Amritsar/Gurgaon: The rain falls hard and Pankaj Jindal ducks for cover from the courtyard of Khalsa College in Amritsar. “Turnout might be less,” he mutters, surveying the meagre student population around him at a campus that looks less like a college and more like a Mughal palace.
In Amritsar, the north India head of the recruitment, training and placement firm Aspire Human Capital Management Pvt. Ltd tries not to get his hopes up too much. After all, earlier in the week, at an English academy in town, he talked to 100 candidates about potential jobs.
Betting big: Aspire Human Capital Management Pvt. Ltd’s founder and chief executive officer Amit Bhatia in his Gurgaon office. (Photo: Harikrishna Katragadda/Mint)
None made the cut on the aptitude test.
And so at Khalsa College, Jindal delays the presentation by half an hour and waits for the sun. It finally peaks out and a trickle of young women in salwar suits and T-shirt-clad young men follow.
As hundreds of firms try to grab pieces of the skills development pie, selling courses to students or selling training to companies, Aspire is trying something a little different: a merger of the strategies.
Founded by former chief executive officer of WNS Knowledge ServicesAmit Bhatia just over a year ago, the firm pioneered a model that relies on number crunching to find, train and deploy rural graduates, and match India’s millions of unemployable youth with companies starved for new recruits.
“It is a new, innovative concept,” says Harmit Sethi, who heads skills development at the trade group Confederation of Indian Industry, or CII. “They are identifying the shortcoming, shortlisting candidates, and correcting the shortcoming.”
Instead of picking up the top tier of graduates, Aspire targets the rest, and provides them with short, focused classes to get them up to speed. At the 22,000-student Lovely Professional University in Jalandhar, for example, a sleek glass Aspire storefront is outfitted with modernist peach furniture and flat screen monitors to function as a year-round counselling and testing centre.
“McKinsey says that only 22% of graduates are placeable,” Lovely Professional University placement director Subash Kannaw says, referring to a McKinsey and Co. study on India’s graduates. “What about the rest? These are the people that make them placeable.” Kannaw says he wants his own son to train with Aspire, too.
Chasing dreams: A file photo of Aspire’s presentation at Khalsa College in Amritsar. (Photo: Munish Byala/HT)
Instead of asking either students or companies to bear the whole cost, Aspire brings employers on board, and divides the price between them. The hiring company usually covers around two-thirds of the Rs15,000 per month fee, while the student pays the rest.
And, perhaps the most unusual aspect of Aspire’s business is that it doesn’t offer courses on a retail basis—the company only trains students that it already has jobs lined up for.
Training day