A few weeks ago, everyone buying a movie ticket at Esquare on Ganeshkhind Road was asked to pick up a small card from the stack at the ticket window that read “One night @ Zensar.” It was an invitation to youngsters to come and experience one night at the call centre and when they did so, the experiment also doubled up as a recruitment drive.

With the current scenario in the market when IT and ITES industries are creating humongous job opportunities, gone are the days when job hunting for youngsters was a distant dream. Today with more jobs and less talent available, the demand for young workers has far outstripped supply. And this is precisely what is making companies pull out all stops and get more and more innovative-and adventurous- when it comes to head hunting and recruitments.

“Most outsiders don't have any idea of what a BPO exactly is. In fact they harbour a lot of misconceptions about BPOs. Hence we organised this one night program to educate youngsters and promoted this program in shopping malls and multiplexes where youngsters usually hang out. The program helped us to generate a database of those people who otherwise wouldn’t have come to Zensar or BPO industry in general,” says Parul Vaidya of marketing and communications department, Zensar.

Apart from these, networking through other employees and approaching their friends is getting an increasingly popular option too. Pradnya Rajput who works in the HR department of an international BPO says her company has zeroed in on referrals as being the most effective recruitment tool. “This is not a new way of recruiting but yes it has certainly improved over a period of time. Money, soft toys, gadgets are all used as motivators for the employees to refer more people. The advantage of employee referral is that the employee satisfaction ratio goes up as their friends are placed in the same organisation. Attrition of employees through other channels is more than 60 per cent whereas in case of employee referrals with all the parameters remaining the same it is less than 10 per cent,” adds Rajput.