The future of Indian tech recruitment

The twist in the future of Indian tech recruitment 

Summary: Indian techie hires are beginning to get assessed on raw coding abilities rather than degrees and certificates, ushering a potential new dawn for tech hiring

An interesting interview given by Vikalp Sahni, the CTO of online travel company Goibibo, to Indian website campushash (which connects interns with companies) indicates the way that the world of technology recruitment is going.

Sahni was asked which way he leaned when appraising a candidate's resume. His response was that the "most preferred mode of judging someone's coding abilities for us has been Github/Launchpad/Bitbucket commits. It is a big plus if an intern has worked with open-source projects and has pushed tested code to the core project repo. A person's project/software gives a good picture of his/her knowledge and likings."

Additionally, Sahni suggested that aspirant coders also attend hackathons, as it allows them to meet great developers from all over the industry, enhances their knowledge base and their networks, and gives them a potential peek into what world-class development work looks like. In other words, no longer is a gilt-edged resume with good grades and other plaudits and certificates going to get you a top-notch job in the world of coding. No greater tech-recruiting oracle than Google already seems to have committed itself to this philosophy.

Laszlo Bock, senior vice president for People Operations at Google, in an interview with The New York Times said, "One of the things we've seen from all our data crunching is that GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there's a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and GPAs and test scores, but we don't anymore, unless you're just a few years out of school. We found that they don't predict anything." Today, Google fields teams where 14 percent of them are sometimes made up of people who have never gone to college.

Google also used to ask fiendishly difficult brainteasers, but Bock says that even those have been deep-sixed. "They don't predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart," said Bock. Instead, Google, according to the article, is using a "big data" approach to hiring and management, where an entire department is devoted to "people analytics". So how does a company successfully gauge which employees to hire? One way is to have them play games that a company like Knack has built, which measures creative and cognitive abilities and social and emotional intelligence — and through mining this "behavioral big data" can figure out who is best suited to be a manager, engineer, or innovator.

This change could potentially throw us into a bit of a tizzy. India is largely a world where conceptual thinking is absent, and learning by rote is a preferred medium. While this is good for committing multiplication tables to memory, it is a major handicap when internalizing more complex concepts.

In other words, we probably need both an educational overhaul as well as a way to purge ourselves of our bad habits to fully embrace this more democratized world of hiring raw tech talent.

But for those who either refuse or are unable to play by the established rules, companies like Goibibo and Google are heaven-sent opportunities to bypass our broken educational system and realise our true potential.

The death of Indian IT services?

Summary: Thanks to the cloud, Indian IT services face a bleak future if they don't embrace change.

Vivek Wadhwa, a prominent former technology entrepreneur, vice president of Innovation and Research at Singularity University, a Stanford University Fellow, and big-picture thinker of all things tech, recently wrote about a hugely disruptive trend taking place in the technology arena that has massive ramifications for Indian IT.

His basic point is that while Indian outsourcers have not "become less capable of servicing Western needs... It is that their customer base — the CIO and IT department — is in decline". Wadhwa points out that customers of Indian IT today are easily able to "download cheap, elegant, and powerful apps on their iPads that make their corporate systems look primitive... They are user customizable and can be built by anyone with basic programming skills".

This is a trend that's been written by focusing on two companies — a "new economy" Indian company like Snapdeal (offering "daily deals") as well as Bajaj FinServ, which is straddling the age-old industry of auto loans.

Both companies have vigorously embraced the cloud for their IT solutions. While Bajaj Finserv still relies to some degree on customization, Snapdeal has put its entire technology infrastructure in the cloud. What is increasingly clear today is that IT is being relegated to its core competence — ensuring the stability of the company's IT ecosystem — while its other departments can simply plug and play software-as-a-service (SaaS) products to get the job done.

For instance, marketers today can use a proliferation of SaaS apps to tweet catalogues and roll out customer loyalty programs. Management can pull cheap and elegant off-the-shelf programs for their workflow, HR, and accounting needs. Web developers can chose a dizzying array of platforms to customize their solutions. Even classic IT-related functionalities like hosting and storage have been upended by infrastructure-related apps that come with popular solutions that optimize data accessing functions.

This is a killer trend. These cloud solutions are cheap, require no heavy upfront capex (unlike current IT services solutions) or maintenance, and give companies something that has become a must today — faster time to market. As Wadhwa correctly points out, if IT services companies don't adapt smartly and expeditiously, they're toast.

So, what should they do in the face of this onslaught? Wadhwa puts his finger on other parallel trends sweeping the world — in robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and 3D printing, which have begun to introduce self-driving cars, voice-recognition systems, and computer systems that can make human-like decisions. While these technologies are becoming ubiquitous and inexpensive, Wadhwa said that America's manufacturing plants aren't up to snuff in rolling them out en masse as yet.

This is where India's IT services firms should step in, added Wadhwa. They can "help American firms design new factory floors and program and install robots ... provide management consulting on designing new value chains and inventory management ... operate and monitor manufacturing plant operations remotely" and so on, in what he says is a trillion-dollar market opportunity.

However, the window to take advantage of this opportunity may be fast closing. So, if IT services players don't want to go the way of computer hardware manufacturers, voice-based BPOs, and other such commoditized businesses, the time to act is now.