Rethink Manpower!

Manish K Jar

About the Author The author is a mechanical engineer and MBA from University of Georgia in the US. He is the CEO of idea 7 Automotive. Idea 7 Automotive is the auto retail solutions company in India that works with many leading auto companies in the area of dealer performance management.

 
Few weeks ago, Times of India's careers supplement Ascent carried an advertisement of something called "Branch Banking Academy" of ICICI Bank, which offered a three-month intensive training program to eligible candidates and a promise of appointment as a "Branch Manager" in one of the bank branches. It is interesting that not a long ago, the same bank and other private banks were considered the hottest employers in the country and always had application surpluses. They were able to rope in not just the best "ready to use" talent available, but had many choices also.

Well, a leading corporate facing talent shortage is not the information that I want to share with you. Most of us are anyway facing the heat on the manpower front. Survey reports throwing numbers in Lacs and Millions for an industry's future manpower requirement are stale news now. What I do intend to highlight through above example is the nature of the solution that the premier private sector bank is considering. What they have resorted to is the cadre based recruitment and training system, which is an old and tested method of talent acquisition. They are actually attacking the root of the problem and finding a long-term solution for their talent acquisition challenges. We however started ignoring it somewhere along the way, as it required long-term manpower planning and investments in training.

Today, if we look around, we can find multiple initiatives of this nature in corporate India like ICICl's Institute of Finance, Banking and Insurance, Retailers Associations of India's Retail Academy, software industry's decade old efforts and our own FADA Academy. Some of these initiatives have been fairly successful and some are still struggling to address the core objective of mobilising fresh talent for their respective companies or industries.

If we critically analyze few of these initiatives, it is not hard to pinpoint the key drivers for success in these initiatives. My objective here is to bring out these success factors, understand them in the context of manpower problem in auto retail business. The idea is to get a few take aways’ that will help us tackle our manpower challenges going forward. These success factors are common to the talent acquisition initiatives in all the industries and domains. Let us understand them in general and in our context:

Sourcing Model

Many of the talent acquisition initiatives are started on the premise that advertisements for diploma courses or job-oriented programs would generate willing or ready candidates. It may be partially true for the glamorous industries like air travel or fashion; Most of the times, they do not work for non-glamorous businesses like ours. Add to that is the resistance that candidates have to fee-levels charged by these academies. We all know that candidates' resistance to pay a particular fee and advertisements not generating enough enquiries have been the challenges faced by FADA Academy centres as well.

So what is the solution? It lies in identifying the right target audience and finding the right ways to attract them. In order to do so, the organisation that is running the talent acquisition initiative needs to answer following questions and test its assumptions even before they start:

▪	Who is my target talent audience?
▪	Are my industry and opportunities perceived to be attractive enough by the above target audience? If not, do I go a notch below on my expectations of the competency/skill levels of the talent I wish to attract?
▪	Will a job in my industry attract candidates from the same location or its people will move from one city to another city to work for my industry?
▪	Is my sourcing model adequate in terms of reach and cost?
▪	Is it scalable and sustainable?

 
Answers to above question will throw an optimal and practical way to identify and attract the right candidates.

Employment Assurance

Another challenge to FADA Academy and many other similar programs is the shaky nature of employment assurances. It is very important to address a candidate's concern about "what happens to him after the skill development program gets over?" It is human to gravitate towards certainty. Having industry-wide shortage of talent is one thing and ability to offer a job guarantee to the candidate is another. Even the instrument of employment assurance matters to the candidate. IFBI offers appointment letters to candidates on the day one of joining the program and publicises the fact in its advertisements. It works.

Training Curricula and Material

Training curricula not given adequate importance and left in the hands of instructors is another source of dissonance in these initiatives. Such initiatives should not just define the "Pre" and "Post" program competency metrics along with the training tools but also get employers' buy-in on the same. This standardization would make the initiatives scalable and smooth. Software industry certifications like "Microsoft Certified IT Professional" or "Cisco Certified Network Professional" have done wonders for companies and candidates. They may not be replicable in the exact form in our industry but definitely bring up some perspective.

Today, most of the dealerships have their own "not very objective" criteria for recruitments. This leaves a huge scope for individual biases and fragmentation in the whole talent acquisition effort of initiatives like FADA Academy.

Retention

We are all concerned about retention of manpower but not many of us make systemic efforts to ensure the same. Most of the times, we hire the "best out of the lot" candidates and not the "right fit candidates". We hire for the skills and not for the attitude. A hiring done this way leads to attrition when the "best out of the lot" candidate finds a more appropriate industry or "the already skilled candidate" moves on for a salary hike by a competing organisation.

A dealer friend of mine once told me that he would prefer "air hostess profile" candidates selling his premium cars, as they would be able handle his customers better. While I respect his anxiety to meet the customer expectations, most of us would agree that it would be very difficult to retain an employee of that profile within the limitations of dealership business. In today's context, we in auto retail business need to be prepared to hire only for attitude and with minimal skills as long as the candidate is willing to learn, work hard and as per our standard operating procedures.

Lessons for Auto Retail

Among the various talent acquisition initiatives, ours is probably not so successful one. We need to introspect and modify the design to develop a scalable and sustainable model. It is not rocket science but sheer common sense. I would very strongly recommend following actions from the industry stakeholders to help auto retail meet up the manpower challenge.

Involvement of Manufacturers

The fragmented nature of auto dealer community makes it very difficult to bring in a structure or scalability to any industry-wide initiative. It is the manufacturers who offer structure and processes to the dealership operations. Manpower being a key enabler in dealership business, it is imperative for the manufacturers to bring all their respective dealers on a common platform to run a talent acquisition program and coordinate the same. While manufactures have been involved in the dealer recruitment initiatives in the past, they need to go a step forward to institutionalise a FADA Academy kind of efforts and actively manage them.

Manpower Planning by Dealerships

During our interactions, we have come across many dealerships which have had the tendency for contingency recruitments. This forces them to be non-committal to any industry wide manpower development initiative and results in a "lose-lose situation" for the bodies like FADA and the dealerships themselves. Let us accept that an auto dealership is a large operation and definitely deserves appropriate resource planning, manpower being the most important resource.

Training Investments Mindset

The stakeholders viz. dealers and manufacturers need to prepare themselves to invest in initial training of manpower. The logic is simple: You are short on manpower and the only way to tackle the challenge is to induct fresh talent in the business. As a business, you do not figure very high on the aspiration value map of the job seeking population. In the country with 10% GDP growth rate and numerous employment opportunities, it is very difficult to attract a "ready to use" talent. What choice do you have other than hiring raw talent, investing in initial training to make it usable?

If one really thinks about it, the solution to our problem is simpler than the more skill-centric businesses. What we need is a commitment from all stakeholders, a more robust design of the initiative and an integrated effort as mentioned above.

Let us rethink. Let us put our monies where the mouth is.