First impressions last

I was in a meeting with a client manager earlier today and one of the concerns that came up was communications with our team in India. While the client admitted that some of our team members spoke very well and were easy to understand, there were clear concerns about the communication skills of some other members of our team.

I have been thinking about this a fair bit, and have come to the conclusion that excellent communication skills are a necessary but not sufficient factor in business dealings. Of course the same can be said of technical skills - necessary but not sufficient.

We in India need to really up our game on how we communicate. One of the things we check for in our recruitment process is an aptitude for spoken English and this has worked well for us. However, there are still some concerns that our clients seem to notice that we haven't been catching during the interview process. We need to acknowledge that it is very difficult to change habits formed across 20 years; and not every skill is trainable. We need to focus more on recruiting talent with not just good communication, but excellent communication skills; and this includes grammar, vocabulary, diction and sentence formation that is in consonance with structured thought.

The short answer to this quandary might to accord more importance to how presentable the candidate comes across as to the recruitment team. By presentable, I mean not so much appearance, as the first impression they make on the interviewers. First impressions do last.