Telecom companies ask recruiters to give job aspirants a reality check

MUMBAI/KOLKATA: India’s major mobile phone service providers have asked recruiters to play down the positive aspects of telecom jobs and tell candidates that promotions, salary increases and fast-track opportunities now depend on market conditions.

Recruiters say they have also overhauled the questions they ask candidates so that they can gauge whether new hires are willing to stay in the game for the long haul and not just find out about their skill sets. “The candidate is repeatedly told the cons of the job more than the pros. The time taken between interviews stretches over days and all methods are used to test a candidate’s patience and ensure that he is the right fit, who really wants to be part of the telco during the tough times,” said Shiv Agrawal, managing director of ABC Consultants, a recruitment firm that mainly looks into middle- to senior-level hiring.

Telecom hiring has changed since the disruptive entry of Reliance Jio Infocomm in September 2016, which led to consolidation in the sector. In addition, the business model has transformed from simple telephony to data-driven mobile usage. Even for senior management positions, head hunters say the need is for those who can forgo their past work and apply new sets of rules.


“When hiring senior people today, they are clearly looking at whether they have the ability to reinvent themselves; the ability to unlearn and relearn and the willingness to upskill themselves,” said A Ramachandran, a senior partner at EMA Partners.

Kamal Karanth, cofounder of Xpheno, a specialist staffing company working on mandates from one of the telecom operators, says it has designed new question sets to check a candidate’s adaptability.

Can you work 18 hours a day? How will you deal with customers who are not ready to pay for services? These are some of questions that are now crucial to a telco’s requirements, he said.

“The client has asked us to tell the candidates that they may have to work 18 hours a day. If competition comes up with a new tariff or product, then the team will have to work overnight to come up with a rival offer,” said Karanth.

He added that reference checks for middle-order recruits, earlier done by the vendors, are now done by the client.

“The telco said it wants to make sure that the candidate’s exit from the previous operator was because of industry consolidation and not because he was first in the line of weak performers,” he said.

The telecom sector has undergone an upheaval since 2016, which left the sector with only three private operators – Airtel, Vodafone Idea and Reliance Jio – after a wave of mergers and exits that led to the retrenchment of more than 100,000 employees.

The three telcos are keeping tight control over costs, while recruitment is taking place in product services and new technologies such as artificial intelligence and Internet of Things.

These are aspects that employers want to know about potential hires: whether they can work with fewer employees and lower costs and still stretch and produce gains and whether they can build up technical capability on their own (not paid for by the company).

“Employers want you to have skin in the game,” said R Suresh, founder of boutique search and consulting firm INSIST Executive Search.

Recruiters say that as the business models of telcos have changed, they want candidates with the ability to come up with ways of monetisation or generating revenue using data-based analytics.

“The whole picture has changed from traditional mobile telephony to data. We are looking for product configuration, new data usage concepts, analytics, work giving value to consumers,” added Suresh.