Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Tuesday, Sep 21, 2004
Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Tuesday, Sep 21, 2004 |
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Money & Banking
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Human Resources Engineering a change, the ICICI Bank way N.S.Vageesh
Chennai , Sept. 20 THE next time you are in a teller queue or enquiring about some forms at ICICI Bank, don't be puzzled if you find one of the officials observing you closely. It could well be one of a new batch of 500 engineers that the bank is planning to recruit over the next couple of months. There will roughly be one engineer for each branch. ICICI Bank is taking in a combination of fresh engineers from the campus as well as those with a few years experience in different industries. These engineers are being recruited to "transform the workplace" and introduce process efficiencies in branches. Whether it is redesigning the branch layout, or the height of the counter, or cutting down the customer interaction time, or reducing the steps involved in counting of cash, or cutting down on the forms that collect the same detail, engineers will apply their skills to the problem. Mr K. Ramkumar, Senior General Manager and Head-Human Resources, ICICI Bank, said, the idea is to improve the delivery standards in the bank that is now doubling its book. The decision to recruit engineers came after there was an internal brainstorming about the kind of talent that the bank needed to recruit in planning for the future. The senior management realised that engineers, as a class, had never been considered as potential recruits by the banking industry. True, when engineers acquired an MBA qualification, they were sought after. But it was more for their managerial skill rather than the technical and domain skills. By adopting the "Engineers were not for us" refrain, the bank was losing out on tapping the talent base of about 5 lakh engineers who pass out every year. "Once we got over the hump - (the mindset of not recruiting engineers) - the world opened up. We could have kicked ourselves over the ignorance," says Mr Ramkumar. He said that if these engineers could come up with 10 to 20 great innovations in processes, it would have more than repaid the investment and the effort in recruiting them.
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