CATCH AS CATCH CAN: Firstsource’s recruitment bus in Mumbai; (below) candidates take a test inside the bus.

Talk about the mountain going to Mohammed. An orange and white bus makes its way through Mumbai’s congested streets. It’s called “Career on Wheels”— and it saves you the trouble of commuting to apply for a job. You fill in a form, sit for a test and appear for an interview — all in the bus.

The bus, bearing the colours and logo of business process outsourcing (BPO) firm Firstsource, has been making its rounds since April 20. Firstsource’s call centres are in the distant suburbs of Malad and Vashi. If candidates are unwilling to go all the way for job interviews, well, the job interviews go to them.

Amit Bhatnagar (not his real name), who works for the Gurgaon-based BPO firm Quatrro, can’t believe his luck. Some months ago, Quatrro had to hire 100 people at short notice for a project. Employees were asked to refer candidates, and 16 people from Bhatnagar’s list were hired. In return, he was rewarded with a Hero Honda motor cycle. That was in addition to the Rs 5,000-10,000 that he got for each person on his list who joined the firm.

Six months ago, Bangalore-based 24/7 Customer held a 9 am to 9 am non-stop recruitment camp in Hyderabad. Close to 120 people were interviewed, many of them between 1 am and 3 am, the only time they were free. Those opting for interviews at unearthly hours got picked up and dropped home.

The BPO industry is in a flux — there are just not enough employable people for the jobs it has to offer. So firms are looking at novel ways of recruitment — mobile hiring, day and night drives, escort services for candidates, handsome rewards in cash and kind for referrals and tapping social networking sites. With talent in short supply and job applicants increasingly playing hard to get, it is pulling out all the stops to woo employees.

Recruitment was always a challenge but it has become a Herculean task now, laments Aniruddha Limaye, chief people officer at the Mumbai-based WNS Global Services. His counterparts at other firms agree. Compared with five years ago, the number of applicants worth hiring has halved, says V. Bharathwaj, chief marketing officer of 24/7 Customer.

“The BPO industry is growing rapidly but the employable pool isn’t growing at the same pace,” notes Ameet Nivsarkar, vice-president, National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom). Employment in the IT-BPO industry grew from 190,000 in 1997-98 to nearly 2 million in March 2008. About 35 per cent of the 2 million belong to the BPO sector.

BPO employees can bag a spanking new bike as reward for bringing in new recruits

Nasscom has been conducting assessment tests and organising job fairs to bring candidates and BPO firms together. It says that only 10-15 per cent of the over 17,000 candidates who have taken the tests are employable. Another 10 per cent need some training, while 55 per cent require significant training. Only 1,000 to 1,200 of the 8,000 candidates who have participated in 10 job fairs got offers from BPO firms.

Worse, there’s competition for this limited pool from other industries. With the economy growing at a fast clip, the airlines, tourism, retail and hotels and the manufacturing sectors are all on a hiring spree. The BPO industry is losing its glamour quotient, says Gaurav Khurana, business development head of the Delhi-based human resource consultant firm Abearix. Other sectors offer equally (if not more) attractive salaries, plush office environments, more opportunities for upward mobility and better timings. So BPO firms are feeling the talent pinch.

Three years ago, Abearix’s BPO clients would demand a supply commitment of 50 to 100 employees a month. Now they are content with five or ten. There are handsome payouts. Rates for placement consultants have increased from Rs 5,000 for every person hired to between Rs 8,000 and Rs 10,000 over the past two years, though some even get paid Rs 20,000 per hire. Sudden mass hiring could see huge bonuses — either a month’s salary or 8.33 per cent of the hired person’s annual salary. A Chennai BPO firm recently paid Rs 45,000 to a placement consultant for two candidates.

Employees who refer candidates are also raking it in. While the going rate for entry-level recruits is between Rs 5,000 and Rs 10,000, roping in a senior manager can get an employee up to Rs 25,000 as referral reward. There are gifts and bonuses as well for people getting a specific number of recruits. Quatrro has a slab system, with someone who gets five recruits getting, say, a vacuum cleaner, someone who brings seven getting a television set and so on. At WNS and Firstsource, those who pull in a larger number of recruits are felicitated in various forms, apart from cash rewards, every three months.

Companies are selling themselves not just to their clients but also to potential employees. Firstsource’s bus, admits Aashu Calapa, executive vice-president, human resources, is as much a branding exercise as a recruitment drive. Advertisements in Mumbai papers are hugely expensive, but may still not stand out in the clutter. The bus does. There are 40-odd call centres close to Firstsource’s offices. Candidates who come there could well walk into one of the other firms. That danger is minimised with on-the-spot offers on the bus.

The search for talent is always on. Bangalore-based recruitment firm TVA Infotech has teams to keep tabs on talent pools, networking with students attending pre-university and university in places such as Mandya, setting up a kiosk near the main bus stand at Chickaballapur (both small towns near Bangalore) or in malls and coffee shops in Bangalore. “If we have to check the demand-supply mismatch, drastic measures will have to be taken,” says Suhas Merurkar, TVA Infotech’s president.

Quatrro’s chief HR officer, S. Varadarajan, doesn’t wait for a vacancy to make a job offer to someone who he thinks will fit in well. A person was hired for the mortgage business three months before the business started. But these, warns Khurana, only work up to a point. “Desperate measures won’t work when there are no people.”

Companies are addressing that. Most are spending more on training those who don’t quite make the grade. Even trainers, says Varadarajan, are getting rewards, with companies helping them get certified or sponsoring them for expensive training programmes or even sending them on holidays. 24/7 Customer has built a network with over 350 colleges and institutes to train college lecturers to further train potential candidates. Companies have to change their attitude to hiring and not look at the same pool others are digging into, says Varadarajan. Easier said than done, maybe?