Understanding Industry Verticals and Domains (For Recruitment.)

(by Abhinav Mishra - recpro)

One of the most fundamental & initial step in recruitment cycle is “Taking the JOB – REQUIREMENTS”, from HR/or Functional Head. Whether you are an internal Recruiter or outside agency you cant skip this crucial step. For searching and sourcing the most qualified candidates we need to start the process by preparing ourselves by Firstly 'Understanding the Requirements or Job Position'.
I have seen many of the recruiters who found trouble in getting with initial searches in the absence of appropriate knowledge of the major Industry verticals and domains for which recruitment is generally or frequently targeted on.
I am delineating herein brief, giving an idea about them.

Lets understand them one by one:



Information Technology
Information technology (IT), is "the study, design, development, implementation, support or management of computer-based information systems, particularly software applications and computer hardware." IT deals with use of electronic computers and computer software to convert, store, protect, process, transmit and retrieve information, securely.
The term information technology has ballooned to encompass many aspects of computing and technology, and the term is more recognizable than ever before. The information technology umbrella can be quite large, covering many fields. IT professionals perform a variety of duties that range from installing applications to designing complex computer networks and information databases. A few of the duties that IT professionals perform may include data management, networking, engineering computer hardware, database and software design, as well as the management and administration of entire systems.
ICT (Information and Communications Technology).

Java
Java is a programming language originally developed by Sun Microsystems & released in 1995 as a core component of Sun's Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C & C++ but has simpler object model & fewer low-level facilities. Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode which can run on any Java virtual machine (JVM) regardless of computer architecture.
The original & reference implementation Java compilers, virtual machines, & class libraries were developed by Sun from 1995. As of May 2007, in compliance with the specifications of the Java Community Process, Sun made available most of their Java technologies as free software under the GNU General Public License. Others have also developed alternative implementations of these Sun technologies, such as the GNU Compiler for Java and GNU Classpath.
Java's design, industry backing & portability have made Java one of the fastest-growing & most widely used programming languages in the modern computing industry.

Business Intelligence
BI applications are used to analyze performance, projects. AQL - Associative Query Logic, Scorecarding, Business activity monitoring, Business Performance Management & Measurement, Business Planning, Business Process Re-engineering, Competitive Analysis, User/End-user Query and Reporting, Enterprise Management systems, Executive Information Systems (EIS), Supply Chain Management/Demand Chain Management, and Finance and Budgeting tools.Data mining (DM), Data Farming, and Data warehouses; Decision Support Systems (DSS) and Forecasting; Document warehouses & Document Management; Knowledge Management; Mapping, Information visualization, Dashboarding, Management Information Systems (MIS); Geographic Information Systems (GIS); Trend Analysis, (SaaS) Business Intelligence offerings (On Demand), Online analytical processing (OLAP) & multidimensional analysis, Real time business intelligence; Statistics and Technical Data Analysis; Web Mining; Text mining; and Systems intelligence.

Data Warehouse
A data warehouse is the main repository of an organization's historical data, its corporate memory. It contains the raw material for management's decision support system. The critical factor leading to the use of a data warehouse is that a data analyst can perform complex queries and analysis, such as data mining, on the information without slowing down the operational systems.
While operational systems are optimized for simplicity and speed of modification through heavy use of database normalization and an entity-relationship model, the data warehouse is optimized for reporting and analysis (online analytical processing, or OLAP). Frequently data in data warehouses are heavily denormalised, summarised or stored in a dimension-based model.

Analytics
The simplest definition of Analytics is "the science of analysis". In reality, the word "Analytics" has not been properly defined by the professional community and may mean different things to different people. A simple and practical definition, however, would be how an entity(i.e., business) arrives at the most optimal or realistic decision from a variety of available options, based on existing data. Business managers may choose to make decisions based on past experiences or rule of thumb, or there might be other qualitative aspects to decision making; but unless there is data involved in the process, it would be considered beyond the purview of analytics. Another definition could be that Analytics is a field of study / profession that has applications in any field (business / social / poiltical / home) where data is available.

Software Testing
Software testing is the process used to measure the quality of developed computer software. Usually, quality is constrained to such topics as correctness, completeness, security, but can also include more technical requirements as described under the ISO standard ISO 9126, such as capability, reliability, efficiency, portability, maintainability, compatibility, and usability. Testing is a process of technical investigation, performed on behalf of stakeholders, that is intended to reveal quality-related information about product with respect to context in which it is intended to operate. This includes,the process of executing a program or application with the intent of finding errors. Quality is not an absolute; it is value to some person. With that in mind, testing can never completely establish the correctness of arbitrary computer software; testing furnishes a criticism or comparison that compares the state and behaviour of the product against a specification.

Enerprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems integrate (or attempt to integrate) all data and processes of an organization into a unified system. A typical ERP system will use multiple components of computer software and hardware to achieve the integration. A key ingredient of most ERP systems is the use of a unified database to store data for the various system modules.
Examples of modules in an ERP which formerly would have been stand-alone applications include: Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Financials, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Human Resources, Warehouse Management and Decision Support System.

