When a temporary hourly job needs to be filled, recruiting companies would normally contact headhunters and staffing companies to fill the slot, paying a commission for every position filled. But as this is a low-level task with little business value, some recruiters have been outsourcing it to India.
India is a well-known business outsourcing hub, but recruitment outsourcing itself has not been embraced with equal enthusiasm by all companies. Some feel that the recruiters there aren't qualified enough to identify appropriate candidates. Recruiters need sophisticated language and decision-making skills to sort through resumes, match candidates to the right positions, interview them, and send the best ones to the onshore recruiters who will then conduct a live interview. One staffing company in Fort Lauderdale with a branch in Toronto had experimented with outsourcing and was not happy with the qualify of the work, so they brought the function back onshore.
The head of one recruiting company in India said that some companies are reluctant to offshore recruiting because recruiting is a difficult skill to master, that it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, referring to potential candidates, but that her recruiters work at a higher skill level.
Her recruiting office has 12 workers, mainly women, who work in cubicles supplied with phones and a map of the US. They search for candidates on job boards like Monster. The recruiters identify themselves by their assumed names or American names saying that they work for a California-based company, and they then leave the company's Silicon Valley phone number with its area code. They don't reveal that the number dialed connects the caller to India, unless asked. Most candidates are not upset when they learn that they have received a call from India, but if the recruiter uses correct pronunciation and accent, that establishes trust and keeps them engaged on the phone.
The training takes place in three parts - they learn how to understand job descriptions, how to find candidates using keywords, and how to determine the authenticity of the resume submitted. Most of the jobs pay an hourly wage, which is a new concept for them in India as they get paid by the month there.
The challenge in this job is fading phone signals. Sometimes calls get dropped, and there goes a chance to fill a job. But the recruiter, undeterred, picks up the phone and makes another call from her list of candidates.
