New Job Offer

On December 21 2005, at around 3:30 P.M., I received a call from a lady by name Savita. It is an STD call from Bangalore. She is an HR executive with aegis, the BPO division of the famous Essar Group. In fact, this company is a joint venture between aegis of US, based out of Texas, a $ 80 million company and Essar group. To know more about aegis, click on the blog header.

After finding out the usual details of my profile, the lady requested me if I could attend an interview in the evening the same day. I promised my wife that I would take her to a movie, "Jai Chirajeeva". I am an ardent fan of Chiranjeevi and on my request she has booked the tickets also. So, I told her that I wouldn't be able to do it that day and requested her if it could be scheduled for the next day. But, Savita insisted that I attend it the same day, as the COO and AVP HR would be flying back to Bangalore the next day. I finally decided to attend and conveyed the same.

I went to their office at 6:30 P.M. after my office hours and after a couple of minutes of wait I was put to the first round of interview. To my surprise, as against the general practice of preliminary HR Round, I technical round, II technical round, Operations interview and the final HR interview for the position of a Manager – Quality, the AVP HR has interviewed me for about 10 minutes and then has put me straight to the COO. When I asked him about this, he told me that, it was to judge whether the candidate would suit their requirement or not in terms communication, mind set, frequency etc in the initial stages itself so as to avoid disappointment at a later time, when the candidate has cleared all other rounds. His statement sounded more relevant and apt after I met the COO

The COO is a young man in his early thirties, worked for GE for around 7 years. He skimmed through my resume and asked me what my areas of expertise are and about the functional skills that I acquired through my previous job responsibilities. He told me that, all through his career he never hired people for a particular position, his strategy has always been to check whether the candidate suits their thought process and then hire him and create positions for him. That’s all, he asked me what my expectation is, when I answered that, we haggled around to arrive at a consensus and the offer letter was rolled out after 15 minutes. That was real quick. Three hours after I entered the building I had an offer letter in my hand.

I haven't decided yet whether to join or not, I am still thinking on it. Most probably, I will join. The role seems to be pretty interesting; of course the money they offered is more interesting! Should I join, my responsibility would be to set up the service quality process for the outbound and inbound call campaigns and setting up the Data analytics team. I would first require to hire my team members; you could refer some of your friends who have experience in working in the service quality team of any outbound contact centers. I could refer them and get them into the company. As far as Data Analytics guys are concerned, I have my team members who reported into me at ICICI Bank.

Apart from all of the above, what I am more interested is whether I would get a laptop at least in this company or not! It has been my dream and it is still a passion that the company I work for should give me a laptop. It hasn't happened in ICICI; it just missed by breadth of my skin and didn't happen in karvy (It missed by the length of my skin :-)). I am positive about aegis!