Videographer: Shally Steckerl Founder of JobMachine, Inc.

By Dave Mendoza, Master Cybersleuth, an Affiliate Partner, JobMachine Inc. (720) 733-2022

Frank Mulligan is an Open Networker who welcomes your Linkedin Invites: View his Linkedin Profile and recommendations,
*Simply add his email, frank.mulligan@recruit-china.com to your Linkedin invitation

Frank Mulligan is the China Director for Accetis International and the founder of Talent Software, Inc. Frank specializes in Executive Search, Staff and Candidate Assessment & Testing, Staffing Metrics.

Headquartered in Paris, Accetis International is an executive search firm with a network of nine offices in Europe, Asia, and North America.

Talent Software, Inc. is a Shanghai-based HR outsourcing provider which Frank built up using China’s first bilingual ATS and testing solution. He has lived in China for over ten years in both Beijing and Shanghai, Before starting Talent Software, Inc., Frank was the Chief Representative of Norman Broadbent Executive Search in China, 1st Secretary (Commercial for the Irish Embassy in Beijing and Strategic Planning Manager, Siemens, Ltd. China.

Frank operates two blogs and an online TV programme that he hosts. Visit Talent Software Blog and “ERE’s Talent in China” for additional information and expert specialization on all things related to China’s complex business, social and staffing infrastructures.

ERE GLOBAL AMSTERDAM: “China’s War For Talent – How hiring moved from tactical to strategic as HR was forced to watch from sidelines”

Frank Mulligan’s decade of expertise working in China in both Beijing and Shanghai gives him a unique and unparalleled perspective in the fields of Executive Search, Staff and Candidate Assessment & Testing, Staffing Metrics and business development. Moreover, Frank has been at the cutting edge of staffing industry trends, operating two blogs and an online TV programme that he hosts. Over the last two years we have communicated, I have been impressed by his broad knowledge of China’s complex business, social and staffing infrastructures, but I must say, that having seen him present at ERE Global in Amsterdam in Fall, 2007 that I have become one of his biggest fans given his extraordinary ability to captivate an audience with breathtaking depth of information with a sense of style and entertaining demeanor. He is a well rounded educator, not simply a specialist with narrow interests. He has risen to prominence as a Thought Leader because he is trusted, well informed, and above all someone you would be honored to call a friend. I strongly recommend Frank’s services and I encourage him to take his presentation globally to educate a broader spectrum of industries that can benefit from his brilliant speaking ability.

View my profile on RecruitingBlogs.com

LinkedIn | Bio | MSN | Skype

By Dave Mendoza, Master Cybersleuth, Affiliate Partner, JobMachine Inc.

** Connect directly with William Chin on LinkedIn, Click “Expand Your Network” tab. Insert his name and email: williamchin68@gmail.com **

Which recruitment software tools do you use in your day to day recruitment activities & do they translate effectively within all of the different countries where you recruit?

“Corporate job sites and other online recruitment websites enable for local language and adapted to the local market do the best in attracting and generate applicant usage.

Corporate sites who take a global approach have not been as effective. They do not factor in local practices. In PRC and Vietnam, applicants will have more difficulty in filling out online forms due to difficulty with the English language. Applicants are generally not as internet or web savvy and find it difficult to navigate through complex websites sites and online forms. Emailed resume/CVs (and even hard copy) are prevalent.”

How many applicants do you estimate are hired from your corporate website as compared to how many are hired through referrals?

“Referrals are consistently the most effective method for recruitment. On average, we hire 30+% of staff through employee referrals. Our corporate website is effective for junior-level positions.”

WHERE ARE THE “MOST HIRES” collected from? (# quantity)

Strictly speaking, in terms of quantity then newspaper ads, campus recruiting and job fairs generate the most candidates. Job fairs have not been a key part of our recruiting strategy. They do not generate the quality of applicants. Where we need to we source directly from campus for entry level positions.

