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Headhunters on the prowl in Bangalore

As dot-com fever rages in India's information technology capital of Bangalore, headhunters have resorted to trawling pubs, hotels, and even clubs and discos in their search for badly needed talent.

V Sridhar, chief of headhunting firm CRV Consultants, which has clients such as Yahoo!, Hewlett Packard, Cisco Systems and Wipro Corp. on its books, said there was a "mad scramble" for IT professionals.

"There are not many people out there to poach. India's IT engineers have a brand equity and there are lot of companies setting up new business every day," Sridhar said.

On an average about three to four so-called 'dot-com' Internet-based companies are being set up daily in Bangalore, which is known as the Silicon Valley of India.

Of the 4,500 enterprises currently in business, more than 1,500 have some foreign element, with total foreign investment reaching $2.14 billion in 1999.

"It is like a jigsaw puzzle. One has to match the client's expectations with the best available. One cannot get complacent in this business as you have to constantly search," Sridhar said.

A combination of higher salaries, employee stock options, cutting-edge technologies and better working environments are the baits that poachers use in the business.

"The bait of learning on the job is the best I ever give. And it works," Sridhar said.

Most software engineers, web designers and creative consultants at top advertising agencies frequently receive what they describe as a "jackpot call" from unknown headhunters.

"My 'jackpot call' came out of the blue. And, it was my third call from a person who did not know me at all but was offering a job in an as yet to be set up dot-com firm," said Pavi Krishnan, creative consultant at Mudra Communications, one of India's leading advertising agencies.

"He said the chief of the company wanted to meet me within a few hours. He asked me for more contacts, which I gave, though he still insisted that I meet the managing director," Krishnan said.

At the city's downtown pubs, headhunters wait over pitchers of beer to ensnare software engineers who come out for a late night drink.

"We keep tabs of employee movement in the IT industry, to which we assign a specialist core team," said Santosh Joseph, principal consultant at Ma Foi Management Consultants Limited, India's only headhunting agency to go public.

"The shelf-life of people in the IT industry is very low. We have to enable a quick response and the demand is high," Joseph said.

Ma Foi has set up a network of 25 consultants who are constantly poaching for their clients.

"We have a database of about 10,000 executives, managers and software developers. A visiting card is the starting point and immediately the person's address and telephone numbers are entered into our database," Joseph said.

The poachers have their "own market intelligence" in place.

"We keep tabs on where a hotshot guy works, how long he has been there and what is his job profile. We map out his career and track him for three to four years," Joseph said.

"Any big success in the industry is taken note of and we see that we do not take an overnight decision as the risk of appointing a person for a job is ours."

Ma Foi has branched into customer support for administration, payroll outsourcing and other services in its 13 centres in India.

"The search business is growing by about 70 per cent," Joseph said, adding that revenues of the company grew 98 per cent last year to Rs 87 million ($2 million).