NEW DELHI/KOLKATA: For campus recruitment at the premier engineering institutes, the IITs, the news is getting better by the day. By the end of seventh day across seven campuses, on an average 200 students were placed, an increase of around 100 per cent compared to same time last year.

If IIT-Bombay has placed 250 students(that’s one-and-half times more than last year), IIT-Kanpur has placed 200 students in 30 companies, IIT-Roorkee’s 150 students got job offers this season compared to just 70 students in 2008 while IIT-Madras has placed 170 students compared to 130 in the corresponding period last year.

The major recruiters from these campuses were Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu which recruited an average of 20 students from across the different IITs, Oracle and Credit Suisse, 15 and 13 students respectively and Indian Oil Corporation signed on around 10 students.

Till now highest payer has been Tower Research Capital which recruited nine students and has paid a CTC of Rs 22 lakh (this can go up to Rs 43 lakh if performance bonus is added). Schlumberger which has been the highest paymaster till last year (Rs 36 lakh CTC) is yet to come on campus.

At IIT Kharagpur, which has gone into placements with some 1,341 students across undergraduate and post graduate streams, over 200 students have been made job offers so far. Of these, 103 have been bagged by B.Tech and B.Arch students.

“Over 25 per cent of them have been placed so far,” says IIT Kharagpur prof-in-charge training and placements SK Srivastava. In 2008 when the market was going through a slowdown phase, all these institutes were able to place around 70-80 per cent students by the end of the placement process which ran into June this year(2009) despite being among the best technology schools in the country.

“Last year, when companies were cutting down on jobs, despite faring the best amongst other institutes we were able to place one-and-half times less the number of students placed this year till now,” says Prof Ravi Sinha, chairperson, placement, IIT-Bombay.

IIT-Madras has seen 40 companies visiting and a major recruiter has been Credit Suisse. The highest package offered till now at IIT-Madras is Rs 26 lakh and the lowest Rs 7 lakh which is higher than last year’s average package of Rs 5 lakh.

This year a new profile that students are interested in is clean energy and efficient technology and hence companies like NTPC and Modile Thermal are expected to get good response when they visit Read more…

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NEW YORK: In a brutal job market, here’s a task that might sound easy: Fill jobs in nursing, engineering and energy research that pay $55,000 to $60,000, plus benefits.

Yet even with 15 million people hunting for work, even with the unemployment rate nearing 10 percent, some employers can’t find enough qualified people for good-paying career jobs.

Ask Steve Jones, a hospital recruiter in Indianapolis who’s struggling to find qualified nurses, pharmacists and MRI technicians. Or Ed Baker, who’s looking to hire at a U.S. Energy Department research lab in Richland, Wash., for $60,000 each.

Economists say the main problem is a mismatch between available work and people qualified to do it. Millions of jobs with attractive pay and benefits that once drew legions of workers to the auto industry, construction, Wall Street and other sectors are gone, probably for good. And those who lost those jobs generally lack the right experience for new positions popping up in health care, energy and engineering.

Many of these specialized jobs were hard to fill even before the recession. But during downturns, recruiters tend to become even choosier, less willing to take financial risks on untested workers.

The mismatch between job opening and job seeker is likely to persist even as the economy strengthens and begins to add jobs. It also will make it harder for the unemployment rate, now at 9.8 percent, to drop down to a healthier level.

“Workers are going to have to find not just a new company, but a new industry,” said Sophia Koropeckyj, managing director of Moody’s Economy.com. “A fifty-year-old guy who has been screwing bolts into the side of a car panel is not going to be able to become a health care administrator overnight.”

It’s become especially hard to find accountants, health care workers, software sales representatives, actuaries, data analysts, physical therapists and electrical engineers, labor analysts say. And employers that demand highly specialized training — like biotech firms that need plant scientists or energy companies that need geotechnical engineers to build offshore platforms — struggle even more to fill jobs.

The trend has been intensified by the speed of the job market decline, Koropeckyj said. The nation has lost a net 7.2 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007. Yet it can take a year or more for a laid-off worker to gain the training and education to switch industries. That means health care jobs are going unfilled even as laid-off workers in the auto, construction or financial services industries seek work.

“So we have this army of the unemployed” without the necessary skills, Koropeckyj said.

Sitting in his office overlooking the Clarian Health Methodist Hospital complex, Jones leafed through some of the applications he’s received. One came from a hotel worker who listed his experience as, “Cleaning rooms; make beds, clean tubes, vacuum.” Another was from a fitness instructor whose past duties included signing up gym members.

Many of the jobless seem to be applying for any opening they see, Jones said.