What is the source of your “LOWEST COST OF HIRES” – (least amount of invested resources for the easiest hires, regardless of quality)

“Employee referrals are the lowest cost hires, even when factoring in referral bonus we pay to employees.”

Whether you are hiring IT engineers, accounting, – whatever talent you are seeking, – is your country’s CULTURE a factor in the RESPONSE RATE you get when sending an email requesting a CV versus calling the candidate directly at their work? Are they open/eager to sending their CV, are they more shy/cautious or even suspicious depending on the method you use to contact them?

“An effective recruiter must develop a relationship in order to getting a foot in the door with a prospective candidate. Asian culture is very relations oriented and this is especially true in recruiting. A cold email is not an effective method of reaching candidates.

In my personal experience, not being a native speaker of the Chinese or Vietnamese language has been a barrier in connecting with prospective candidates. Remember, that while many professionals do speak English fluently, it is not their first language. Making the first impression and being conversant is helpful in building the initial rapport.”

In Your country, how does the actual selection process proceed once a candidate has been identified and what role does a recruiter in PRC and Vietnam play in the process?

“As in-house recruiters, we have the benefit of working as partners to our internal business groups and hiring managers. We source, interview, select and close (make offer) to the candidates, following the candidate all the way through the process. We have a proactive approach to senior and difficult-to-find candidates.

We utilize local recruiters to source locally in Asia. Again, knowing the native culture and language is important in building a strong network.

We are also continue to be interested in “return to home country” candidates. We work with our recruiting team in US and Europe to source and identify candidates for Asia. We are interested in those candidates who are international students studying in the US and have plans on returning to their home country for employment.”

What methods/resources produce the FASTEST amount of time in producing hires?

“Newspaper and online job sites are the fastest way of generating a candidate pool. Campus job fairs and events are the fastest way to reach university graduates. We have started to use social networking sites to reach prospective candidates. While these sites are not intended to generate volume, they do give us better hit-rate.

LinkedIn is the most prolific networking site in Asia. There hasn’t been a similar network site that has emerged with scale of users. vnSpoke in Vietnam is brand new site.”

What SPECIFIC TECHNOLOGY TOOLS do you use that produce FASTEST amount of time in producing hires. Please state the software, databases you use in detail.

“Newspaper ads and internet job sites are the two resources that generate the fastest way to find candidates (entry to junior levels). In Vietnam, very few people have their resume/CV’s (personal bio) posted online. Similar to China, the primary methods of getting “volume” is through newspaper ads.

Tools available and used in the US are not as prevalent in Asia. The simple reason is at resume spiders, contact list generators etc are designed, built and deployed for the US market. I haven’t seen “native” tools developed out of the Asia market yet.”

Is it acceptable, or common, in your country’s culture to offer a referral fee for a successful hire to someone who recommended the candidate? Yes or No? What is the formula, method or basis for developing a money reward for a referral?

“Yes, it is a common practice to offer a referral bonus. The specific amount is based on external benchmarking and internal evaluation. Depending on the situation, we may have “specials” offered for critical hires.”

Do you use blogs specific to each country’s talent within target industries/competing companies?

“Recruiting blogs have not yet caught on in PRC and Vietnam. Chinese students use school based online bulletin-boards (aka BBS) for information jobs and internships. ChinaRen.com is a popular site for younger demographics and is known for building an alumni network (similar to facebook). vnSpoke.com is a newly launched social networking site in Vietnam.”

What are the BEST JOB BOARDS ** SPECIFIC WEBSITES** to each of the countries you recruit for, BOTH overall and SPECIFIC TO each industry

PRC – Top 3 jobs site in China:
www.chinahr.com
www.51jobs.com
www.zhaopin.com

Vietnam – vietnamworks.com (the leading job website)
www.hrvietnam.com
www.vnspoke.com (social networking site)

Not Country Specific:
Facebook.com (best way to reach students studying in the US (and local) universities.

