It’s the 2nd of June 2003 and I was really excited to see what this company had in store for me, as I was taking a big leap from being with smaller outfits to joining an MNC like Oracle Corp. I purchased a new clothes for this day and there I am in my little car (which I have even today) cruising towards Oracle Bannerghatta road office in Bangalore to do my joining formalities. My then manager graciously volunteered me for an urgent meeting with one of the Business Units which wanted to ramp up in India…. My recruiting life at Oracle started that moment and keeps me going still….

I was then introduced to my team members and I gathered from them that the number of roles that we needed to fill on a rolling basis would be 1200 to 1500 headcounts at any moment. Oracle India had 100+ Employment Agencies working with us at that time. We used to rely heavily on their assessment of the market situation and skill availability. We were doing all the conventional strategies of the day such as releasing print advertisements, conducting open career fairs ( “walk-in’s” we call them in India), mass mailing, referrals coming directly with their hard copies etc etc. We also had a wonderful mechanism for collecting resumes from our vendor base. We had a structure that the vendors would slot (“pigeon holes”) their candidates resumes based on their skills. There were lot of pigeon holes meant to hold resumes on different skills like Java/J2EE, PL/SQL, DBA’s etc Each vendor was required to segregate and put into the pigeon holes for the recruiters their resumes so we could distribute them to the appropriate hiring lines. I am not sure what was the logic used to distribute whose resume to whom!!!

Most weekends we ran “walk in” events. The typical weekend drive would start at 7.00 am in the morning day and would close by 4.00 am the next day. Each one of us would spend at least 18 hours in the office and some of my colleagues had spent 24 hours in the office (people who have been with me from then would vouch for this!)

FAST FORWARD

This continued for a while before we were realigned into the Global Internal Recruiting Team. We had this gentleman Jan Ackerman come to India to do requirement gathering for the iRecruitment implementation. During this visit he also showed the demo of a new ATS. We had our share of debate whether these tools were meant to make us more productive or the other way around. The transformation for all of us started at this point from where we learned the Global Internal Recruiting model, methodologies, tools and techniques under the guidance of Jan Ackerman.

I started transforming myself into something good, great, big and rewarding. I didn’t have a clue then what the future would be, but I agreed to join the ride. I embraced the change that was happening around me and stood up to face it and transform myself and the team and myself. I learnt. I learnt, I learnt…each moment…every day. I completely went with the flow whole heartedly to internalize, learn the tricks of managing delivery through this foreign but new Internal Recruiting model. I feel really proud to be one of the skeleton members of the team that is now standing tall across JAPAC region with head and shoulders above all other competitors recruiting models today.

I see another wave hitting me in the form of Web 2.0 which is going to transform my view of recruiting and of course my colleagues around JAPAC. Let us all learn. learn... and learn….each moment…and each day. I am sure we will all remain proud that we seized this opportunity to grasp this new technology.

This article was written by Gunashekar Govindan who is Recruitment Director APAC for Oracle. Guna can be contacted at gunashekar.govindan@oracle.com