If you plan to hire a few people and do not know how to go about it, you can always turn to Summit HR Worldwide.

This Chennai-based company has 165 employees and its clients include Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 companies like Adecco, Visa, Yahoo!, Cisco Systems, Intel, Dell, AT&T, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Flextronics and many other leading US-based human resource outsourcers and staffing companies.

Summit HR Worldwide is into HR and recruitment process outsourcing services. Founded by Ranjan Sinha, Summit helps companies in the United States, Europe and India recruit the right people.

Sinha did his BTech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, Masters from the Wharton School of Business and MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. He was named the 'HR Outsourcing Superstar' by HRO Today magazine for his contributions to the HR outsourcing industry in 2006.

But Sinha has more than Summit to his credit. As an entrepreneur, he had started Magnifi Inc., a Cupertino, California- based firm and followed it up with Mindshare, Inc. In 1995 Sinha served as the co-founder and president of WhoWhere? Inc., which was subsequently acquired by Lycos in 1998.

In an interview with Contributing Editor Shobha Warrier, Sinha talks about Summit HR Worldwide and the talent crunch the world is going to face in a few years' time.

Why did you decide to start HR Summit Worldwide?

In the dot-com era, there was a dearth of talent. It was not about hiring college graduates. To run companies, you have to have the brightest engineers. Those engineers are like film actors who are stars. You have to attract them and nurture them. So, after going through that experience of trying to build organisations in a highly talent constrained environment, I realised that to be a successful CEO, you should have the ability to bring in talent.

I also realised that India would be a great place to put infrastructure, people and process to help the US companies.

Since you are helping Americans find jobs there, why did you decide to have an office in Chennai and not somewhere in the US?

Cost and also the quality of recruiters influenced my decision. Here, we can work 24 hours. When a manager sends a request at 4 in the evening to us, by the time he comes to the office in the morning, the resumes of likely candidates are already on his table. That is possible because we talk to the candidates in the evening. Thus you reduce your cycle time.

Plus in the competitive environment, you want to get to the candidate faster. The speed of getting to the candidate is more. As the cost is less here, we can go deeper and deeper into the talent.

Your reach of talent is broader and the speed at which you connect to the candidate is faster.

How do your recruiters serve your clients?

We basically help US companies right from Dell to Boeing to Sun to find talent in the US but the people who help them find it are in our office in Chennai.

This is how it works. If Cisco wants a software programmer, they send a request to our office here. Our recruiters sitting in Chennai call candidates in Silicon Valley, interview them, do their background check, reference check and if they find the candidate suitable, they ask him to meet the manager at Cisco. The recruiters are not at Silicon Valley but are based in Chennai.

We are one of the few business process outsourcing companies from India that help Americans find jobs. We literally helped 7,000 Americans find jobs last year. We helped nurses and healthcare specialists find jobs as we support seven hospitals in the US. We do not hire people from India and move them there. There is no loss of jobs for the Americans.

We helped a couple of research firms find physicists. We also work a lot for defence contractors by finding chemical engineers, nuclear engineers and propellant engineers.

What are the advantages of having Indians as recruiters compared to people of other countries?

India's biggest advantage is its talent pool -- people who are eager to succeed. The motivation level is also very high, and of course their exposure to English is another plus point.

How efficient and good are your recruiters in finding the right candidate? Do they not have to be knowledgeable about the requirements of your clients?

I think that is the key intellectual property Summit has. We have invested enormous amount of money in our training programme. We believe that we produce the best recruiters in the world whether it is for the US market or the Indian market.

The training programme is extremely elaborate. When we hire someone with a call centre background who is geared towards 'culture of process', we spend a lot of time and carefully to take them from the 'culture of process' to the 'culture of relationship building and solution'. You can present ten resumes but if they are not the right types, the company concerned will be disappointed.

We have spent close to a million dollars in training our recruiters.

How do you pick your recruiters?

Our intake point for the US market is anyone who has two years' experience in a call centre, and whose accent is either American or European. Every 15 people that we interview, we hire only one.

For certain verticals like finance and accounting, we prefer MBAs. For engineering recruitment, we have engineers. For healthcare recruitment, we have dentists and doctors in our panel. We have domain expertise. But the main job is to take a dentist and transform him into a recruiter. That is what we do best.

Where do you see India in the next ten years? Will there be a resource crunch?

By 2010, there will be shortage of half a million professionals in India. Every company has to ask the question, 'how am I going to win the war for talent?'

In the US also the situation is same. There is an intense war for talent. In 2012, US employment needs to increase to 145-160 million. That is about 20 million people to be added in six years in the US.

In the next few years, many CEOs may need talented people, and I want to help these CEOs to become successful.

You are an outsourcing company and outsourcing is an emotional issue all over the world. . .

It is an emotional issue but people have more or less accepted it as a way of life. When people lose jobs, it is an emotional issue but, in our case, we don't feel the heat because we help them find jobs. Nobody says 'we hate you' when we call them, because we call them to say, 'Can we help you find the right job?'

You won the HR Outsourcing Super star award this year. . .