Consult your common sense

How does one get a job in a software company? Most go through consultants. But before you trust them, pause a moment. If they insist on cash, press shift, don’t enter! Most of the employees of Prodigy are today ruing the day they went to the consultant. Rajkumar Gorasa, a 2010-passout from Magmus Business School, Visakhapatnam, paid `60,000 in May, 2011. He was offered a job as a trainee involving three hours of daily training in SAP, Java and .Net for three months. As per the offer letter issued by the company, he was entitled to a monthly stipend of `7,000 during the training programme followed by an increment when he was to work on live projects. “My father, a farmer, pledged my mother’s gold so that I could pay the so-called security deposit. I signed a one-year bond besides depositing all my original certificates with the company,” says Rajkumar, who received stipend only for a month.  Similar is the case with Srinivas Donepudi, a BTech from Anurag Engineering college, Suryapet. He worked as a game tester in a company called Gameshastra for a monthly salary of `7,000. “The timings were erratic with a combination of night and day shifts. My routine was getting disturbed. When I received a call from Prodigy, I thought it would help me get into actual software development. I paid `70,000 to a certain Sanjay, who I later realised, was a consultant and was facilitating back-door entry into Prodigy by taking money from unemployed youth. The money we lost can be earned, but we lost six months working for a fradulent company. In IT industry, it’s difficult to find a job once you have a gap in your career,” he fumes.Mahendra Verma, a BTech student from West Godavari district, like others paid `60,000 to a consultant in Dilshuknagar. Though Verma had good subject knowledge and scored 70 per cent, he scored low on communication skills and couldn’t find a job through campus placements. “When a friend referred me to a consultant, who found a job for him after taking some money, I followed suit. But all these days, I never got to work on any projects. We were given training for a few hours and the rest of the day, we used to spend time in the lab or go out. I lost both money and time,” he regrets.