What are recommended/effective local newspapers and major associations & conferences and industry-specific website portals for recruiters to consider familiarizing themselves with to understand the native staffing cultures and employment tools of the trade?

PRC: Each major city has its own leading newspaper. Beijing Youth Daily (Beijing) and Xin Min Evening News (Shanghai) are the most popular for the respective cities.

Vietnam: Tuoi Tre (leading VN newspaper)

What Search Engines in addition to common ones like Google, do you use that are native to the countries you are responsible for?

PRC – top search sites are:
www.baidu.com (in Chinese)
www.google.cn (is very popular)
www.sina.com
www.sohu.com

Vietnam
www.yahoo.com.vn
www.google.com.vn

Which 3rd party agency/ recruitment search firms have you successfully used and would recommend to others for the types of positions (IT, accounting etc) you recruit for?
China – all major recruitment firms globally have offices in China (contingency as well as retainer. Examples of PRC based agencies include Paul & Leon Consulting (www.plcc.com.cn), PCI Executive Search Consultants (www.pcichina.com), Antal (http://www.antal.com).

Vietnam – the two leading agencies are: Navigos and PwC (They are generalist recruiting for all market segments. There are no specialty recruitment agencies in Vietnam.)

NOTE: Mentions of firms and/or websites does not constitute an endorsement nor recommendations by SixDegreesFromDave.com.

By Dave Mendoza, Master Cybersleuth, Affiliate Partner, JobMachine Inc.

** Connect directly with William Chin on LinkedIn, Click “Expand Your Network” tab. Insert his name and email: williamchin68@gmail.com **

Today “Six Degrees From Dave” continues its series of articles focusing upon global perspectives among fellow colleagues in the staffing industry from each corner of the Earth, in the spirit of fostering best practices and understanding. As part of my continuing effort to research perspectives and identify fundamental patterns among recruiters, newspapers and other mediums, and the role of demographics, I have reached out to global staffing leaders and recruiters to inquire on their methods of recruitment, to examine their personal efforts to develop social networking relationships to foster talent pools, and to identify the types of job boards, blogs, user forums, Listservs, etc. particular and useful to their countries, regions and continents. Today another small step forward to initiate a series of inquiries in the hopes that together we can learn from each other.

Again, I thank each of my colleagues in advance for their willingness to confront the questions posed. Your contributions will assist in identifying patterns we can sort together as part of an ongoing discussion. I invite the staffing organizations of Corporate America and Multi-National companies to contribute in the dialogue.

(*** INTERESTED IN PARTICIPATING? If you are an overseas staffing professional, and wish to be interviewed as part of this series to share your perspective, please email me at ldavemendoza @ gmail.com)

William Chin is a Senior Staffing Manager with experience for staffing goals throughout Asia (Taiwan, Singapore, China, Southeast Asia and Japan). In his current role, he is responsible for recruiting for Intel’s Assembly and Test Factory start-up in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. In his prior role, William was responsible for Intel’s Sales and Marketing functions in China, India, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Cambodia, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand. In addition to his staffing responsibilities, William served as Greater Asia Project Manager for corporate-wide implementation of PeopleSoft 8.9 suite of recruiting tools. In addition to staffing, William has also held positions in Compensation supporting IT groups at Intel.

William has been recruiting for over 11 years, primarily as in-house recruiter for Intel since the day he was first approached by an Intel recruiter at a job fair. Earning a BA, East Asian Studies at UC Davis, Masters in Education at UCLA, and a Certificate in Human Resources at UC Berkeley William has prepared himself extensively on both a scholastic and professional level to contribute to the APAC theatre. William and his family originally resided in San Francisco prior to his overseas duties and currently work and live in Ho Chi Minh City since 2006 and over 4 years in Singapore and 2 yrs in PRC on previous APAC onsite projects.

How is culture a factor in the hiring practice different from other countries you recruit from?

