The Hidden Perils of Playing the Job Market

Firstly, just a quick introductory spiel: my name’s Jamie Liddell and I’m the web editor of the Shared Services & Outsourcing Network (SSON: www.ssonetwork.com), a global community of – you guessed it – shared services and outsourcing practitioners. As part of our recent exciting alliance with BPOVoice, we’re going to be bringing you content from around the outsourcing and shared services spaces, giving you a wider focus onto various related industries and activities connected with BPO. Please feel free to take a look round our site and give me any feedback you feel is appropriate: you can contact me direct at Jamie.liddell@ssonetwork.com and I look forward to any comments you may make. You can find out more about me personally at http://www.ssonetwork.com/about.aspx.

That’s that out of the way: now let’s get on with some proper blogging.

As part of my role I have recently begun working on a series of interviews with the CEOs and chairs of the major outsourcing players. This is still in its infancy and I won’t have anything ready for publication for a couple of weeks (of course, once the series begins I’ll keep you up to date) but one thing that’s struck me straight away is the concern felt at board-level over attrition and turnover in the BPO space – particularly in India.

I know you’ve probably read and heard a great deal about attrition-rates, and how they’re threatening the industry – and perhaps a great many of you couldn’t care less. The idea of true professional mobility is key to any rapidly emerging professional sector (it could even be argued that it’s a prerequisite of genuine democracy) and it’s easy when you’re right at the BPO front line to discount a CEO’s complaints as being somewhat reminiscent of an ancient feudalism, or at least a long-obsolete notion of top-down capitalism: keeping the workers down, and all that. Why should you worry about the impact your changing jobs has on something as amorphous and intangible as the “outsourced services industry” when you’re looking at instant personal benefits from moving, such as a raise and a promotion?

But here’s a factor I hadn’t considered: the detrimental effect too much movement between jobs has on one's own resume. Alok Aggarwal, the chairman and cofounder of Evalueserve (whose company has published a white paper on “job-hopping” which you can download from our site at http://www.ssonetwork.com/interviews.aspx?id=2550&fid=230) told me last week of his deep worries over just this issue:

“…What they don’t realise is that every time they move from one job to another, the last three months they’re not really doing any work for [their old company]. And the first three months they’re learning the culture and the ways to do work at the other company. And hence six months is wasted in their own lives, where they haven’t really learnt much, and since this is all about knowledge, and learning, they’re screwed. They do this six or seven times and by the time they’re about seven years in the game, they’ve wasted about 3 ½ years in the whole process. They basically have done themselves completely out of the market… Even if we were to send their resume to a client saying we wanted to use this person, the likelihood is that the client is going to refuse, saying ‘you cannot use this person on my jobs, he seems to be changing jobs all the time, I don’t know what kind of knowledge he has, what kind of person he is’…”

That might not sound like an issue right now – but do you really want to waste half the most important period of your professional career chasing an extra few bucks?

JL