Polaris:  Walk-in and Walk-out
By Ajay Sharma

Founded in 1993, Polaris Software pulls no punches when it describes itself as the ‘world's most sophisticated banking and insurance software company. Polaris is the chosen outsourcing partner for 10 of the top 15 global banks and 6 of the 10 top insurance companies. Polaris offers state-of-the-art, holistic solutions for banking, wealth & asset management and insurance.’

But at least a couple of its HR managers seem to exaggerate when placing their jobs ads. There is a talent war going on in the NCR region among top IT companies and its clearly the survival of the wealthiest. Candidates who had waited long and silent during the recession period are now out in the open, dictating their terms loud and clear. Companies like TCS, HCL, IBM, Polaris etc. are on a hiring spree and there are walk-ins to be witnessed almost every weekend. Walk-ins are generally not every candidates’ preferred way of getting interviewed as it is synonymous with long waiting periods without the guarantee of getting picked up for the interview. However, this time since the requirements are huge, the companies have no other way to go but to hire candidates in bulk through walk-ins. So, this monsoon, its raining offer letters for IT candidates. Clearly, the best paymasters are ruling the roost and the poorer counterparts are settling down with the leftovers.

Polaris conducted a walk-in for the NCR (Delhi, Gurgaon and Noida) last Saturday, August 21 for candidates with testing backgrounds. They made huge announcements, through their recruitment vendors, about the walk-in and clearly indicated their interest in talking to candidates with all sorts of salary ranges.

The positions advertised through vendors read like this - "Immediate Opportunity for Test Leads/Managers" with Banking Domain experience for POLARIS Software Labs - Gurgaon (WALK IN -21/Aug/10). A number of candidates checked with vendors if Polaris would be able to match their salary expectation to which vendors responded very positively.

According to a Techgoss Tipster about 50-60 Candidates with relevant profiles walked in with great enthusiasm and hope as generally, a testing profile doesn’t fetch many interviews and the highly skewed demand-supply ratio of testers only worsens the situation. Turnaround was pretty impressive ignoring the facts that the whole of NCR region was knee deep in rain water and it was any IT guy’s long awaited weekend. There was a mild jostle in an attempt to get the interview slot number.

Any successful candidate had to go through two rounds of technical interviews followed by a final HR round. Soon after the first set of interviews, an environment of curiosity and anxiety was felt turning into that of regret and despair. Candidates who had cleared the two rounds of technical discussion were moved for the third/HR round only to be told that Polaris didn’t have enough budget to meet their salary demand. A few, very senior, candidates felt quite embarrassed and unwanted when their interviewer asked them a single, trivial question like – ‘difference between strategy and planning’ and called it an interview. After hearing these kinds of feedbacks, a few candidates opted out of the interview and simply walked out. Clearly, the environment was that of mismanagement and chaos leaving candidates high and dry.

One candidate rightfully commented, “I did five hours of wasteful walk today, I walked in and out of Polaris”.

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