“Differing country culture has not been a major issue affecting my recruitment efforts in Asia. However, personal relationships and building a social network is a key factor in expanding a referral network, especially for senior level candidates. Knowing the local language is important in getting your foot in the door with candidates.

As an example, candidates in the US are used to direct cold calls and respond well to recruiter calls. However, in PRC and Vietnam, candidates will ask for source of referral and the relationship you have with the referral source. The usual recruiter response of being unable to disclose source of referral may not gain the confidence of the candidate. Premium branded retainer agencies are able to by pass this hurdle.

Once you’ve gained the confidence of the contact that person may refer you on to other contacts. I’ve had situations where applicants actually have referral other friends and associates knowing that others may be a better fit.

As the market matures and competition intensifies in PRC, applicants are more and more comfortable with direct-source cold calls. Vietnam relies on strong referral network for candidate sourcing.”

Where is your host country ahead of the USA in certain recruitment tactics?

“Both countries, China and Vietnam, continue to be reliant on relationships and hard copy CV. Use of the internet (online job boards, social networking) for job search is still in its infancy.” Applicants continue to rely on newspaper ads and job boards (junior level) and recruiting agencies (mid to senior level) as channels for job hunt. Companies typically have about 1/3 of hires from employee referrals.

What single event had the most impact on your sourcing/recruiting career? What inspires You as a Recruiter?

“The person who originally hired me had the single biggest impact on me as a recruiter. Firstly, he saw a potential in me as a recruiter. It’s been a blast ever since.

He was the first to send me on a temporary assignment in Taiwan, what was initially a two-month project turned out to be a two-year project through Singapore and China. I later returned to the US but found myself continuing to work on international projects. Some years later, I made a person decision to localize and working based in Singapore.”

Does your staffing organization “DIRECT SOURCE” from competitor companies to hire talent?

“Yes, we do direct source from competitor companies. However, as an employer, we have strict ethical practices when approaching candidates.

One of my key strategies for building a strong in-house recruiting team is to hire people with the passion and savvy for recruiting. One does not typically find this type of talent in traditional HR. I set my strategy on hiring agency recruiters to work as in-house recruiters. We use the usual telephone direct source approaches. Social and professional network sites (e.g., LinkedIn) is a great source to generate candidates and project.”

Can you identify specific obstacles of the countries you are responsible for, – particularly in terms of HOW EMPLOYMENT LAWS ARE FACTORS – specific to direct sourcing & hiring, and cultural differences in the recruiting process?

“There are no specific laws which have a direct impact on our ability to recruit in either PRC. There are limitations on hiring foreign passport holders (foreigners and/or returning overseas-Chinese). Hiring senior-levels and technical experts are allowed but only with documentation that you have exhausted all other recruitment efforts. Employment contracts may not exceed 10 years.

For local PRC citizens, a valid “HouKou” (residence permit) is required to receive social insurance benefits. For example, someone who has a HouKou in Xian, China working in Shanghai is not eligible for social insurance benefits because the person is working out of his/his home jurisdiction. However, this is not a major limitation in recruiting or attracting qualified candidates as higher paying jobs in major cities more then compensates for the lost in social insurance benefits.

The Vietnamese market is similar to China in recruitment practices. While companies may hire foreigners and overseas-returning Vietnamese, employers are required to demonstrate and document that all other recruitment efforts to hire local Vietnamese have been exhausted. Employment contracts must be within a defined period.

The government of Singapore actively supports recruitment efforts for highly technical talent into the country to support its growing industries. Work permits and permanent residency permits are easy to obtain.”

How are US and recruitment culture in Vietnam different? How are they similar?

“The use of online employment recruitment activities is significantly greater in the US both in terms of applicants using online resources (applying online, use of job portals) and company reliance on corporate websites.

For example, new graduates will typically attend campus job fairs and apply through job boards. Junior staff will utilize job boards to post CVs in their job search. Senior level and people/project managers rarely use job boards. They will have their resumes sent to a search firm. In PRC, they are probably getting calls every day from recruiters.

