‘Never pay to appear for interview or get a job’

Cashing in on the crisis

The Bengaluru-headquartered Quess Corp, a technology and business services provider looks to fill vacancies averaging 50,000 annually. The corporation said it interfaces with 130 job consultancies across the country.

“In our experience, the more boutique-level a consultancy is the likelier we are to see quality issues,” explained Guruprasad Srinivasan, the chief operating officer of Quess Corp.

He clarified that this boiled down to unqualified candidates being pushed through to interviews, coupled with other unethical practices such as giving candidates job offer letters when there was no vacancy and charging them money.

Also Read: Country's youngsters: Jobless and scammed

Srinivasan said that no candidate should ever have to pay money to appear for interviews or to submit their resume.

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He added that the company has big boards in all of its offices, informing candidates that it is illegal for consultancies to charge them money.

“We have had some candidates who have come forward and said, ‘we paid some money to this so-and-so consultancy.’ We immediately blacklist those consultancies,” he added.

Over the course of 2016 to 2018, Quess Corps had to blacklist eight job consultancies.

Meantime, experts agreed that India is probably one of the few countries in the world, where people expend large sums of money to find respectable employment.

Education-skill gap

This is a situation created primarily by a gap in education and skill-building, said an HR manager.

“Engineering students are not receiving instruction in the latest technologies as colleges are still using traditional methods of teaching which are incompatible with the requirements of industries, especially IT. This gap in skilling makes many people unemployable. They become desperate for meaningful work and may end up seeking the service of dubious consultancies,” she added.

Srinivasan said, “But you also have to look at things from the point of view of candidates. In tier-3 locations, many working-age individuals would like to secure jobs at
companies having an office in the locality. Since they cannot approach these companies directly, they try to go through a boutique job consultancy. This is where the problem occurs,” hinting that these people sometimes fall victim to scams.

In an effort to curb the crisis, companies are taking various steps. Advertisements
to inform the public of job scams and having an url where people can check if their job
offer letters are legitimate are some measures companies have taken to address the issue.

Lavanya Chandan, a director of OLX India, said that the company was aware of the scams being perpetrated on its platform and was taking measures to combat them.

No shortcut to success

Sudeep Kumar Sen, Business Head - Industrial, Engineering and General Sales, TeamLease Services Limited, said job seekers should understand that there is no shortcut to success. “Shortcuts always create a fear of job loss due to competency issues,” he said.

Job seekers, Sen explained, must ask about the interview process and the type of job, understand and validate the selection process and then apply. “One must understand that even if a job opportunity is processed through a consulting firm, job seekers need not pay because consulting firms get paid by their clients,” he added.

Candidates, he continued, should also look for jobs posted on qualified and trustworthy job portals and verify whether the job opening is for a corporate or a consulting firm and whether the consulting firm is an intermediary to run the process of screening and selection.

Industry experts asked for the formation of a regulatory body of government officials and industry heads to crackdown on dubious placement agencies.

“Helping someone with a job is a step towards building a stable economy. Let us weed out the errants,” Sen said.