Exclusive Interview Of Mr Narayana Murthy with rangrut.com

Date: 20-Jan-2010

Rangrut.com:  What do you think about the availability of resource in market and what are the challenges Infosys faced while hiring fresher in this recession?

Mr NR Narayana Murthy: I think whenever there is a recession, whenever the economy slows down, the opportunity for job creation in this IT- industry so as against about 500,000 jobs created in the last year it must have been hardly 100,000. Infosys was one of the very few companies that honored every one of them the commitment. Most of the company, they postponed their joining period and I think the youngsters have put into difficulty, there was lot of uncertainty and therefore I would say that whenever there is a slowing down of growth of the economy then job creation automatically slows down. 

Rangrut.com: We have heard you in various platforms where you discussed about employability among fresher. I see that Infosys has also taken an initiative called campus connect to address this issue. Can you tell us something more about it?

Mr NR Narayana Murthy: Well what we found seven years ago that the graduates that came out of the various engineering colleges in the country perhaps from few IITs and few engineering colleges were mostly not well equipped to handle our requirement. Also the fact that we recruited civil engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, chemical engineers to become software engineers, we had to do two things: One we had to mount a three to four months programme for training these engineers the basics of computer science. Now that programme has become an 8 months programme. Second we have to work closely with the engineering colleges so that non qualifying students could be better equipped to handle the requirement of IT Company. Campus connect is upgrading the knowledge of students coming out from the engineering colleges. Making sure that they understand what’s happening in the IT industry, to understand the basics of the IT industry, making sure that they have knowledge of the latest tools and technologies. This is the purpose of campus connect.

Rangrut.com:  Do you think that an online medium called Rangrut.com can help employers in reaching numbers.  

Mr NR Narayana Murthy: Certainly it will. While the large companies have their infrastructure of recruitments well in place, majority of the companies do not have the infrastructure  of evaluating talent, attracting talent or for educating this talent and for easily recruiting this talent therefore any company that specialises in making this job easier for other companies would be very useful. And I presume that this is the job you people are taking of and I have no doubt about it.

Rangrut.com: We have been receiving queries that why employers emphasize so much on certain threshold like percentages. DO you think that students with lesser percentage are not that bright?

Mr NR Narayana Murthy: NO!! See our education system does not really test learning ability. However it test one important thing that is how disciplined the youngster have been. How hardworking the youngster have been, How committed the youngster have been. How much they hear to the teacher. These are all important quality for success even in a company. That is why we have to go by the criteria of marks because otherwise we will have to manage huge number of applications which we will not be able to do. So we felt that let us look at  the criteria that clearly tells us that the person is hard working, disciplined, committed etc. and out of that we will see who are smart because if you are a smart one and disciplined you will definitely do very well. So however there may be some cases where you are not that smart, you are hard working and disciplined and you have done well, there may be even few cases where you are very smart but you are not disciplined and hardworking obviously you don’t made the grade so we are looking at the combination of smartness, hard work, discipline and commitment and that certainly come from the set of people who have done education with good marks.

Rangrut.com : Lets go a few years back. How did you get your first job?

Mr NR Narayana Murthy: When I did my masters from electrical engineering specialization from IIT Kanpur. There were about 8 students who passed where probably there were 50 jobs for us so each of us got 3 to 4 jobs. And it was not difficult at all. There were more jobs for people who are trained and have skills and our case was of that kind only.

Rangrut.com: Mr Murthy, I want you to give advice to first job seekers and students.

Mr NR Narayana Murthy: My Advice to all the students and first job seeker is :  

                     1) They should be very disciplined in the process

                     2) They should be hard working

                     3) Committed towards their work

                     4) They should do their assignments properly

                     5) They should try and understand whatever is thought in the class

                     6) They should try and apply it to the real life situations

                     7) They should work out for every problem that was there at the end of    

                          the chapter.

8)      They should learn to ask more questions

I think if they do all of these things, they would be wonderful

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