Healthcare is expected to create 248,500 jobs this year, leading all other sectors including tech. But even as go-go as healthcare is, the pace of job creation there has subsided some.

Nothing surprising there, except that this is India we’re talking about, and not the U.S.

Ma Foi Randstad, the international HR service provider, says India’s torrid jobs growth is slowing up, though the numbers are still at a pace much of the world would envy. According to a Randstad survey of 13 industry sectors, 3rd quarter employment in those sectors was projected to grow by 353,900 workers. But a survey at the end of the quarter estimated the actual hires at 331,200, leading the company to headline its economic summary ”Indian Economy: sluggish but not panicky.“

Randstad’s quarterly surveys cover only a fraction of the country’s 478 million workers, more than half of whom work in agriculture. However the so-called “organized sectors” in the survey contribute a disproportionate share of the nation’s GDP, employing about 35.2 million workers.

As in the U.S., healthcare is the fastest growing of the 13 sectors in the Randstad survey. The company estimated employers would add some 63,800 workers in the 3rd quarter. It now estimates that 60,400 jobs were added.

Only two sectors showed above expected growth: Pharmaceuticals, where 1,300 more jobs than the original 11,300 are believed to have been added, and real estate and construction, which added 1,110 more jobs than the initial 29,600 estimate.

The tech sector, employing about 2 million workers, fell 9,000 jobs short of the 55,500 estimate.

Notes the Randstad survey, “many IT firms (are) becoming cautious in their hiring. This has been further accentuated by the decline in attrition rates since the economic downturn, which has come down to 15% from 25% in the last couple of quarters. Many of the firms are hiring based on their immediate project needs.”

One positive for U.S. and Canadian tech recruiters is that a slowdown in India should make recruiting overseas candidates a little easier. That should be especially true for companies hiring in-country workers to staff their overseas operations.

It should also lessen some of the impetus for H-1 engineers in the U.S. to return to India. Though U.S. companies have seen some Indian expats leave for jobs in their home country paying not much less than they were earning in the U.S., the exodus has been small. Now, with the declining value of the rupee, and the slower pace of hiring, that’s one less issue.

Despite the slower than expected job growth, and a slowdown in the growth of the GDP, from a high a few years ago of 9 percent annually to this year’s projected 7.5 percent, Randstad’s report says “the long term growth story of India is still intact.”

Adds Randstad, “even though a deceleration in job growth rates is now being experienced, in the longer term the economy still retains the wherewithal to jump back — the numbers may be sluggish, but there is no need to press the panic button as yet.”

by Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

Becoming a leading-edge recruiter is an admirable goal few corporate recruiters strive to achieve. Not only must a leading-edge recruiter routinely demonstrate a marked increase in positive business impact over other recruiters, but they must consistently monitor trends, devise new approaches, benchmark against emerging practices, and constantly fight with colleagues often resistant to trying something new.

Historically, staying on top of trends and new approaches was relatively easy, as there were only a few companies isolated in a few narrow geographies that one needed to watch. The War for Talent in 1997 certainly drew a lot of attention to the practices of technology firms in “silicon hubs” like California’s Silicon Valley (home to Google, Cisco, Intuit, Facebook, Twitter, and HP) or Seattle, Washington’s, Silicon Forest (home to Microsoft and Amazon), but up until a few years ago there was no formal process to identify where leading-edge practices were emerging and who was developing them.

ERE Media’s Recruiting Excellence Awards and articles by global strategy advisors like Kevin Wheeler and ourselves, who have advised and studied the practices of companies in more than 40 nations, are helping leading-edge recruiters focus their attention where evolution is occurring.

The Hotbeds of Evolution and Innovation are Shifting

No one can argue that rapid growth of the technology sector in 1997 left many technology companies desperate for talent, and that desperation drove many charged with recruiting for such organizations to both collaborate and innovate new practices to help close gaps in supply and demand. While not cheap, importing labor and shifting work to geographies where the supply of labor exceeded the demand has been the dominant approach.

For more than a decade such solutions have helped allocate work across an emerging global talent market, but now many of the geographies that picked up work are also struggling to source qualified talent to staff available projects. While China and India may have a surplus of unemployed/underemployed people, they too have a shortage of skilled professional labor.

As global economic growth focuses on Asia, desperation of firms in Asia to keep pace with the demand for talent is driving more and more talent management focus on excellence in execution, collaboration, evolution, and innovation.

With smaller company sizes, nations like Australia and New Zealand are earning a reputation as being home to progressive companies willing to try new practices. Nations like Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam, to name only a few, are channeling state investment dollars into industry-sector-focused universities and research parks that elevate public/private collaboration to new levels.

