Offshore IT challenges - Part II

In continuation to my last post....

The second troubling issue is employee retention.  Indian IT community is not projecting an image of dependability to the global enterprise.  Attrition rates are way too high (I heard someone say as high as 20% in good years) and prospective employees shop around with job offers playing one firm against the other.  Just to be clear in what I mean by this, employees move from company to company in a very short amount of time for a very small increase in compensation.  The other part of the problem is that the prospective employees accept an offer letter from a company and then go shop in the market with few other companies and negotiate higher comp.  It's OK if they doesn't accept the offer and shop around but it is not ethical/professional to accept an offer and then to go around and shop for higher comp on top of that. 

I believe this is an easier problem to solve and the industry/firms have more control over.  But it needs more discipline and commitment from the Indian software firms. Couple of the things I can think of to address this set of issues include:

1. Companies not interviewing/considering new hires that have worked for less than 2 years at the previous firm.  Some companies use something called a dependability index to track and address this but it should be adopted as an industry self regulation measure.  
2. Companies not negotiating with candidates on top of offers from other companies. 
3. Educating the candidates that it's not acceptable to shop around once they accept an offer and to blacklist them if they are caught doing it (goes back to the national registry of Software professionals concept we discussed in the last post).  

Also, IT firms should realize that they are as much responsible for this problem as the candidates because it's the firms deeds that are encouraging the candidates to behave in a fashion that is actually detrimental at the end to the overall industry.

P.S: I received a lot of feedback from people that read my last post and I sincerely appreciate it.  These are genuine problems for the Indian IT industry and if not addressed can make the whole industry irrelevant to the global economy very quickly.  So, please share your thoughts on how we can act on any of these and also please share these posts with your friends/acquaintances who can make a difference.  Thank you!!