Tuesday, July 27, 2010

How did the great company become greater?

The word “speculation” got high publicity after global recession that I started speculating things quite often. Don’t worry! Finance is excluded from my area of speculation. I think speculation can be added to the official list of hobbies. While jogging or sitting through a boring lecture I switch myself into speculating mode. During the world cup more than the spirit of football, octopus Paul interested me so much that my recent speculation was on Paul.

The most important thing on a B-school campus is “CV point”. The more you collect, the better placed you are. Recently some of the juniors got their resume (CV) reviewed from me while I was browsing magazines in library. I gave all the required gyaan. On the way back to room I saw a huge monitor lizard. In the dim light it looked like an octopus. Now you know the source of the following speculation.

Between the walls of the meeting room of “The Great Company” a group of HR managers, recruiters are discussing that it has become really difficult to select prospective candidates. One of the recruiter expressed anguish that B-schools and Engineering schools are increasing the intake year by year. Gone were those days where it was easy to screen the resumes which were few in number. Now there is such a demand-supply gap even on the campuses all the students apply for just two-three positions we can offer. Recruitment has become a very tedious task. I am resorting to heuristics such as age, gender, location and sometimes one or two words which are bold to filter CVs out of the big heap of them. All the other recruiters in the room supported the above argument. There was obvious helplessness evident on their faces.

The senior HR manager who is inspired by lateral thinking responded, “That’s simple! You are all worrying too much”. Let us order octopuses to do the job for you. Don’t you all know how octopus Paul decided the fate of the teams in the recent football world cup? Let the octopuses filter the CVs.

“The Great Company” became greater because it got exactly the candidates it needed. The octopus phenomenon spread across the country. Octopus farming saw a tremendous growth ,CAGR of approximately 700%.

The famous Placement coach Mr. Paul ( changed his name after octopus Paul) suggested to highlight points related to water, swimming, sports that got something to do with mighty of one’s legs like running etc. Now you know whom to impress from your CV point.