In Vietnam, many new graduates do not even have resumes, let a lone having a well-written one. They are not used to using online resume submission and majority of companies continue to collect hard-copy resume from students. The experienced professional (including passive candidates) will have a ready-prepared resume. In my experience, once being introduced as a corporate recruiter, candidates will generally send a CV within 1-2 days.

By Dave Mendoza, Master Cybersleuth, a JobMachine Inc. Affiliate Partner

By Dave Mendoza, Master Cybersleuth, a JobMachine Inc. Affiliate Partner

Companies, People, Ideas
Back to India
Robyn Meredith 07.23.07

“He left his homeland 35 years ago for a high tech career in the U.S. He thought he might never go back. Now Harsh Manglik has returned to India to ride the outsourcing wave and oversee 35,000 employees for Accenture. … The Future is Being Designed”
Harsh Manglik

Harsh Manglik spent 35 years building his career in the U.S. Then he went home.

On a starry night 55 years ago, deep in a remote forest of northern India, a 4-year-old boy nicknamed “sher baccha” (Hindi for “tiger cub”) rode safely in the arms of his father, who carried him into the moist night air. “Can you hear that?” the boy’s father asked. Then it came again: a deep, threatening rumble from a mile away. “That,” his father said, “is a tiger.”

The father was Ved Mitra Manglik, part Indiana Jones and part Robert Moses, a towering figure famous for building dams and irrigation projects critical to the development of postcolonial India. He had dragged his family to this remote outpost, a hundred miles and a two-day trek from the nearest railroad station. No schools, no roads, no running water. He would always sling a rifle over his shoulder before stepping out of the tent that served as the family home.

His son, the tiger cub, is Harsh Manglik, 59, chief of Accenture’s (nyse: ACN – news – people ) thriving India business and overlord of 35,000 employees–4,000 more than the $16.7 billion American consulting giant employs in the U.S. Five years ago the firm employed only 800 people in the country. In his own way Manglik is helping to build modern India, just as his late father had done half a century before him. “It is heady to think you’ll have a role in shaping things and seeing your fingerprints on it,” Manglik says. “The future is being designed.”

Yet Manglik long ago left behind India and the $100-a-month job he got after graduating from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur to seek a better career in the U.S. And for most of his 35 years in America he doubted he ever would move back to his homeland. Instead, he got a graduate engineering degree at Case Western Reserve University, followed by an M.B.A. at Carnegie Mellon. He became a U.S. citizen and climbed the ranks of big names in high tech–Booz Allen, United Technologies (nyse: UTX – news – people ), Accenture, IBM, Symantec (nasdaq: SYMC – news – people ).

And then Manglik shocked his wife and two grown daughters and his relatives in India by doing the one thing they never expected: He moved back to India. He rejoined Accenture in September 2006 to run its far-flung India business from Bangalore, overseeing the hiring of 1,000 new employees a month, expanding service to U.S. clients and wooing Indian companies that could become the global giants of tomorrow.

“We know it is going to be big, and we know we have to get in now,” he says.

Ever more executives, engineers and salesmen, India-born and U.S.-trained, are returning to their homeland to cash in on the Asia boom. The same is true for returnees to the once backward but now surging economies of China and Vietnam (see box). In India these returnees are known simply as NRIs (for nonresident Indians); in Vietnam they are called Viet Kieu, meaning “overseas Vietnamese.” In China they are “sea turtles,” or Hai Gui Pai, although some jealous Chinese who never left dub these new arrivals Hai Dai–”seaweed.”

Some 20,000 people of Indian descent have returned in the past two years, says Kiran Karnik, president of India’s Nasscom, a tech trade group. Last year 40,000 returnees resettled in booming China, up from 7,000 in 1999, says David Zweig, a professor at Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. In Vietnam the government has eased visa requirements and investment restrictions to encourage the flow back, and since the 1990s thousands of Vietnamese have returned.

