Recruitment at Mouse Click
It's hard to imagine why anyone would pick up a newspaper to find a job any more. With a seemingly endless array of career sites, mailing lists, corporate sites and newsgroups, job seekers have more options online than ever before. And the credit goes to the growth and advances in Information Technology (IT).Traditionally job seekers most preferred channel was Newspapers & Personal Referrals. As for online recruitment, the medium has come a long way in the last 3 years, but it remains a tool that has only been put to the test in a candidate-rich environment. Along with the IT revolution in the recruitment channel the current market has four clear segments - Corporate Sites, Personal Referrals, Newspapers, Recruitment Agencies & Job Sites. overseas country. One American manager made the point that he can’t understand why there aren’t travel warnings for the US since there is clearly a greater proven risk of terrorist attacks there. It seems to him that there have never been comparable terrorist attacks in either India or Philippines.

That all sounds good but Business Process Outsourcing is still a new concept to many people. Managers wishing to pursue outsourcing programs must spe

Both India and Philippines are the subject of long-standing travel warnings from various embassies. Some say India is on the verge of nuclear war with Pakistan. In Philippines, terrorist bomb threats are all too common. Is it any wonder that Gartner Group cites security as a “key concern in outsourcing?”

If one only looks at the screaming headlines, then it is difficult to understand why so many intelligent people are building outsourcing operations in these apparently “unsafe” countries. But if we speak with the people actually leading the operations in Asia, we get quite a different perception of the risks involved.

John Standring is the Manila-based General Manager of the IT outsourcing facility for Safeway, the huge American supermarket chain. He feels that while there are security risks in Philippines, they are not much different from those “of any big city in the world.” He believes that with “proper security measures” there is little to worry about. It seems to me that this same advice would be appropriate for anyone visiting New York or Washington for the first time.

Shaun Paterson is VP of Operations for the large outsourcing facility of Thomson Financial, the Canadian global financial information powerhouse. He takes a similar view. Shaun feels the streets of Manila are “safer than those of London,” England (his home country) -- he says female friends visiting from Britain feel the same way. As someone with many years of Philippines experience in IT and Business Process Outsourcing, Shaun feels qualified to say that security risks are at most trivial.

Almost all experienced managers I have spoken to make similar assessments. Some have said that the risk of personal injury is higher while driving a car to the airport for an overseas trip than it is being in the overseas country. One American manager made the point that he can’t understand why there aren’t travel warnings for the US since there is clearly a greater proven risk of terrorist attacks there. It seems to him that there have never been comparable terrorist attacks in either India or Philippines.

That all sounds good but Business Process Outsourcing is still a new concept to many people. Managers wishing to pursue outsourcing programs must spe

ons in these apparently “unsafe” countries. But if we speak with the people actually leading the operations in Asia, we get quite a different perception of the risks involved.

John Standring is the Manila-based General Manager of the IT outsourcing facility for Safeway, the huge American supermarket chain. He feels that while there are security risks in Philippines, they are not much different from those “of any big city in the world.” He believes that with “proper security measures” there is little to worry about. It seems to me that this same advice would be appropriate for anyone visiting New York or Washington for the first time.

Shaun Paterson is VP of Operations for the large outsourcing facility of Thomson Financial, the Canadian global financial information powerhouse. He takes a similar view. Shaun feels the streets of Manila are “safer than those of London,” England (his home country) -- he says female friends visiting from Britain feel the same way. As someone with many years of Philippines experience in IT and Business Process Outsourcing, Shaun feels qualified to say that security risks are at most trivial.

Almost all experienced managers I have spoken to make similar assessments. Some have said that the risk of personal injury is higher while driving a car to the airport for an overseas trip than it is being in the overseas country. One American manager made the point that he can’t understand why there aren’t travel warnings for the US since there is clearly a greater proven risk of terrorist attacks there. It seems to him that there have never been comparable terrorist attacks in either India or Philippines.

That all sounds good but Business Process Outsourcing is still a new concept to many people. Managers wishing to pursue outsourcing programs must spe

es that with “proper security measures” there is little to worry about. It seems to me that this same advice would be appropriate for anyone visiting New York or Washington for the first time.

Shaun Paterson is VP of Operations for the large outsourcing facility of Thomson Financial, the Canadian global financial information powerhouse. He takes a similar view. Shaun feels the streets of Manila are “safer than those of London,” England (his home country) -- he says female friends visiting from Britain feel the same way. As someone with many years of Philippines experience in IT and Business Process Outsourcing, Shaun feels qualified to say that security risks are at most trivial.

Almost all experienced managers I have spoken to make similar assessments. Some have said that the risk of personal injury is higher while driving a car to the airport for an overseas trip than it is being in the overseas country. One American manager made the point that he can’t understand why there aren’t travel warnings for the US since there is clearly a greater proven risk of terrorist attacks there. It seems to him that there have never been comparable terrorist attacks in either India or Philippines.

That all sounds good but Business Process Outsourcing is still a new concept to many people. Managers wishing to pursue outsourcing programs must spe

country) -- he says female friends visiting from Britain feel the same way. As someone with many years of Philippines experience in IT and Business Process Outsourcing, Shaun feels qualified to say that security risks are at most trivial.

Almost all experienced managers I have spoken to make similar assessments. Some have said that the risk of personal injury is higher while driving a car to the airport for an overseas trip than it is being in the overseas country. One American manager made the point that he can’t understand why there aren’t travel warnings for the US since there is clearly a greater proven risk of terrorist attacks there. It seems to him that there have never been comparable terrorist attacks in either India or Philippines.

That all sounds good but Business Process Outsourcing is still a new concept to many people. Managers wishing to pursue outsourcing programs must spe

overseas country. One American manager made the point that he can’t understand why there aren’t travel warnings for the US since there is clearly a greater proven risk of terrorist attacks there. It seems to him that there have never been comparable terrorist attacks in either India or Philippines.

That all sounds good but Business Process Outsourcing is still a new concept to many people. Managers wishing to pursue outsourcing programs must spend a lot of time justifying their plans to skeptical department managers who face the loss of their staff. Security risk is always flaunted as a “key concern” in any outsourcing project – What happens if a bomb destroys our facility and kills our people? Will our senior staff be kidnapped? Aren’t these countries very corrupt? On and on.

Another approach to explaining away the issue of Country Risk is to go back in time to an earlier generation of offshore outsourcing. Let’s talk about electronics.

Intel, Philips, Toshiba and Texas Instruments are a few examples of electronics companies that have operated billion dollar facilities for decades in Philippines. Last year was Intel’s 30th year anniversary in the country. During that period, the company has seen a tedious parade of armed insurrections, volcanic eruptions, electricity black-outs and corruption scandals. Through all of it, they have continued supplying their critical components to the global supply chain without notable interruption.

Semiconductor people consider themselves the “old-hands” of outsourcing and sometimes express derision at the sudden attention given to the “new-kids” of the concept, namely Business Process Outsourcing. The old-hands don’t understand why there is so much worry about spending $5M to setup a call center when for most of them this is “peanuts” -- many have annual maintenance budgets that are larger than that.

A semiconductor facility, they say, requires large buildings to be custom built, power and water supplies to be upgraded, training technical staff can take years, and so on. A BPO operation, by comparison, has a lot less to worry about.

For these reasons, semiconductor managers sometimes refer to call centers as “outsourcing-lite” or “outsourcing-on-a-diet.” Jokes aside thou