Don’t Promise the Earth

If you hire someone who requires a huge amount of training-time in soft-skills, then you are losing out on two accounts. Your money is going down the drain for that someone may never pick up the subtler humane skills required to deliver results in the workplace. It is like a guy who either knows the crunch of numbers or simply doesn’t. The BPO business is like that — either your employee knows how to convince people or just doesn’t. You might have a chap suave enough to bowl you in person but becomes a cold sponge over the phone or writes such inane emails that even your most loyal customer may be irked. So even if this prospective employee does well in his stint as a trainee, he’ll collapse and be naturally weeded out once he hits the floor. This obviously translates into loss of hard cash for you. But notice the loss your company suffers from the trying to train someone innately unsuitable for the job. If you put pen to paper, that translates to a lot of money!

Then there are folks who’d want to join you for the carrots you provide. That promised part-time MBA, that trip abroad, those gala feasts and the happy atmosphere your ad – people put in the papers for you. Let’s do some number crunching: first that huge colorful ad in the big dailies, then the money gone in  hiring fancy people to just put in the ad ( c’mon you’d have just as easily written those lines, otherwise you’d be a no-good boss), then you have that time wasted interviewing the wrong people, not to count the costs. And for all this waste of money and time, you get the wrong people — those who turn up believe in the eternal student syndrome. After they do their MBAs they feel they’ll be ready to deliver. And you must be feeling the same, otherwise why on earth would you paint an everlasting happy-playground for your employees. You’ll be attracting only the lighthearted or fair-weather people then. You need committed people who’ll feel they have a stake in your company. Those guys need not be wooed with goodies and freebies. You need people who do not believe in free lunches. Don’t follow the stick and carrot policy. It will surely backfire. Your rewards should come in due time without rosy future promises and a commitment on your part to stick with the employees through thick and thin. Pink slips are never the right option for the right employees how hard the going gets for you.

So next time when you recruit, make sure of not promising the sky. Tell your future employee that life is not so cool after all and the most exciting of things tend to drag. See who are still interested and you’ve got winners now!