Selection critieria is odd, one is not selected for his skills, its only friends of existing employees who get selected without much scrutiny! While one must be able to make and have friends at workplace, it should not be a selection criteria in my opinion! Until you are outside the organization, the HR will pamper you like anything to have you on board, but once you enter, you will be treated like bonded labor, with no respect for the skills you bring with you! There is an over-abundance of managers, who are not just extremely manipulative, and non-transparent, but also consider themselves as heroes, with their only passion being brute force leadership. I was hired as a Java Architect, and later was asked to do all sorts of admin work including excel sheet project management.
I resigned, and within 3 months, 3/4th of our team had resigned! They manipulated my reason for resignation, to help avoid any blame on management. Out of the 3 months notice period, I was idle for 2 months with no work adding any value to the company - I was not relieved even after having completed all transition activities. 3/4th of the team that resigned did the KT, and the rest 1/4th team rated our KT as 10/10 in feedback form. After some days, the Team Director engaged us in a team meeting, and his words to us were "It is an employee lifecycle, you are just an employee, and are powerless, you guys need to make sure that we succeed in days after you leave, its your accountability!, if you fail, you will have serious implications on your future jobs, we might not even relieve you, and will add negative remarks on your relieving letter". He further went on to say "Redo the KT, and you are accountable to make it interesting, you should not make the rest of the team sleepy".
The EMPLOYEE remarks, while may be true to some extent, we all in the IT industry usually come from a decent educational, and family backgrounds, and do not deserve such insult - well it was this motivation that urged 3/4th of our team to look for jobs outside:). Managers are totally inefficient, and panic easily with even slight aggressive(and true) remarks from client. There is total absence of meritocracy. Having escalated this to the team director in email, his reaction was "don’t expect me to read your email, I get thousands of emails from important people!" Salary increments are meager. Policies are not at all friendly.
On the day of induction, you will be threatened with reasons under which your employment may be terminated, and the HR head saying "Don’t come here for money, if you are here for good compensation, please leave". The CEO on his induction speech talks about how to be happy in life, he goes ahead narrating how he found his wife. While the personal touch is appreciable, there is no discussion about company strategy, values, etc. He also threatens you saying "If you don’t enjoy coming to office, please leave" - the point I am trying to make is, none from the leadership welcomes you on induction, they only threaten you, which is highly demotivating. People working at Sears India have no corporate etiquette, and manners. Interviews were taken at desk, instead of in a meeting room, some genius in our team had a telephonic interview, where he ended by saying "2 or 2 paanch hote hai ye to tumhi pata hai na". Upon bringing this misbehavior to management notice, their answer is "we have taken action, you don’t look into it".
The list goes on and on, but I don’t want to bore you anymore, this is enough to give you a glimpse of what Sears India is! On another note, the company is not doing too good financially, obvious reason being poor quality work, from a poorly skilled workforce.