India’s return tide started with the tech bust in 2000, when many Indians working in California lost their jobs; the joke then was that B2B meant not “business to business” but “back to Bangalore.” The trend grew as U.S. companies began sending data processing and call center work to cheaper labor markets in Asia and India.

Now Accenture’s worker hordes serve the world’s blue-chip companies from Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Delhi and Hyderabad. For companies like Best Buy (nyse: BBY – news – people ), Kimberly-Clark (nyse: KMB – news – people ) and Wyeth (nyse: WYE – news – people ), they answer customer calls, maintain the payroll, keep the books and even sort through résumés. Others tackle higher-end work as strategy consultants, researchers on systems integration and customizers of Oracle (nasdaq: ORCL – news – people ) and Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT – news – people ) software.

Accenture runs four small research labs around the world, and the newest one was set up in Bangalore in November 2006, two months after Manglik arrived there; it will have a hundred researchers in three years. Manglik is hiring 2,000 management consultants in India to bid for more gigs. “India is a key country for Accenture, a critical element in our global delivery network” and “integral to our growth strategy,” says William D. Green, Accenture’s chief executive. He personally wooed Manglik, who had put in two years at the firm before leaving in 1992, to rejoin and run India operations last year.

To use a phrase uttered by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, on the night India won its independence from Britain in 1947, for Manglik it was a long delayed “tryst with destiny.” Like Gandhi, Manglik’s grandparents on his mother’s side had been jailed by the British for fighting to free India from colonial rule.

But Manglik would spend most of his adult life in the U.S., and with each promotion any thought of a permanent return to his homeland faded a bit more. “When I left India [in 1972] I was very clear I wanted to come back,” Manglik says. “As I progressed in my career, it began to recede to the background.” His father and mother seemed to accept this. “Fathers are heroes to most children–particularly to boys,” he says. “But he brought me up to be independent. Never once did he say, ‘Why don’t you stay here?’”

He lived in Washington, D.C. , New York and Connecticut; in 1981 he married an Air India flight attendant. They settled in northern California and raised their two daughters there (neither of whom speaks Hindi). Every three years Manglik and his wife brought their American children with them to visit family in India.

As India’s high-tech sector boomed in the build-up to the Y2K scare (the computer glitch that later fizzled), Manglik began to imagine returning to India once his daughters finished college. The scenario grew more real as his once swashbuckling father, in his 80s, had a stroke in 2004.

One summer afternoon in Delhi, as the father lay in bed, his health in rapid decline, Manglik’s sister Kalpana visited his bedside to read him a passage she had penned in a biography she was writing about him. She wanted to describe how he felt about the long absence of Harsh, the only one of his five children to leave India. She voiced a hope that their father had harbored silently:

“I know my son will come back, because he knows his history is in the dust of India. One day he will know that this dust is his mother.” She paused, waiting for her dad, ever stoic, to speak. He could not. His eyes filled with tears, and finally he managed to say, “I could not have said it better.”

A few days later Kalpana read the passage over the phone to her brother, who was up late at night at his home near San Francisco. She listened for a reaction, from 7,690 miles away, but could hear only silence. “He didn’t say anything,” she says now. “He is the last person to cry.”

Within a week Manglik visited her and their father in Dehra Dun. He began flying from San Francisco to India more often, each time finding the country modernizing before his eyes. His father died in September 2004, and Manglik attended the funeral, watching his dad’s ashes sink into the same stretch of river where the elder Manglik had swum as a boy. A notion began to gnaw at him.

“My father never said it, but I do wonder what he thought about the fact that there I was, somewhere else, building my career, and whether I was being selfish.”

And so when Accenture’s chief, Bill Green, called him one day in August 2006 to entice him into quitting Symantec to take a job at Accenture–maybe a post running India?–Manglik’s answer came quickly: “When do I show up?” He began his new job a month later.