However, nowhere can one find as much focus on recruiting leadership than in India and China. Twelve years ago production standards in both nations were subpar, work ethics were questionable, and infrastructure was lacking, but today both nations have firms that excel in world-class engineering design, international trade, offshoring, and manufacturing. Over the course of those 12 years, firms in India and China have not only studied and adopted Western talent management practices, they have improved upon them if not in design, most certainly in execution.

Examples of Progressive Recruiting and Talent Management Practices

While ERE readers will need to wait until March to learn about which companies won a recruiting excellence award (with finalists announced soon), what follows are a few practices becoming common among leading employers in India based on our work and a review of the ERE Award Applications. Mentally compare this list of practices to those that are currently in operation at your organization.

General Recruiting Practices

• Prioritization of key jobs and skills. Recruiting resources focuses on the most critical 40%.
• Pre-need hiring. Talent pools mapped and individuals assessed prior to requisition opening.
• Tight integration with sales/operations to drive workforce planning. Recruiting leaders often sit side by side with sales and operations leaders during development meetings to coordinate workforce planning efforts.

Employee Referral Program Practices

• Dedicated referral teams employing a proactive referral strategy in which recruiters personally solicit the names of the very best from the very best employees and managers. (In one organization this approach produced 47% of all hires, garnered a 66% employee participation rate, and consistently produced the highest quality hires, all with a cost-per-hire 20% lower than other hiring channels.)
• Employee referral processes that target corporate alumni in order to boomerang them back. (This approach often produces better results than any other alumni recruitment effort.)
• Onsite referral fairs that allow referred candidates to receive on-the-spot interviews and/or offers.
• Online referral status tracking that provides feedback on status and alerts when a referral’s status changes.
• Established referral targets for individual managers and teams.
• Required pre-assessment of referrals by referring employee. To eliminate poor quality referrals many programs require that employees pre-assess their referral and share the assessment as part of the submission process.
• Service-level agreements that guarantee feedback to the referring employee within 72 hours of submission and help-desk response to inquiries within eight hours.

Metrics and Business-case-related Practices

• Advanced statistical analysis processes including six sigma assessment, value chain analysis, and force field analysis for assessing and improving recruiting process performance.
• Quantification of the direct-dollar impact of new hiring processes on corporate revenues. (In one example, the organization identified that reducing time-to-fill in revenue-generating positions by 40% could increase revenue by millions of dollars.)
• Development of “hiring accuracy” metrics that assesses and quantify hiring success/failure rates.
• Distributed real-time recruiter productivity measures. (One organization found that simply measuring and reporting productivity increased it 70% in one year.)

Recruitment Marketing and Branding Related Practices

• Development of in-house recruitment marketing teams capable of supporting frequent communication design/delivery channel changes.
• Using search engine optimization techniques to measurably increase visibility of jobs and brand messaging online.

College-recruiting-related Practices

• Using ambassador programs to build relationships with top students and faculty.
• Adoption of CRM approaches that let recruiters communicate frequently with students via text messages about events in the students’ lives, such as “best of luck” messages during final exams.
• Development of robust campus performance assessment processes and metrics.
• Use of contests, quizzes, and projects to excite top students and more accurately assess them.
• Engagement of market intelligence data to identify employee value propositions that better engage students.
• Online professional training courses covering topics that improve the quality of potential candidates and attract top students to participate in the application process.
• Leverage alumni to give tech talks, classroom lectures, and on-campus workshops.
• Curriculum guidance. Many organizations work closely with academic leaders and key faculty to align curriculum with industrial need, ensuring that courses focus on practical knowledge and skill development that is immediately relevant.

Training and Development Practices

• Extensive focus on deep enterprise training, development, and leadership preparation. (One organization has built the world’s largest leadership and development training center, exceeding in size GE’s famous Crotonville facility. The 270-acre, $60-million plush facility has a hotel, food center, employee care center, theater, and research facility.)
• Overseas residential training programs. Recent grads are frequently provided an opportunity to work internationally for a period of several months prior to accepting a stationary role in their home country.

Are You Leading or Lagging?

I hope you agree that this list represents some pretty progressive practices and strategies. While India’s leadership position is certainly open to debate, there can be no doubt that staffing challenges in India and China are forcing leading firms like Infosys, Tata, Aricent, Reliance, and Wipro to focus on execution and innovation. Some might argue that lack of government regulation and lower cost of labor enable them to do things you couldn’t do in the U.S. or Western Europe, to which my response is simple: it’s not the job of a leader to whine about what they can’t do, but rather to find a way to do what they need to do.

Not all organizations in India are on the leading edge when it comes to talent management and even those that are have areas that need improvement. The point is that if you want to be on the leading edge you need to be aware of other organizations on the edge, and that moving forward more and more of the firms you need to monitor will be in India, China, and other Asian nations.

