more openness (have to be...) on sharing goals, creating awareness of one and others goals,  achievements and successes.   This will be driven by the fact that performance will be absolute so there would be focus on whether people are low balling their goals (setting easy achievable one's designed to show your outcome well)

e) End of the day performance will have to determine salary increases if the designers don't come up with ways and means to design compensation frameworks based on skill / capability capacity and progression of the capabilities.  Mantra of pay for performance alone will not work.     In fact if performance alone determines pay in the new approach to performance management then it is going to be a failure since the whole grouse of current forced ranking was about distributing pay and reward with some people being at the receiving end vis a vis others. 

In short the blame could be passed by managers to the system of forced ranking in the current system but in the new context that will not happen.... Managers and leaders doing evaluation will have to take ownership and deliver lasting happiness among employees to feel they go a fair chance at appraisals.   HR and Organization designers would need to understand models that will help better and alternative linkages to promotions, career progressions as well

Some Key Take Aways from SHRM's India Conference and Exposition 2015 , New Delhi

Now Don't Junk That Degree Please.... !!!

In the last two days I  was surprised to read the buzz in social networking and messengers like Whats App around the fact that Ernst & Young decided to dump their degree classification criteria at college entry level hiring.  But the way it was interpreted based on news reports is very different...Looks as if you no longer need a degree to get into E&Y.  And already this decision  (interpretation of no need for degree) is getting huge thumbs up in Social Media forums.

This goes to show how naive people can be and how quickly they start jumping to conclusions and also how something like this becomes a thing everyone's thinking of copying without even understanding.

The biggest shocker came when I read and hear seasoned professionals  praising the decision and Yo !!! They are already advocating removing entry criteria of having a degree for entry level jobs.   Ranging from "I told you, there was no need for fancy degrees"... to "Yes there's not an iota of evidence that there is a correlation between college degree and success." and ....  You know "Bill Gates, didn't have one, See how successful he was".   Soon pundits will be competing with each other to see how they can do away with criteria of having a degree as an entry level job requirement.  

Don't jump to conclusions so soon.  Read between the lines.... For all you know...and read... E&Y is not doing away with criteria that college degree is needed to get an entry level position.  Probably  they are only doing away with the tougher filter criteria when applying for an entry level job.... for which  you need minimum number of A or B grades in the subjects learnt at college degree program to qualify to participate in their selection program.   It is like saying lower the eligibility from 60% (or 50%) cut off scores and just allow them to apply for your job even if they just cleared their degree program.  Although it looks misleading (even a tweet on the web page of the company says it scraps away requirements of degree for a job) I would guess they are not really doing away with need to have a degree.

There will be "experts" who will say "Why do you even need a degree?,  See Bill Gates didn't have one"  But the question is how many people like Bill Gates do you find every day in life.   These are exceptions.  If Bill Gates or Dhirubhai Ambani did not have degrees so what... they were surrounded by people who had degrees and college education.  You don't come across people with these stories every day in the bus or at the street corner.  Both Bill Gates and Dhirubhai Ambani had teams and teams of highly qualified degree holders who helped them run their organizations. They were visionaries and inspirational and that's what made them what they are, not the fact that they did not have a college degree.

Now the E&Y story and the buzz it created  raises the key question again... "Is A College Degree Really Needed as entry criteria for a job position at entry level".   In a manner of saying it means,  do you need a degree to take up a job in an organization.  I belong to the category of Aye Sayers.  College degrees are meant to provide holistic, all rounded personality development,  provide knowledge and understanding in a certain field of study and prepare the students to take up careers.   They are supposed to make a well developed person and not just an intelligent person with no understanding of  social realities,  appreciation of arts, society and philosophy and so on.  Probably the reason why E&Y Decided to delink the minimum performance criteria in the degree was due to the fact that they found little correlation between "performance" and "college grades".   Following can explain that...

a) Success in career =/=  Success in exams.   Life success is dependent on whole lot of factors beyond just grades (which are dependent on mental ability in most cases of curriculum design).  

b)Education has become very competitive and lucrative field.   Colleges want to avoid detaining students  hence majority pass out of college even though they don't really deserve to.  Holding back students for non performance is proving expensive for the colleges. They also face the risk of litigation by the affected students.  So there can be little evidence of those who succeed in school only succeeding in real life.   They start a new race altogether (see next point)

c) College curriculum is getting distant from reality of industrial and organizational practice and so people are finding it difficult to cope and the best students find themselves outwitted in the rat race in organizations. 

d) People see that whether you slog and perform at the really top end of the class or you just enjoy your way through college and clear the bar by cats whiskers distance from the cut off point for graduating you still end up going to work starting off at the same level as the direct fit with jobs is very low. So every one starts off on ground zero when it comes to work organizations.   Then starts the new race.

e)Also the main aim of a college degree is not to just prepare you for a job.  It aims to prepare you for a life, a good way of living, understanding, being and relating with people in our lives.  Hence maybe a poorly balanced output.

