In last few weeks I read many compelling posts about recruitment strategies and how candidates turning down offers just few days prior to joining date. You can feel the frustration of a recruiter in those posts.
At the same time, candidates (in general; not the one who did it) have defended this act with some sincere remarks.
Well, I don’t intend to get into endless discussion of Who Is Right. However, one thing I found that was common across these posts; most have attributed this situation as a result of 3 Months notice period policy deployed by most IT organisations.
Why 3 months notice period –
In my IT career, in India, I have seen recruitment strategies changing. Such as notice period going from 1 month to 2 months to 3 months. Now why that might have happened?
In India, IT companies (most of these are service based organizations) haveBilling per hourrevenue model for every IT employee they provide. Now when one of the employees decides to quit, company needs to find his/her replacement before that employee leaves to avoid break in revenue. Also, they need to “support” the project that candidate was working on.
During the process IT companies realized that they were unable to find replacements in one month. So they decided to extend notice period to 2 months! And it went on. Now It is 3 months.
Naturally, with extension in notice periods, it added few more concerns to already existing ones. Earlier candidates used to find a job and then quit. Now with 3 months of notice period, you often come across candidates who quit their job first and then they search for a new one. You also hear about candidates getting more counter offers based on exiting one.
What could be some of the remedies –
Many have suggested that if we go back to one-month notice period, most of these problems would solve. TCS tried it. For whatever reason, they decided to go back to one-month notice period. Now TCS are back to 3 months. Guess why?
Even if we believe that going back to one month would cease many concerns; we may not have data to support that theory.
Let’s imagine we have a notice period of one month. And we find a candidate after screening and interviewing process in a month. It is still two months before he/she gets onboard! Is that efficient recruitment strategy ? Would company let go one month’s revenue from that candidate? Here, the only variable is the time we take to find a RIGHT candidate. Let’s say notice period is going to remain constant.
I think the basic problem lies in our inefficiency in reaching RIGHT candidate sooner. We spent most of the time engaging candidates who are not relevant to the job or not interested in the job. We need to get that right.(https://goo.gl/wZkpmi) We may also need to reconsider our recruitment strategies.
There are other common scenarios, such as, what happens when candidate decides to decline your offer last moment; we go back to square one. In most cases we start all over again! Why don’t we intend to use our previous efforts? Companies always talk about maintaining talent pipelines. But how effectively they are able to use it?
We might have avoided solving many such basic problems in the past and continued to put a bandage.
Will notice period change? And will that solve any of these problems? Not sure. But I think we need to have fresh outlook towards addressing most of these concerns. We need to embrace right technology more than ever to overcome most of these challenges.
