Bangalore: The booming ITES-BPO industry, faced with a shortage of right talent and high attrition, is now attracting "under graduates" to work in their centres.

Industry managers on June 13 told reporters that the trend of hiring skilful and experienced "under graduates" in the last one year had yielded good results.

"We started hiring non-graduates more as an experiment and the team is growing. They are experienced, have skills and perform well," 24/7 Customer.com General Manager Human Resources G V Giridhar said.

Several firms in Delhi and Mumbai including ICICI Onesource are hiring under graduates, who are paid the same salary as graduates and undergo the same training to serve calls from overseas customers.

The trend may increase as the industry, which employs 1.70 lakh people, would need to ramp up on a massive scale to reach the target of 1.1 million jobs by 2008 and hiring may move to smaller cities and towns, where firms plan to start their operations.

"We are seeing the trend of firms moving into B class cities like Coimbatore, Mysore, Jaipur (where GE has set up its centre) and Indore," ICICI OneSource Ltd Vice President Human Resources Aashu Calapa said.

Digital Globalsoft Contact Centre Head Prashant Sankaran said his company had formed a task force to identify locations in small cities.

NIIT Ltd Sr Vice President Suren Singh Rasaily said the industry could be promoted as a "career" in the customer service industry and make it attractive.

Industry managers were unanimous on the need for imparting communication skills to students in the education system that would help in "rolling out" industry compatible workforce.

A ITES firm spends an average of Rs 80,000 to recruit and train a person, before he handles the first call of customers.

Rasaily, who is also head of Human Resources initiative in NASSCOM (National Association for Software and Services Companies), said a code of ethics for the industry should be brought, wherein poaching by competing firms does not "harm" the industry.

He said only 50 million English knowing people in India were getting an opportunity to move up and added "the English language divide was much larger than the digital divide".

PTI