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	Hiring the right people. As we advance into the this century, there are less people entering the workforce and it will become increasingly difficult to find good employees. Competition will increase for the best workers.

	Checking it out: employee background checks can save your company time, money and reputation if the worst were to occur. Here's what you should know

	Controlling retention: Go on, make the staff happy: half the battle of employee retention is knowing why they stay

	Screen and Glean employee feedback and exit interviews If hiring the right people is costly, time-consuming and difficult, then keeping them is critical, and probably one of the most important issues facing organizations today.

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HR Digest - Updated 31st August 2005

Indian IT Managers Among Lowest Paid In The World: Survey

The IT sector may be among India\'s top paymasters, but IT managers in India are among the lowest paid in the world, said a survey by Mercer Human Resources Consulting. IT managers, \"defined as those who are responsible for developing IT systems and managing a company\'s IT specialists\" in India, on an average, earn $26,500 a year, the survey said. While the top earners are IT managers in Switzerland who take home an average of $1,61,900 a year, those who earn the least are IT managers in Vietnam who are paid an average of $20,100 a year. The survey, which covered 5,300 companies across the world, found that eight of the 10 highest-paying countries for IT managers are in Western Europe. Japan and Hong Kong are the only two non-European nations that rank among the top 10 for pay to IT managers. According to the survey, IT managers in Japan earn on an average $1,12,300 a year and those in Hong Kong $97,600 a year. IT managers in the US, which is ranked 14th, earn an average yearly salary of $89,100.

Motorola To Hire 1,000 More

Motorola is planning to increase its engineering headcount in India by 1,000 to take the total to 3,500 by the end of next year. Mr Ed Zander, Chairman and CEO, said the company had invested in people in India and also intended to increase its penetration in the market and bring low-cost mobile phones to the country. \"We will consider India as a base for manufacturing when the volumes justify it,\" he said, adding that while manufacturing had moved from one low-cost location to another, Motorola\'s investment in the \'high-cost\' engineering talent pool was for the long-term. In the past four months, Motorola has launched Motorola Labs, expanded its Global Software group to Hyderabad and launched new facilities for its core network division and embedded communications computing businesses.

Oracle Bullish On HR Management Solution

The US-based enterprise software company, Oracle Corporation, remains bullish on its human capital management (HCM) application offerings in India. China and India are the biggest markets in Asia for the application, according to Mr Ron Hanscome, Senior Product Director, Human Resources Management System, Oracle. The application enables companies to address employee expectations and increase motivation levels thereby improving customer delivery and services. It covers processes surrounding the management of worker and organisational data, compensation, benefits and legal compliance, he said. Oracle is working with Hewitt as a knowledge partner in India. Hewitt has deep domain knowledge and this would help Oracle concentrate on specific targeted programmes, he said.

Nipuna Opts For India-based CEO

Mr Venkatesh Roddam, a senior Deutsche Bank official, has joined Nipuna, the BPO subsidiary of Satyam Computer Services, as the new Chief Executive Officer effective August 16, 2005. Prior to joining Nipuna, Mr Venkatesh was the Global Head of Trust and Securities operations for Deutsche Bank based in Frankfurt. He brings over 18 years of experience in the financial services and banking industry in India and overseas. He started his career with ANZ Grindlays Bank, and later moved on to work with Emirates Bank International and HDFC Bank. He had been with Deutsche Bank for the last eight years.

When Your Pay Doubles, Your Boss Gets 10 Times The Hike

In the last ten years, directors\' remuneration of the top companies has jumped more than 10 times while the companies wages and salary bill grew by a little more than double during the period. India Inc net sales, net profits and dividend pay-outs jumped by four times during the period. During \'04-05, India\'s top 41 non-banking private sector companies paid Rs 271 crore to their directors against a mere Rs 28 crore ten years ago. In the same period, the company\'s employee cost grew from Rs 4,740 crore to Rs 16,558 crore, a cumulative growth of three and half times. Excluding three IT companies namely Infosys, Wipro and HCL Infosystems, the cumulative growth in employee cost drops down to 126 pct or little over two-fold. As a percentage of net sales, employee cost has come down from 7.5 pct ten years ago to 6.6 pct now. Industry professionals blame it on the differential compensation model adopted by India Inc for its top management and lower level employees.

Major Shake-up At Citi
Mr Sarvesh Sarup, head of consumer business for Citigroup India, is headed for Europe to take on a senior level assignment. Mr P S Jayakumar, regional head, consumer finance of Citi will take over the mantle from Mr Sarup. Mr Anando Mukherjee, head of retail credit, HDFC Bank is now on course to join Stanchart as the head of retail credit. Mr Sarup is currently the country business manager, global consumer group, CitiGroup. All the consumer business of Citigroup in India including Citibank and CitiFinancial, the wholly owned NBFC of Citi, reports to him. He will now take over as the head of the GCB (global consumer group) business of UK and Germany, based in UK.