The Mangliks moved to Bangalore in September 2006, and for months they lived out of a hotel room, having left behind their two grown daughters. This month they move into their new home, an apartment in central Bangalore. Manglik’s wife, who had gone by the nickname Sally since she was a girl, has reclaimed her Indian name, Madhuri, meaning “sweetness.”

Booming Bangalore, a place of palm trees, traffic jams and tech entrepreneurs, is as close to Silicon Valley as you can get in India. It takes Manglik an hour, in a chauffeured Toyota (nyse: TM – news – people ) Corolla, to navigate the 9-mile drive to work each morning. “I’ve adapted to that,” he says. “I make my phone calls in the car.”

Along the way he passes roadside food carts where a fresh coconut tapped with a straw costs a quarter, and dusty lots filled with cricket games already under way, and women in colorful saris, walking with heavy bags on their heads. Noisy yellow-and-black motorized rickshaws wriggle through standstill traffic as pedestrians press past a sacred cow grazing along a sidewalk here and there.

Past the shopping mall with a KFC, Citibank and Sony (nyse: SNE – news – people ) and Adidas (other-otc: ADDDY.PK – news – people ) shops, a row of office towers houses IBM, EMC and Oracle. Just past the Hindu temple, marked by a blue, red and green dome, lies his destination, the seven-story glass-and-concrete office complex housing Accenture India’s Bangalore hive.

The brightly painted hallways are crammed with new hires in a rush, high-potential prospects who, in Manglik’s generation, had to leave India if they wanted to exploit their technology degrees. But Manglik says he is lucky to be back in the land he left 35 years ago. “These are not even once-in-a-lifetime opportunities,” he says, “because you don’t usually get the chance, in an entire lifetime, to shape your country.”

His father could not have said it better.

One recent afternoon Manglik braves blistering heat and gridlock to get to the Bangalore airport. He arrives at the grimy terminal, pushes past myriad touts and steps to the counter of Jet Airways, a transient home since his return to India. As he checks in for a flight to Delhi, a route he now travels more than the San Francisco-to-L.A. trek of his past, the lights overhead flicker erratically throughout the airport, a symptom of this boomtown’s chronic power shortage.

He climbs aboard the plane and leaves behind the Third World for a cushy seat in business class, where a flight attendant offers a cold towel and a chilled glass of coconut juice. Manglik reaches for a copy of A Transition Across Ages, the biography of his father that he helped his sister self-publish last year. He turns to page 152 and runs a forefinger across the text, translating elegant Hindi script that quotes his late father predicting the return of a son who, one day, will realize that his history lies in “the dust of India.”

Then he comes to a passage about the lullaby he heard as a 4-year-old boy–”sher baccha”–in a tent in the remote forests of northern India, where tigers still roamed. He pauses to let the flight attendant pass, then sings the lullaby softly as stars sparkle outside the plane’s portholes, the land he had left shrouded in darkness seven miles below. It transports him back to the place where it all began.

The most vivid depiction of how demographics will impose manpower shortages I have read to date.

Japan will become an “unprecedented” society of old people by mid-century at current birthrates, the government warned Friday, forcing the country to think about persuading retired people back into work.

In an annual report on aging, the government forecast that two in every five people will be 65 or older by 2055 if the trends of a low birthrate and high life-expectancy continue.

“Japan is likely to become an unprecedented aging society like no other country in the world has ever experienced,” the document said.

It urged people to “review their fixed ideas and change their mindsets to see elderly people as precious manpower who support an aging society.”

The government has struggled to persuade Japanese to produce more children, with many young people finding families a burden on their lifestyles or careers.

The trend spells a future crisis, with a smaller working population having to support a mass of elderly. Japan has rejected large-scale immigration.

Japan has already surpassed Italy as having the world’s oldest population, and in 2006 people aged 65 or older accounted for a record 20.8 percent of the population of 127.77 million.