Final Thoughts

Generally speaking recruiting is a conservative profession. If you’re a “defensive type,” super patriot, or resist being data-driven, you will likely dismiss our contention that the U.S. is/has slipped into second place with regard to recruiting leadership. If, however, you are open-minded, I suggest that you revisit this list of practices and use it to help determine where your firm needs to be if it’s going to seriously compete for talent in the emerging global labor market. Companies in India, Singapore, New Zealand, and China have already started recruiting top scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and finance professionals from leading corporations in the U.S. and Western Europe. The battle is heating up. Are you more prepared to fight or give up?

Alan Tonelson, who represents small- and medium-sized manufacturers, called this “ultimately a losing proposition” and feels that no amount of labor-saving technology can offset the low wages, huge pools of workers, and lower overall capital costs in China, India, and some Third World nations.

In his book, Race to the Bottom, he writes that the United States “will never be able to compete with them simply by cost-cutting.”

He points out that in the past 10 years, imports have gained a larger share of the U.S. home market, and that free trade agreements, beginning with NAFTA in 1994, fueled a surge in imports by ”sending jobs, production and, increasingly, research and development overseas.”

In an interview with the Akron Beacon Journal, he acknowledged that some U.S. manufacturers (i.e., Illinois-based equipment company Caterpillar) have managed to “keep their employment levels pretty high by cutting wages.”

He highlights its “two-tier wage systems” where workers are now making $10 to $14 an hour at jobs that had paid double that or more.

He thinks that ultimately, the U.S. middle class will be gutted.

”The division of the country into a relatively small number of high-income earners and a much larger pool of working poor will greatly accelerate. In other words, the social profile of the United States will start to resemble that of Third World countries,” he said.

Is there a shortage or a surplus of engineers in China? Some sources report hundreds of recent engineering graduates being turned away from job fairs because all the open positions have been filled.

Yet, in another article, the author bemoans the lack of electrical engineers. Other confusing facts cloud the picture. Is India running out of English-speaking professionals to fill the outsourcing positions that have grown so rapidly over the past decade? Does the Philippines have the quality of English speakers American and British firms need?

Most of my recruiting colleagues in the United States can’t answer those questions. They struggle to build effective recruiting teams in Asia. They have a hard time finding competent recruiters and even more trouble finding high-quality candidates.

Many don’t even know where to begin when they are chartered with putting an Asian recruiting effort into place and are confused over figures and facts that often seem to contradict themselves, like those I have mentioned above.

Any new territory can be confusing and contradictory to those who do not have an inside view. Reports about the United States in European papers 200 years ago contained similar stories about skill shortages and glowing reports of opportunities that, in many cases, didn’t really exist. It requires the help of experts who are already there or at least the assistance of experienced guides to keep you on track.

Today in China, colleges and universities are turning out many hundreds of graduates, but many lack the level of skill that European and American firms expect. Some schools that are called colleges are, at best, technical schools and the graduates, at best, are technicians with hands-on knowledge but without the physics and math and other engineering subjects taught in the west. A recruiter has to be well-versed in each school, its curriculum, and reputation.

On the other hand, there is also a shortage of jobs for skilled people. While the economy of China is red hot and growing fast, it still can not produce enough jobs for everyone qualified.

That’s why it is both easy and hard for a firm outside the system to understand the paradoxes and nuances of this vast country. Finding a recruiter who knows this and can live successfully in the culture is certainly a challenge.

And, yes, India is facing a shortage of skilled people who are fluent in English. This primarily affects call centers, but actually has little effect on programming or other technical discipline where one or two English speakers can act as the spokespeople for the others.

Even though the demand is growing for English-speaking folks, many educated Indians are turning away from working for foreign firms. They are starting their own firms to supply India and China.

This further reduces the potential pool of candidates. The same applies to the Philippines and other countries with pools of English-speaking citizens.

Asian recruitment also encompasses Australia and New Zealand. In both countries, economies are vibrant and growing because of increased trade with China and the rest of Asia.

This has led to a huge talent shortage and increased competitive pressure to recruit better and faster. New Zealand, with just about four million citizens, suffers the most. Much of its talent goes off to Europe or Australia or elsewhere in Asia in search of greater opportunities and higher salaries.

Australia, with about 20 million people, has a similar problem; however, its larger size offers slightly more opportunity.

The number of European and American organizations that are recruiting in Asia, including Australia and New Zealand, has been steadily growing over the past decade. Every major organization has at least one recruiter in Asia and many smaller organizations have at least engaged a third-party recruitment firm or have outsourced their recruitment to a recruitment process outsourcing firm.

The markets are very competitive and only the best recruiters can really make a successful living. It is easy to make mistakes and hire the wrong recruiters as well as the wrong candidates.

Nothing replaces prior experience and a philosophy of trial and error as you enter these markets. Very few organizations get it right the first time they try.