Database Administrator
A database administrator (DBA) is a person who is responsible for the environmental aspects of a database. In general, these include:

Recoverability - Creating and testing Backups
Integrity - Verifying or helping to verify data integrity
Security - Defining and/or implementing access controls to the data
Availability - Ensuring maximum uptime
Performance - Ensuring maximum performance given budgetary constraints
Development and testing support - Helping programmers and engineers to efficiently utilize the database.
The role of a database administrator has changed according to the technology of database management systems (DBMSs) as well as the needs of the owners of the databases. For example, although logical and physical database design are traditionally the duties of a database analyst or database designer, a DBA may be tasked to perform those duties.

Technical Writing
Technical writing is a subset of technical communication, is used in fields as diverse as computer hardware and software, chemistry, the aerospace industry, robotics, finance, consumer electronics, and biotechnology.

Technical writing (aka Information Development or Technical Documentation or Technical Publications) exists to communicate and disseminate useful information. Technical communications are created and distributed by most employees in service organizations today, especially by professional staff and management. Writing well is difficult and time-consuming, and writing in a technical way and about technical subjects compounds the difficulties. To be useful, information must be understood and acted upon. Fortunately, tools and techniques are available to make writing more accessible and easy to understand.

Computer Networking
Computer networking is the engineering discipline concerned with communication between computer systems or devices. Networking, routers, routing protocols, and networking over the public Internet have their specifications defined in documents called RFCs. Computer networking is sometimes considered a sub-discipline of telecommunications, computer science, information technology and/or computer engineering. Computer networks rely heavily upon the theoretical and practical application of these scientific and engineering disciplines.
A computer network is any set of computers or devices connected to each other with the ability to exchange data. Examples of networks are:
local area network (LAN), which is usually a small network constrained to a small geographic area.
wide area network (WAN) that is usually a larger network that covers a large geographic area.
wireless LANs and WANs (WLAN & WWAN) is the wireless equivalent of the LAN and WAN.

Sales
Sales are the activities involved in providing products or services in return for money or other compensation. It is an act of completion of a commercial activity.
The "deal is closed", means the customer has consented to the proposed product or service by making full or partial payment (as in case of installments) to the seller.
Academically, selling is thought of as a part of marketing, however, the two disciplines are completely different. Sales often forms a separate grouping in a corporate structure, employing separate specialist operatives known as salespersons (singular: salesperson). Sales is considered by many to be a sort of persuading "art". Contrary to popular belief, the methodological approach of selling refers to a systematic process of repetitive and measurable milestones, by which a salesperson relates his offering of a product of service in return enabling the buyer to achieve his goal in an economic way.

Marketing
Marketing is a social process which satisfies consumers' wants. 4 Ps of Marketing are:
Product: The product aspects of marketing deal with the specifications of the actual goods or services, and how it relates to the end-user's needs and wants.
Pricing: This refers to the process of setting a price for a product, including discounts. The price need not be monetary - it can simply be what is exchanged for the product or services.
Promotion: This includes advertising, sales promotion, publicity, and personal selling, and refers to the various methods of promoting the product, brand, or company.
Placement or distribution refers to how the product gets to the customer; for example, point of sale placement or retailing. This fourth P has also sometimes been called Place, referring to the channel by which a product or services is sold (e.g. online vs. retail), which geographic region or industry, to which segment (young adults, families, business people), etc.

Advertising
Advertising is paid, one-way communication through a medium in which the sponsor is identified and the message is controlled by the sponsor. Variations include publicity, public relations, etc.. Every major medium is used to deliver these messages, including: television, radio, movies, magazines, newspapers, video games, the Internet (see Internet advertising), and billboards.
Advertisements can also be seen on the seats of grocery carts, on the walls of an airport walkway, on the sides of buses, heard in telephone hold messages and in-store public address systems. Advertisements are usually placed anywhere an audience can easily and/or frequently access visuals and/or audio.

Media
Media may refer to various aspects:
Recording media, devices used to store information
Print media, communications delivered via paper or canvas
Electronic media, communications delivered via electronic or electromechanical energy
Multimedia, communications that incorporate multiple forms of information content and processing
Digital media, electronic media used to store, transmit, and receive digitized information
Mass media, all means of mass communication
Broadcast media, communications delivered over mass electronic communication networks
News media, mass media focused on communicating news
Media meshing, the act of combining multiple independent pieces of communication media to enrich an information consumer's experience
New media, media that can only be created or used with the aid of modern computer processing power
Media for advertising, also media-buying, or the choosing and buying of TV airtime, radio airtime, newspaper etc space, for advertising.


