HR in technology companies

Over the past 5 years in the IT/Telecom industry, I have seen how the HR teams in many companies tend to classify you first according to the years of experience you have... I wonder how valid that is... Invariably, when recruiting candidates, I have found many who make it to higher positions thanks to their years of experience while not necessarily being as hard working or passionate as some of their younger counterparts... While it is true to some extent that the years of experience is a good measure of the amount of practical learning that a candidate has gained, is it right to get mired in such a numerical measure with such rigidity when evaluating candidates? I remember one company that visited the campus at ISB which in fact put up a formula for their pay packages in which your educational qualification and years of experience were the only inputs! Half the crowd that attended that ppt wanted to withdraw their applications when they saw such a shocking categorization even before the interview. In the name of process, if you are going to fix the limits of a person's financial incentives like that, how can someone who is really streets ahead be actually groomed to higher positions quickly though the ranks?

In fact, when I was talking to one of my US returned friends the other day, I asked him about the differences in HR policies in the US and India in IT companies. Though this is a very subjective opinion, it was not very dis-similar to what I had heard from many others like him... His opinion was that one, in tech companies, HR in India tends to play a lot more role in recruiting a candidate in the name of following processes, while in the US, all that mattered was one decision by the hiring manager about the absolute suitability of the candidate for the specific position on offer. Maybe this is due to the random hiring in large numbers done by the Indian companies in anticipation of high growth and a need to ramp up quickly. But the second point was more interesting. He said that if one were brilliant in the US, there is usually no policy that prevents you from gaining ascendancy (I am not going into racism and gender here). He was of the opinion that HR generally takes a backseat and is involved only when absolutely necessary. In India in tech companies have set up too many rigid guidelines in the name of processes that allows HR to be first involved and second interfere in every issue related to recruitment process, pay and promotion.

Personally, I have not worked in the US. So I cannot comment. But I can certainly say that I would like to see more HR personnel who have a techie background. HR folks in India are dominated by grads from XLRI, TISS and other such bschools or psychology grads who have never worked in an organization before in any other role. Isnt it crucial that someone in HR has actually been in the shoes of the average employee before graduating to manage employee affairs? Would it not be great if these XL and TISS grads had worked as a techie for a couple of years before moving into an hr role? If the average employee is the customer of HR, then wudnt it be great if, as a HR person, I have been in the shoes of my customer to actually understand what his needs are? In fact, this is more so in the IT industry, which is witnessing high growth, attrition and more and more ambitious employees everyday. Wipro, I heard, actually encourages and in fact has in its HR roles, employees who were software engineers. When I spoke to a senior HR guy from Digital when in ISB, he too felt the same. That a HR person is able to understand and perform better if he has worked in the shoes of an employee in the past. I do not know if the face of HR in the US is different from India because bschool grads in the US, who get recruited into HR teams, have actually worked before bschool, because of which they are more evolved and understanding when they enter an organization. I do not know the proportion of bschool grads among HR folks in the US, but this could possibly be an explanation.