The article discusses the challenges and solutions for hiring skilled professionals in India Inc., pointing out how outdated hiring practices and poor talent development strategies are hampering growth.
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In today’s competitive job market, India Inc. faces a paradox: despite a large pool of candidates, companies often struggle to find the right talent. This shortage is less about the absence of skills and more about outdated hiring practices and poor talent development strategies. Here’s what needs to change to stop pushing away skilled professionals and create a thriving workforce.
The Early Days of Nurturing Talent
Back in early 2015, a pioneering Associate Product Manager (APM) programme was proposed at Flipkart to attract India’s brightest undergraduates into a structured two-year rotational leadership track. Skepticism delayed this, with traditional views favoring MBAs or experienced hires for product roles. Fast forward nearly a decade, and this programme is now coveted across campuses, producing senior product leaders and entrepreneurs globally—proof that investing early in raw talent pays dividends.
The Shortcut Approach to Hiring Slows Growth
Hiring managers today face overwhelming applicant volumes—often thousands within 24 hours of job postings. With limited resources, many resort to shortcut filters such as college tier, salary expectations, or notice period to weed out candidates. Recruiters often admit that prestigious colleges are proxies for skill, but this method misses many capable professionals who lack those “signals.” The reliance on resumes alone without deeper skills assessment results in overlooking diverse talent pools and encourages bias.
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Challenges With Take-Home Assignments and AI
While take-home assignments could provide better insight into candidate skills, they bring complications—verifying authorship, designing assessments, and managing evaluation bandwidth. Many organisations avoid them due to these practical challenges, perpetuating superficial screening techniques that don’t measure critical job-readiness.
Interviewers Often Lack the Skills to Identify Talent
Another critical gap lies in the interview process. Most organisations assign senior employees as interviewers without formal training, leading to subjective assessments and inconsistent candidate feedback. This “untrained interviewer” problem results in candidates being ghosted post-interview and companies unsure about their evaluation outcomes. When recruiters expect candidates to be job-ready, they must ask: are interviewers equipped with the right tools to gauge this readiness?
Hiring and Talent Development Are Disconnected
What hires a candidate is often unrelated to what helps them grow or succeed in their role. Educational background, often emphasized during recruitment, rarely correlates with promotion opportunities, which depend on actual skills and continuous learning. Indian organizations frequently measure talent acquisition success purely on speed rather than quality or fit, while HR focuses on employee satisfaction, creating siloed efforts. This misalignment leads to disillusionment—new hires discovering their roles differ from interview promises and struggling with growth support.
Real-World Disconnect
An engineer’s experience exemplifies this gap: promises of working with cutting-edge tech turned into routine maintenance of standard code. Performance appraisals requiring innovation are frustrating when day-to-day work offers no such scope, pushing talent toward exits.
The Talent Density Dilemma Amidst Increasing Business Complexity
As firms scale, operational complexity rises exponentially, necessitating increased talent density—more skilled personnel per unit of business complexity—to avoid chaos. However, many Indian organisations see talent density decline or stagnate. Learning and development (L&D) teams are often understaffed and underfunded. One unicorn startup revealed a paltry Rs. 3,000 training budget per employee, while many firms lack any dedicated learning budget. This neglect drives high-potential employees to seek opportunities elsewhere.
The Way Forward: Hiring for Skills and Potential
Reports frequently cite “talent and skills shortage” in India, but the root cause is a chicken-and-egg problem created by outdated recruitment and talent retention practices. Persisting with legacy hiring based on degrees, college tiers, and immediate availability perpetuates a diminishing pool of quality talent, making shortages feel acute.
The solution lies in adopting a new-age mindset that values skills, potential, learning agility, and curiosity over certificates and credentials. Outcomes-driven learning should be embedded in hiring policies, matching the evolving demands for critical thinking and adaptability in roles. This shift also requires better alignment between talent acquisition, L&D, and HR to sustain employee growth and satisfaction.
Creating a Growth-Oriented Environment
Investing in robust training programs and structured interview processes while reducing dependence on proxies like college pedigree will help identify candidates ready to contribute from day one. Offering continuous development pathways incentivizes retention and builds a stronger talent pipeline internally, reducing dependency on external hiring.
Conclusion
India Inc. stands at a crossroads where investing in skills-based recruitment and development is no longer optional but essential. Moving beyond shortcuts in hiring, preparing interviewers, synchronizing hiring with growth strategies, and enhancing talent density can transform human capital challenges into competitive advantages. By doing so, organisations will not only stop pushing talent away but become magnets for India’s best minds, fueling innovation and long-term success.
Source
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