SAP to raise staff count at Bangalore

SAP AG, the global leader in business software solutions, plans to add another 1,350 employees at its Bangalore centre, increasing its headcount to 3,000 by the end of 2006. The Bangalore centre is the largest development facility for SAP outside Germany and at present employs over 1,650 staff.
"India is among one of the top eight strategic markets for SAP globally and the IT knowledge available in the country is highest in the world," Leo Apotheker, president - global customer solutions and separations, SAP AG, said. About 75 per cent of the new recruits would be for SAP Labs India, which is into business solutions group (BSG) manufacturing, developing mobile business solutions and financial services. The remaining 25 per cent would be appointed for global consulting and support operations, he said. Opened in November 1998, the Bangalore centre accounts for over 40 per cent of SAP's global BSG manufacturing team. SAP Labs India is one of the four global product development hubs for SAP globally. SAP is the leading business software solutions provider for large, medium and small businesses in India and has a clientele ranging from large enterprises such as Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) to companies like Yamuna Flour Mills and John Fowler. According to International Data Corporation (IDC), SAP has a 54 per cent market share in enterprise resource planning in India.

IBM plans software campus in Bangalore `Construction work under way; land sought in Mysore'

Though bulk of the growth in headcount in 2004 was on account of the acquisitions, IBM has been adding more people in India to execute the increasing number of projects that were offshored. IN a bid to expand and consolidate its rapidly growing operations in Bangalore, the Big Blue IBM is setting up a huge software development campus in the city. IBM's investment in Bangalore campus could run into several millions. IBM has acquired about 10 acres of land in northern parts of the city, where it has started the construction activity, highly placed sources said. It also sought some 50 acres of land from the Karnataka Government in Mysore to expand its development operations, they added. An IBM spokesperson neither denied nor confirmed the company's expansion plans. At present, IBM has about four leased facilities in Bangalore from where its global services, business transformation, software labs and the application management services division operate. The company has an employee headcount of close to 25,000 people in India, the bulk of whom are in Bangalore. IBM has been ramping up its India operations rapidly over the past couple of years as it offshored more projects and reduced jobs elsewhere globally to cut costs. The company's headcount at the beginning of 2005 stood at 23,000, a growth of some 150 per cent compared to early 2004. Though bulk of the growth in headcount in 2004 was on account of the acquisitions, IBM has been adding more people in India to execute the increasing number of projects that were offshored. The buy-outs included the $170 million Daksh eServices deal that brought in about 6,000 employees into the IBM fold. Also the acquisition of Rational and Trigo which had development centres in India brought in several hundred of developers into the IBM fold. Sources said IBM has been hiring aggressively in India for its global services division and the BPO outfit. Most of the hires are laterals and the company has been hiring people for its operations in Bangalore, Kolkata, Pune, Mumbai and Gurgaon. IBM could be adding on an average of over 500 people every month, sources said. IBM recently announced that it would slash some 13,000 jobs, mainly in Europe to cut costs. Sources said some of those jobs could come to India as the company is expected to move some of its operations out of Western Europe to lower-cost regions.

Nasscom planning IT aptitude test

COIMBATORE: In its bid to ease the load of IT companies in the recruitment process, the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) is planning a national level IT aptitude test on the lines of GATE/CAT or the GRE tests. Though the proposal is still in the conceptual stage, R. Narayanan, Chairman of Nasscom Initiative on HR for IT, is confident of its rollout by the year-end.
Narayanan said Nasscom's efforts were aimed at moderating the IT companies' recruitment process load. "Thousands of candidates are picked off the campus every year and the question paper structure differed in each of these companies. To bring about some uniformity in the question paper pattern (since all recruiters gauge the test score of the prospective candidates on aptitude test), Nasscom is contemplating a test at the national level," said Narayanan. Nasscom and the All India Council for Technical Education have signed a memorandum of understanding for industry training. "We noticed that the small players in the IT space are equally committed to industry training. We have trained 200 faculties so far," he said. To enable students prepare for such training, the company has launched a Web site with all related information. "Students would need to put in 300 hours for preparation, so that they can take the test on the date of joining. We are extending financial incentive to candidates who fare well in the tests," said Narayanan.

The information provided in this section has been gathered from published sources. The information is true to the best of our knowledge and Topplanet has taken reasonable steps to ensure the accuracy of the information.