Yet, despite all this activity, most recruiters don’t have the time to learn and don’t have much real understanding of the Asian talent space, particularly in China and India. Whether this is caused by distance, culture, language, or cost, it is having a negative impact on many organizations.

They are not hiring the best people and they are not really engaged positively in the Asian talent communities. Some firms send a recruiter from home and put them into the role of leading a recruiting effort. This is a useful practice, as over time, they will learn how to function well and become effective.

However, during that process, they will need guides to help them and they will need an accelerated learning process. Many times exported American or European recruiters struggle to adjust to the Asian environment and, in the process, create issues that could have been avoided had they had some training and access to a few experts to help out.

Australasian Talent Conference

In an effort to begin raising the general level of knowledge and provide a forum for learning and discussion, I have joined with another firm in Australia to create the Australasian Talent Conference.

This conference will provide an overview to the Australasian talent marketplace and put you in touch with scores of other recruiters and HR professionals who are either based in Asia or have responsibility and interest in the Asian area.

You will meet people who can guide you in developing a better recruiting or development function in the region and you will hear from many experts in the area.

Each year the conference will be held in a different Asian country. The inaugural event will take place in beautiful Sydney, Australia, from March 20 to March 22.

The conference is open to human resource professional, trainers, leadership development experts, and recruiters from the United States, Europe, and Asia. We have assembled a powerful list of speakers and have invited a large number of Asia recruitment technology companies, service providers, and recruitment agencies to join us.

We will be looking at trends, case studies, best practices, and practical solutions to the issues every company faces in Asia.

If you are concerned about your firm’s ability to successfully compete for talent in any Asian country, this is the conference you should attend. Spread the word and help make this the best source of recruitment knowledge there is in Asia.

According to India-based blogger Gautam Ghosh, there are more than 20,000 recruitment firms in India already. Many Indian recruiters, along with their counterparts in Singapore, Australia, Ireland, and elsewhere, understand that the pursuit of top talent is global. And in many cases, these recruiters have their governments behind them. In India, ongoing global promotions brand the country itself as a great place to work, live, and study. The government of India is working to convince the best of the massive Indian Diaspora to return home ó often appealing to a sense of patriotism and offering opportunities that might be hard to come by even in the United States. While I was in India last month, two world-renowned scientists who had been invited to the United States by American universities became so frustrated with the U.S. immigration procedures that they publicly declared they had no further interest in setting foot in the United States.

A Bigger World for Recruiters

Recruiters had it easy before 1995. Relatively high unemployment and a steady, if small surplus of talent combined with low turnover made it a cushy job. The “War for Talent” between 1995 and 2000 created a new recruiter, far more aggressive, far more technologically savvy and far more connected. After a three- to four-year lull, the game is again changing for recruiters. For a short while, some may get away with a provincial, shortsighted view of talent. But while they’re tapping an ever-decreasing pool of US-based talent, their colleagues and competitors will be nurturing global relationships and building their networks into the farthest reaches of the planet. Needless to say, the latter will ultimately prevail. Having recently returned from a six-day, three-city tour that started in Delhi and ended in Bangalore, I urge recruiting executives to get on the plane and go East.

I traveled with executives from DNL Global, an innovative recruiting firm based in Dallas, that saw the light years ago and has already built an impressive clientele both in India and the United States around the identification and recruitment of globally capable managers. As DNL builds its global talent pools, it will become a “go to” firm for companies desperate for the type of talent and thought leadership that can build bridges and create a competitive advantage in the global workforce. In the best Indian business schools and in the top companies, one seldom hears HR and recruiting discussed in their traditional sense. In a nation that has been the recipient of more HR and recruitment outsourcing business than anywhere else, India’s answer to skill shortages and sky-high attrition rates is an emphasis on talent management. Everywhere I went, organizations were immersed in strategic workforce planning and analytics. They were tying performance management and retention to compensation. Due to high attrition, “talent relationship management” is approached methodically and creatively in many of the business-process-outsourcing call centers I visited. Everywhere, employment-brand building, particularly through heavy investment in employee development, is a cornerstone of workforce initiatives.

On the acquisition front, Indian multinationals are nurturing relationships with talent while in school, building talent pools and enticing overseas workers, particularly those who left India and have built skills in the west. In the business-process-outsourcing call centers, some are reaching into high schools to develop call-center skills so that they will no longer have to rely solely on college graduates for the millions of customer-service positions being created each year. I’m not surprised that the conversations I had with business leaders, human capital consultants, and university professors in Delhi, Ahmedabad, and Bangalore are so similar to those I have in North America. While there remains a massive income, poverty, and infrastructure gap between cities in India and the West, the language of business and human capital management is nearly identical. Human capital professionals and leaders in the West have as much to learn from their counterparts in India as the other way around. I had to learn this for myself, and so should you.