Starting @ India

In past, a MNC use to face issues like legal complexities, infrastructure, workforce effectiveness, labor unions etc as major challenges in starting their operations in India. Despite these problems, cost advantage and India's largest pool of English speaking work force use to attract them. With the revival of Indian economy, government pro foreign investments policy and reduction in legal hassles, their interest in India has grown and almost daily we hear about an IT/Engineering or Finance company announcing a major expansion or setting up new operations in India. Companies are investing money, time and deputing their best managers to manage things in India.

However with the tremendous growth (both in revenues and employee sizes) Indian Inc. is making, the top management of MNC's is facing a new heat - talent crunch. With India becoming a centre of all IT/Engineering/Finance industry, the competition to attract the best talent has heated up. The demand for talent in these domains is estimated to outreach the supply by 2008 (according to McKinsey). As if to say the existing Indian giants were not posing enough problems for MNC's, we have recently started seeing many VC or self funded Start Ups hitting the Indian market to share the same talent pie.

The shortfall of talent has forced MNC's to develop complex recruitment process to reach out to the talent. Still, the recruitment process is so competitive, especially in major cities like Bangalore, Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai etc., that MNC's often have to interview 50 potential candidates before getting one employee on board.

USP of every startup is its unique idea. In order to transform the idea to reality startups need extremely talented individuals to form their core team. Even more important than cash has become the ability to find and recruit the right team. Their ability to do this becomes one of the single largest factors in their future success.

Apart from salary, stability and perks, the biggest hurdle for start ups in motivating the talent to join them is to have a very solid reason to counter the peace of mind that comes by telling friends and family that they've got a great job at a branded company they've likely heard of. It's very important to realize that stability and prudence is an important cultural factor in India. A startup's potential employees are going to have a hard time rationalizing why they'd take a risk on a no-name startup when there are so many big companies looking to compete for their talent.