Challenges for organization to scale their team

I observed a pattern where many organizations will prefer to hire fresh engineers from prestigious college and invest reasonable time and effort in training them on various skills before start realizing contribution to the business from those new hires. Organizations have tried various other models also to hire fresh talents and I could see some challenges they are facing with speed of acquiring business not going as per plan. There are different perspectives to look at the challenges all players are facing in industry - student’s perspective, college perspective and organization perspective. In this blog I am talking about organization perspective challenges.

HR/Talent acquiring division gets requirements of new talents from different business units keeping in mind business plan under discussion. The budget of new talent acquisition is carefully used, HR team visits all top colleges, evaluate students as per organization process and make offer to the best candidates keeping the joining date approximate (subject to change) as requested by business units hiring them. Business situation force HR to move the date further and they do their best to get connected to the potential new hire but they see a risk of losing some of the right talent when they get clarity to bring them on board. Even if everything goes well they see some best students drop out giving admissions they got for higher studies as reasons, or not happy with role which is not their passion (forced test engineer role or forced development engineer role) or region/place of work not as expected by them etc. Oops! All investment to acquire talent and train them is going waste.

The organization must be wondering, how nice if they have a solution where they can get a potential talent pool from different sources just in time (JIT) to start contributing from day 1 of joining to the project. 

Assuming few steps normally happens when you hire fresh talent from campus – talent acquisition team effort, travel and stay, training investment on new hires for minimum three months on various skills from internal academy or external vendor, may cost totally per student approximately rupees 2.5 to 3 lakhs. Assuming a minimum salary plus over heads for three months, minimum training charges investment per day, total hiring cost spent by talent acquisition team divided by number of students hired we may find Rs. 3 lakhs as investment per student before they start contributing in project assigned.. This may go up if you are providing accommodation and food also during training period. From my experience there will be few exits due to job allocation which is not in their line of interest. That is another loss on investment made so far. 

JIT hiring opportunity of engineers well trained and groomed by a professional organization who understands the needs of industry, easily will save Rs. 3 lakhs minimum per student by going through this path. Assuming organization hiring in bulk like 100 in a batch every year will save rupees 300 lakhs!. The software professionals hired in this model are productive from first week after you train them on organization process and domain on which they are going to work.

Love to hear different views or comments from the software community.