A Day's meet with L&T Head - April 4th 2008

It was the Chennai Job Fair that gave us a unique opportunity to talk across to various CEOs and corporate HRs about our rural employment model; and it also landed us with invites from them to actually help implement the model.... but it was L&T's Vice President Mr.G.D.Sharma who really interested in a very similar system in place at L&T, inviting us to visit their skills development & excellence center and if possible take inputs for the model, that we shall present to the district collector, kancheepuram.

So here we were, all bound over to Porur to meet Mr.S.Natarajan (Head Construction Skills training, L & T) for an entire day, not only to understand L&T's recruitment procedure but also to incorporate our rural employment model to scale their existing system.

There were around 3 hours of mutual cross-talk explaining our concept and understanding where it can be incorporated in L&T's existing systems; just to provide with a few points on how critical these issues are for L&T we have state a few statistics :-
1) Every quater (3 months) L&T requires around 900 equipped workmen.
2) But lack of availability they recruit only 300 who are in-turn given training for the next 2 months.
3) During the Training 20% leave within the first 2 weeks.

L&T is almost pursuing their recruitment process as a social responsibility model to give livelihood for the rural folk; when you come across the annual costs for these process... but still they run it in-house rather than out-source their staffing to any external third-parties; mainly cause they have to provide the training...

During our brain-storming we suggested a few points that was taken with great interest
1) During the training they must have a aptitude/attitude module, wherein the trainees are shown about the advantages they had in L&T and why they should continue working here (To decrease their attrition rates).... In fact this is a practical Business Plan venture!!!
2) Recruitment drives to be conducted on a monthly basis rather than quarterly across village centers, ITIs and diploma colleges (of course, right now these drives happen unsystematically)

The PPT that we presented to Mr.Natarajan.
To end with a astonishing note (Couple of buildings in their head-quaters)