It isn't often that one comes across a signboard that also doubles up as an advertisement for jobs. That is why the bright-blue boards with a hard-to-miss "We are hiring" message placed along the Noida and Greater Noida Expressway instantly draw attention. The boards take you to the sprawling corporate office of NetAmbit, a financial products distribution company, and right to the centre of their many innovative hiring techniques.

Girish Batra, the company’s founder and MD, says because they hire in large numbers, using every possible opportunity for visibility is important to them. The message must get across to as many people as possible, and thus utilising the signboards was almost natural. "This idea just came about. Somebody from my team suggested it, and it made perfect sense," says Batra.

The need is certainly there. NetAmbit, which has been offering a bouquet of financial products to customers since 2003, currently employs more than 4,000 people to staff their 150 branches, and six call centres across India. The company uses the direct marketing model to sell products like insurance schemes, home loans and corporate fixed deposits. Each month, 3,000 to 4,000 candidates walk into their office. Because the churn is so intense in a customer services-oriented company like this, NetAmbit hires up to 700 people each month.

Amitabh Kapoor, the company's head of human resources, says it's tough to determine the impact of the board-advertising—how many people have actually been recruited as a direct consequence of the campaign. "We don't have a way of knowing how many candidates have applied after seeing those particular ads. We get to know that informally later on after they join."

This isn't NetAmbit's first innovative take on hiring. Because financial products was (and remains) an under-penetrated market when they started out, Batra knew he had to use a comprehensive outreach campaign—one that leveraged the internet, television, ground sales staff and call centres. The latter two necessitated the need for a vast pool of talent. Beyond using job sites, newspaper classifieds and employee referrals, NetAmbit also roped in NGOs to help them find employees.

They partnered with NGOs such as Sarthak and Etasha to recruit young people from the slums. Batra says doing so has had multiple benefits. First, it fulfils their philosophy of creating jobs for the underprivileged. Second, these recruits have shown to be better, more committed employees, though some of them are barely high school graduates. "It's best to hire people who genuinely need the job. The more we go to the weaker sections, the higher is our success rate," says Batra.

Their job advertising campaigns in smaller towns, or semi-urban areas on the fringes of metropolitan cities have been very successful. "We manage to get a lot of candidates who otherwise don't get jobs because of their poor command on English. We don’t mind hiring people who know just Hindi or the local language in any of the states we operate in," explains Kapoor.

This has proved to be a hiring masterstroke of sorts. Many people who joined them from these campaigns as tele-service operators (TSO) have risen through the ranks to become heads of divisions. Amit Chugh, who joined in 2007 as a TSO, confesses he never thought he'd stay in the company this long. Four years later, he heads an entire centre, and has no plans to go anywhere. "I've grown a lot as an individual here. I don't think I would have got this opportunity anywhere else," he says.

Another recent initiative NetAmbit has come up with, is to invite potential candidates to undergo a day-long workshop. The workshop gives them an insight into the highs and lows of the job, thus providing them with a clear picture of what to expect. It's worked out well. Forty per cent of those who have attended the workshops have been recruited.

Batra knows such innovations will have to be bettered, and newer ones introduced, as the company grows at a robust 80 per cent. For NetAmbit, the hunt for the right employees is far from over. — Meenakshi Kumar

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