The curious case of the NECTAR

Confused with the title? Let me take a step back and narrate a story which is familiar to most of us. 

 The Devas formed an alliance with the Asuras to jointly churn the ocean for the nectar of immortality and to share it among themselves.

 Now in the modern hiring scenario substitute nectar with candidates who the prospective organizations want and the current employers want to retain. I am not calling out who is the deva and the asura here as its purely relative😊The only difference is there isn’t an alliance between the two, but in retrospect this can prove to be useful in getting this nectar faster. This  elusive candidate or nectar is  being searched by prospective employers and on the other hand being retained by the current employer. Who wins in this modern day scene?

 The gods and demons gathered on the shores of the milky ocean and performed Vedic rituals to ensure their success. They made offerings into a sacred fire and sprinkled the milky ocean with rice and flower petals. After completing these initial activities everyone became quiet as they realized they did not know how to begin to actually churn the ocean.

Classic right? No one still knows the mind of the candidate. Everyone tries with various processes to find this nectar and what they unearth in this process are sometimes beneficial and sometimes its not.

Finally, Dhanvantari, the heavenly physician, emerged with a pot containing the amṛta, the heavenly nectar of immortality. Fierce fighting ensued between the Devas and the Asuras for it.

The recruiter convinces the organization that they will get the candidate and ensure that other perks like sign on bonus were promised to obtain this nectar. The fight for this still continues and each continue with ardent fervor to find this nectar. 

 However the closest factor in our scenario is this notice period which organizations have which gives the candidate the sweet power of being the nectar. The more this is, the more difficult it is to obtain the nectar . Any short cuts to reduce this may produce more challenges and very few times you are proved to be lucky.

Any person offered a job starts talking about notice period before they can join and in India the average is 60 days. 2 MONTHS.  The organization or the hiring manager is under immense pressure to hire yesterday. It’s not even 30 days or 15 days. We should have hired this person yesterday and our project is suffering and morale is low and this leads to wellness issues within the team and this causes more attrition which means you need to hire more. Funny either ways we are back to hiring yesterday. This is such a powerful tool for the candidate to leverage. In this modern scenario, there is no lord vishnu who can magical sway this nectar in any direction though this is what we need to address. The shorter the NP, your options reduce and you stop shopping for offers. There is some sanctity in this whole process and respect across everyone's time. If a candidate wants to leave and there is a week NP across any roles, then re-imagine this scenario.

This calls for another blog post....

 

Source: Wikipedia for this mythological story and exoticindiaart.com for the image