So lets not get carried away even if some organization may do away with the criteria of a degree.  Remember today's  solutions are tomorrows problems. Imagine if you employee people without a college degree what will your customer (who's paying for the work you are doing)  pay you for a job that is now done by non graduates , which was earlier done by graduates.   More OR Less... That's the Question?

The larger question is for educationists,  management thinkers from schools and colleges who need to wonder how they would address this issue of  lack of any seeming relation between what degree scores you have and how you do in your job at work.  Otherwise degrees will be just like the tickets that take you to the destination but you would need a visa stamp to enter it.

Enabling Change that Lasts, That Should be the Focus in Training

There is a saying .... "Put a Changed Man Into an Unchanged Context and he eventually goes back to the old ways of doing things".  

Very relevant for trainers and training fraternity.  General quest for trainers is to see change come about based on the inputs during a training intervention.  Thus they see their role as that of driving change.  However the lasting change does not come by because of the above.   Which means... The trainers should understand the context from which the trainee (who you expected to change) came from and eventually went back to.  

Understanding the context and seeing that in light of the training is very important.  Therefore the role of the trainer is also to collaborate with the owner of the context (here it is the line manager)  to understand stumbling blocks as well as enablers for the desired change.  

For e.g. you wanted to make people more proactive through a training program.  However the situation on the ground once the trainee went back (here it is say one of the operations floor for customer X) was one where any hint at addressing something which was not raised as an issue by the client or any other stakeholder is not welcome and looked at with suspicion is a sure shot recipe for the trainee going back to old ways.   Why rake up issues, why search for embers to burn your feet... these are the kind of manifestations of feedback.

So what do you do?  Trainers can pass the baton to designers and say the context should be taken care of during design.  Yes, but the product you create is what gets back to action in the context... (in example above it is the operations for Customer X) and it is in the trainers interest to work with the managers or leaders in the floor of operations for Customer X to see how people are encourage for being proactive.   The managers need to be sensitized that one has to encourage, reward, cajole people to be proactive just in case they have been so used to not being proactive and waiting for fires to be doused.

Operationally using Kurt Lewins - Force Field Analysis helps in identifying barriers to change and resisting forces and as a group the Trainers can work with leaders to eliminate the opposing forces.   Thereby it becomes a much easier task for trainers to achieve their goals of bringing about lasting change once the context issues have been addressed to facilitate changed behaviors. 

Training is not an event. It is a process. It does not end at the exit of the classroom session.  The designers, managers and trainers should work together to ensure that there is sufficient focus on right context for individual to perform in changed context.

Don't Miss the Woods for the Trees: Performance Management can drive right Behaviors

One objective of a good performance management framework is to drive the right kind of behaviors within various organizational entities.   How does this happen? By Setting Targets and Goals with qualifiers. Yes, the word qualifiers is to circumvent the proverbial  "fallen between the cracks"

It is important to emphasize both "how" and "why" aspects when setting goals and not just the focus on "what"

Take for example the highest achiever of sales in Pharma Co (name is irrelevant).  Here was Monty the highest grosser on sales.  For eight quarters he clocked over 40% growth each quarter and was the star salesman two years in a row.  About 9 months later when a new drug was launched by the competition the skeletons tumbled out of the cupboard.    Mohan used his smooth talking skills and network with stockists to off take and store more than they needed and the inventory went piling up finally leading to zero off take in two quarters when things got tough.

We don’t need to mention the fake invoice generation by “unscrupulous” employees to show higher sales.  This happens in various industries and google your way to “Billing Scams”

So if you are looking for good behaviors aligned to your organizations value system then you need to ensure the “desired behaviors” are brought into focus.  

This can be done through combination of the Performance Management and the Competency System.   The PMS should focus on the goals the “how” and “why” along with the “what”.   The managers should ensure that they anticipate how things can “Go Wrong” and discuss these with their teams in the process of setting goals.   

The competency framework should ensure that the behaviors of the competencies (managerial and leadership) do cover behavioral aspects of “how” apart from defining the core job related behaviors of the given role.

Focusing on just numbers,  targets and deliverables you might end up like the proverbial  missing the woods for the trees.