Only a year ago the communications job market was far from being saturated and good opportunities were found on every corner. However, these golden days are finished and currently the communications industry is experiencing a more client-led recruitment market rather than a candidate-led one. This situation is mainly due to the general slowdown within the communications industry.

However, this situation doesn’t have to turn into a nightmare. Companies are just more conscious and therefore are reviewing roles and responsibilities. In line with the rest of the communications world,there is a process of ‘right-sizing’ taking place in India. But here this does not necessarily imply ‘down-sizing’ – more specifically, it refers to companies gearing themselves up for the challenges that lie ahead, both in the short and long term.

Corporates are making considerable changes through restructuring, reassessing and restrategising their resource bank – preempting skills required for the long term and satisfying the short term need. Candidates, however, still have every reason to be optimistic because there is a core-skills shortage in the telecoms industry.

With strong roll-out plans, and the lure of a deregulated market, companies are now seeing that to turn their plans into a profitable reality a solid workforce is essential.

But wisely, companies are not primarily jumping into this recruitment frenzy feet first. They have seen the situation in the west at the moment, where there has been a move from rapid expansion to downsizing in a short timeframe (with over 350,000 job losses in the UK itself), and have seen the pitfalls of having excessive resource. Instead they are looking at how to balance their recruitment requirements with their business development plans, and to ensure that they, as a company, can attract and keep the best people.

As a starting point, many companies are turning to specialized recruitment consultants, but initially not to search for new staff. Instead, recruitment consultants are being used to run a variety of assessments on a company. As a starting point, benchmarking activities are undertaken to see how well current managerial skills perform against the best practices globally, and then the consultants provide operational and managerial assessment programs to develop recruitment strategies for the ongoing development of the company.

This leads to the development and implementation of a structured approach to developing an effective talent pool. With this in place, it becomes easy to see where and when resource is required and an organic growth pattern, in line with a company’s business plan, emerges.

Companies only want the right fits, as it is a tough market and companies get inundated with CVs, they are keen to and prefer to work closely with someone who focuses on and understands the communications arena.

Monica Batra, VP, executive search and selection, India, Band-X