The ratio of elderly people is expected to increase to 40.5 percent of the population in 2055, the report said.

Japan has a retirement age of 60, but nearly two-thirds of men between the ages of 65 and 69 are keeping their jobs. The percentage of women in the same age range holding jobs was much lower at 28.5 percent.

“Many elderly people have strong desire to participate in social activities in their communities, but those desires are not always realised,” it added.

“If they have time, elderly people can be put to use to support families and people who need help, which will reduce the shortage of manpower and curb elderly people’s isolation from society.”

It recommended the expansion of consultation services set up in some communities that assist elderly people who are looking to stay active.

Copyright AFP 2005, AFP stories and photos shall not be published, broadcast, rewritten for broadcast or publication or redistributed directly or indirectly in any medium

LinkedIn | Bio | MSN | Skype

Google can’t find talent in India?
Compliments to Jimmy Stroud at Jim Stroud 2.0

October 11, 2006

There might be more than a billion people in India, but even an internet superstar such as Google has trouble recruiting talented locals in its South Asian operations, a board member said.

“I know first hand that we’ve had a bit more of a challenge trying to hire engineers for Google in Bangalore compared to other parts of the world,” Google director Ram Shriram said in San Francisco.

In particular, the venture capitalist cited a shortage of web development skills such as knowledge of Javascript and Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). The web design technology used in the latest generation of websites such as Google Maps and Flickr Middle also are in short-supply, he said.

“The people are smart, innately smart but don’t have this particular skill set yet,” said Shriram, an Indian native who is a founding member of Google’s board of directors.

Indian high-tech centre Bangalore is the site of one of Google’s global research centres, the location where services such as Google Finance were first developed.

Google also has offices near New Delhi, Hyderabad and in Mumbai.

Google had about 8000 employees worldwide at the end of June.

In recent years, many US firms, including Reuters, have started operations in Bangalore seeking to draw on a pool of low-cost, talented labour.

Yet the rapid growth of such operations has led to a greater competition for talent.

Shriram said some Indian businesses such as call centres suffered from high staff turnover as greater competition for labour has driven up the wages employers have to pay to keep employees, something less common in web businesses.

“In the web 2.0 businesses, I’m not seeing that, but I am also seeing a huge talent shortage,” he said.

“It’s been really hard to find middle management, for example. It’s great to find a good founding team, but then I can’t find middle management. I can’t find engineers.”

Besides serving on Google’s board, Shriram invests in start-up companies such as TellMe Networks, 24/7 Customer, Plaxo and StumbleUpon.com through his venture fund Sherpalo Ventures.

He also was an early member of the executive team at pioneering web company Netscape Communications.

Shriram, who held 2.3 per cent of Google’s shares when the firm went public in 2004, was also critical of the state of web design in India, the world’s second most populous country.

“User-interface people are in short supply in India,” he said. “I have to actually transport people from here over there,” he said of the need to send US workers to India.

Checkout accounting jobs, UK at AccountantCareers.co.uk.

Some aspects of sourcing expertise are based on fundamentals — asking the right questions. I take the time to ask candidates to assist in the explaination of engineering basics in layman terms. The Pan Pacific theatre is a pivotal arena for semiconductor manufacturing and the demand far exceeds the supply for established talent across a variety of key disciplines. I have long been an advocate in the essential need for semiconductor companies to establish their own indigienous sourcing teams with the help of domestic sourcing gurus on-site. In the process, you create infrastructure – which is too often missing overseas. As a hobby, I source Asian IC engineers, in doing so, I developed the following guide of English to Chinese translations of key semiconductor engineering terms for your sourcing pleasure: (I simply cared enough to ask)

English to Mandarin Chinese Character translation

If your staffing organization wants to up its game further and establish its own sourcing team simply contact me and JobMachine inc. can make the above techniques a way of life and hires!

Search internships at College Recruiter.com.