“You just don’t have the supply to fill those particular positions,” he said of the more than 200 “critical” jobs he needs to fill at Clarian, including nurses, pharmacists, MRI technicians and ultrasound technologists.

Contributing to the problem is that in a tough economy, employers take longer to assess applicants and make a hiring decision. By contrast, “in a healthier economy, you don’t wait around for the perfect person,” said Lawrence Katz, a professor of labor economics at Harvard.

To be sure, employers in most sectors of the economy are having no trouble filling jobs — especially those, like receptionists, hotel managers or retail clerks, that don’t require specialized skills.

But as more jobs vanish for good, the gap between the unemployed and the requirements of today’s job openings is widening. Throughout the economy, an average of six people now compete for each job opening — the highest ratio on government records dating to 2000.

Sifting through applications for jobs at the U.S. Energy Department’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state, Baker said he sees “people that have worked in other areas, and now they’re trying to apply that skill set to the energy arena.”

“Unfortunately, that’s not the skill set we need.”

The jobs opened up after the lab received federal stimulus money to research energy-efficient buildings. Baker needs employees with backgrounds in city management and a grasp of the building codes needed to design energy-efficient buildings. Yet even a salary of $140,000 for senior researchers isn’t drawing enough qualified applicants.

Baker said he’s getting resumes from well-educated people, including some from information technology workers who want to enter the green-energy field. But he said it could take a year to get an unqualified employee up to speed on all the building codes they need to know.

“We’re running out of people to train” new employees, he said. “We simply cannot attract enough (qualified) people.”

The lab has hired a recruiter for the first time to fill dozens of positions. Rob Dromgoole, the recruiter, is going so far as to make cold calls to college professors. He’s also visiting academic conferences to pitch jobs.

The trend has left jobseekers like Joe Sladek anxious and frustrated. Sladek’s 23 years in the auto industry haven’t helped his efforts to land a job in alternative energy since he was laid off a Read more…

Jobs Editor CMDN Hot Jobs, CMDNHotJobs.com, Career cmdnhotjobs, Increased hiring, IT firms, IT industry, job hiring, job intervew, job seekers

It’s always fun to hear hiring managers recall the most boneheaded mistakes they have seen job seekers make during an interview: showing up in
flip-flops, say, or taking a cell phone call while meeting the company president.

But that kind of cluelessness is rare. More common are the subtle missteps or omissions that can cause one candidate to lose out to another. If one person is sending out the right signals and behaving in the right way through each step of the process, he or she has a much better chance of landing the job – even with an inferior resume.

Now here’s the tricky part: There is no single set of rules. While certain standards of courtesy always apply (be punctual, treat everyone you meet with respect), your success may depend on the company’s culture and the preferences of the people doing the hiring. Your ability to sense, and to act on, these factors could make a big difference.

When Susan L. Hodas, director of talent management at NERA Economic Consulting, is hiring, she looks for the right cultural fit as much as the right experience. To some degree, she goes with her instincts, she says, but she can also identify certain preferences. Here is one: “They should come in a suit,” she said.

Body language is also important, Hodas says. She is looking for an assured but not overly casual demeanor, along with good eye contact. She is also looking for people who can enunciate their words (mumblers beware) and who can communicate their thoughts and ideas clearly.

Overall, she says, she is looking for people who are “confident but not cocky.”

She says she and her colleagues apply “the airport test” to candidates. They ask themselves: “Would I want to be stuck in the airport for 12 hours with this person if my flight was delayed?”

It seems that just being yourself – albeit a formal, polite, alert and attentive version of yourself – is the best way to behave during interviews. You don’t want to do such a great job of faking it that when the company discovers the real you, it comes to regret ever hiring you.

That said, there are certain things you can do – both during the interview and afterward – to give yourself an advantage.

You should always research the company thoroughly (easy to do on the Internet), and be prepared to give specific examples of how your experience relates to the job. Also be able to describe as concretely as possible how you made a difference in your previous jobs.

Researching the company will help when the interviewer asks whether you have any questions.

Do have questions, said David Santos, director of human resources for Interbrand, a brand management firm. Not having questions shows a lack of interest and preparation, he said.

Make sure your questions show knowledge of the company and your interest in contributing to its success. You’d be surprised how many people focus on themselves, not the company, by asking right off about things like salary, benefits and bonuses, said Annie Shanklin Jones, who manages U.S. recruitment for IBM.

Try to establish common ground with your interviewer so you stand out, Shanklin Jones said. Maybe you went to the same college or you pull for the same sports teams, she said. During the interview, “leverage your referrals,” she said, finding ways to highlight the people you know within the Read more…

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