Priyanka Sangani
The Economic Times
Shortly after the turn of the century, when bento boxes had become Japan’s best-known contribution to the culinary world, came the wildly popular conveyor belt sushi restaurants. Also known as sushi-go-rounds, the customers, once in, could simply pick little portions of fresh sushi and sashimi of their choice from a moving conveyor belt.
The final bill would be calculated based on the number and type of sushi portions consumed. The idea combined Japanese minimalism, the ‘Just-in-Time’philosophy and their loathing for wastage. But we digress. In the India Inc of today, listening to HR honchos and CEOs holding forth on their single biggest concern — talent management —is a little unnerving.
It would suggest they’re readying to run a sushi-go-round rather than a BPO or a financial services giant. Just replace the sushi and sashimi with skilled workers or potential employees, and you get the picture. In a perfect world, businesses would like nothing better than a wide variety of talent flowing steadily on a conveyor belt giving them the freedom to pick what they choose optimally and pay for the bite instead of the whole platter.
Peter Cappelli, director, Center for Human Resources at Wharton Business School calls it “talent on demand”. If you thought likening people to vinegared rice-and-fish rolls is farfetched listen to a bit of shopfloor terminology from K Ramkumar, the chief human resources officer at India’s largest private bank ICICI. “In this country, there is a lot of raw material. We don’t have to import it, but it needs a lot of processing.
There is a lot of wastage, but we have our process shops to fix that. It doesn’t matter if you get me magnetite or hematite — bring me anything with some iron in it, and we can make steel out of it,” he says. And steelier stuff follows, as he makes no bones about his company’s recruitment policy being a kind of supply chain process – sourcing raw material and turning them to finished products.
And that assembly line lingo is rapidly becoming HR jargon in hyper-growth companies is confirmed when the folks at Wipro sing from the same score sheet. The talk is about how ‘Just In Time’ hiring has enabled the company to have new employees ready and lined up, even before the business realises that it needs those many more people. “Large companies have a stable pattern of growth, and so we can start the process of finding the right people even before the business puts in a requisition for talent, resulting in shrinkage of cycle time,” says Pradeep Bahirwani, vice president-talent acquisition, Wipro Technologies.
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