Questionable HR Practises

A letter of intent is not a contract and cannot be enforced - it does not have any legal binding. Companies always play a very safe game - they generally do hire candidates when the market is doing well, but in adverse conditions they can very well get away by refusing to hire them. The best thing for candidates to do in such a situation is to keep on applying for jobs even when they have a job offer/letter of intent. This way they are assured of at least one job even if the others do not hold good.

Here I would like to mention an Incident – There was a well known computer institute which used to conduct exams and interviews for a particular computer course. The highlight of the course was that the candidates were given offer letters before the course commenced. Various well-known IT companies would select candidates, and on successful course completion, the candidates would immediately start their job with their respective companies. I was a part of the technical team from my company who conducted the interviews. We interviewed a lot of candidates who had come from various locations with only with one hope in their eyes “to get the coveted job”. We short listed quite a few of them and were happy that we were able to get well qualified candidates. Our Manager had appreciated us a great deal by saying that we had done a very good job. A few months later, mistakenly one of the managers mentioned that the interviews were a farce, the company had to fulfil its commitment of conducting interviews and there would be no jobs for any of the candidates. This came as quite a shock to all of us. We really don’t know what the institute or the candidates must have done to get good jobs for them. The company’s reputation of course did suffer but this act really displayed their lack of ethics.

As suggested by many of my batch mates, "Cancelling the Job Offers" would not affect the Brand Image of the firms like Infosys, TIL, SLM Software and would definitely not reduce their competitive advantage. These are all well established companies and a small incident like this would not harm their brand image. Although such a kind of action should warrant a tarnished image, the issue is soon forgotten when the times change and all is well in the job world.

I do agree with Infosys Spokesperson's statement that Infosys had not really cancelled any job offers since what they had given to the students was only "Intent of Offer". The legal jargon in such situations is not understood by the general public and this is where they get stuck in a rut – in this case, the IITians from Mumbai. Infosys was able to get away unscathed by citing “Letter of Intent” instead of Offer Letter but it does put the company in a bad light – at least with the IITians.

If I was the placement coordinator at IIT, Mumbai I would first try to procure jobs for the 120 candidates who were left with no job offers. I would try for smaller companies who were doing reasonably well. I would then try to remove the loopholes in the current placement system by getting inputs from the candidates as well as the management, check for the placement practises followed by other institutes, refine them and put them into practise from here on. I guess this would help resolve the problem to a certain extent.

I have not gone through the experience as the IITians, but yes one of my friends has faced a roughly similar kind of situation. She was already working for an IT firm, got a job offer from a reputed IT Company. She was serving notice period in the current company when the market crashed. On contacting the HR person of the 2nd company, she was informed that taking into account the current market scenario, the letter would not hold good. She would either have to forego the new job or take up the new job on a low pay scale, even lower than the one she was getting in her current company. This came as a shock to her but she had to take up the new job as she had already resigned from the current one and there was no likelihood of her getting any other job in such a short duration. It was quite distressing to see such a kind of a unethical behaviour from a reputed IT Company. Finally when the market picked up, she was the first to resign from that job and landed up getting a really good one!!