Management
Management comprises directing and controlling a group of one or more people or entities for the purpose of coordinating and harmonizing that group towards accomplishing a goal. Management often encompasses the deployment and manipulation of human resources, financial resources, technological resources, and natural resources. Management can also refer to the person or people who perform the act(s) of management.
The verb manage comes from the Italian maneggiare (to handle — especially a horse), which in turn derives from the Latin manus (hand). The French word mesnagement (later ménagement) influenced the development in meaning of the English word management in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Management has to do with power by position, whereas leadership involves power by influence.
Frenchman Henri Fayol considers management to consist of five functions:
planning
organizing
leading
co-ordinating
controlling

Finance
Finance studies and addresses the ways in which individuals, businesses, and organizations raise, allocate, and use monetary resources over time, taking into account the risks entailed in their projects. The term "finance" may thus incorporate any of the following:
The study of money and other assets;
The management and control of those assets;
Profiling and managing project risks;
The science of managing money;
As a verb, "to finance" is to provide funds for business or for an individual's large purchases (car, home, etc.).
The activity of finance is the application of a set of techniques that individuals and organizations (entities) use to manage their money, particularly the differences between income and expenditure and the risks of their investments.

Accounting
Accountancy (profession) or accounting (methodology) is the measurement, statement or provision of assurance about financial information primarily used by managers, investors, tax authorities and other decision makers to make resource allocation decisions within companies, organizations, and public agencies. The terms derive from the use of financial accounts.
Financial accounting is one branch of accounting and historically has involved processes by which financial information about a business is recorded, classified, summarized, interpreted, and communicated; for public companies, this information is generally publicly-accessible. By contrast management accounting information is used within an organization and is usually confidential and accessible only to a small group, mostly decision-makers. Tax Accounting is the accounting needed to comply with jurisdictional tax regulations.
Practitioners of accountancy are known as accountants.

Auditing
The most general definition of an audit is an evaluation of a person, organization, system, process, project or product. Audits are performed to ascertain the validity and reliability of information, and also provide an assessment of a system's internal control. Auditing is therefore a part of some quality control certifications such as ISO 9001. The goal of an audit is to express an opinion on the person/organization/system etc. under evaluation based on work done on a test basis. Due to practical constraints, an audit seeks to provide only reasonable assurance that the statements are free from material error. Hence, random sampling is often adopted in audits. In the case of financial audits, a set of financial statements are said to be true and fair when they are free of material misstatements - a concept influenced by both quantitative and qualitative factors.

Legal / Law
Law is a system of social rules usually enforced through a set of structured institutions. Contract law regulates everything from buying a bus ticket to trading swaptions on a derivatives market. Property law defines rights and obligations related to buying, selling, or renting real property such as homes and buildings. Trust law applies to assets held for investment, such as pension funds. Tort law allows claims for compensation when someone or their property is harmed. If the harm is criminalised in a penal code, criminal law offers means by which the state prosecutes and punishes the perpetrator. Constitutional law provides a framework for creating laws, protecting people's human rights, and electing political representatives, while administrative law allows ordinary citizens to challenge the way governments exercise power. International law regulates affairs between sovereign nation-states in everything from trade to the environment to military action.

International Trade
International trade is the exchange of goods and services across international boundaries or territories. In most countries, it represents a significant share of GDP. While international trade has been present throughout much of history its economic, social, and political importance has been on the rise in recent centuries. Industrialization, advanced transportation, globalization, multinational corporations, and outsourcing are all having a major impact. Increasing international trade is basic to globalization".
International trade is also a branch of economics, which, together with international finance, forms the larger branch of international economics.

Manufacturing
Manufacturing is the use of tools and labor to make things for use or sale. The term may refer to a vast range of human activity, from handicraft to high tech, but is most commonly applied to industrial production, in which raw materials are transformed into finished goods on a large scale.
Manufacturing takes place under all types of economic systems. In a capitalist economy, manufacturing is usually directed toward the mass production of products for sale to consumers at a profit. In a collectivist economy, manufacturing is more frequently directed by a state agency to supply perceived needs. In modern economies, manufacturing occurs under some degree of government regulation.
Modern manufacturing includes all intermediate processes required for the production and integration of a product's components. Some industries, such as semiconductor and steel manufacturers use the term fabrication instead. The manufacturing sector is closely connected with engineering and industrial design.

Production
In microeconomics, production is the act of making things, in particular the act of making products that will be traded or sold commercially. Production decisions concentrate on what goods to produce, how to produce them, the costs of producing them, and optimizing the mix of resource inputs used in their production. This production information can then be combined with market information (like demand and marginal revenue) to determine the quantity of products to produce and the optimum 'pricing'

Supply Chain
A supply chain, logistics network, or supply network is a coordinated system of organizations, people, activities, information and resources involved in moving a product or service in physical or virtual manner from supplier to customer. Supply chain activities transform raw materials and components into a finished product that is delivered to the end customer. Today, the ever increasing technical complexity of the distribution of standard consumer goods, combined with the ever increasing size and depth of the global market has meant that the link between consumer and vendor is usually only the final link in a long and complex chain or network of exchanges.
This supply chain begins with the extraction of raw material and includes several production links, for instance; component construction, assembly and merging before moving onto several layers of storage facilities of ever decreasing size and ever more remote geographical locations, and finally reaching the consumer.


Engineering
Engineering is the applied science of acquiring and applying knowledge to design, analysis, and/or construction of works for practical purposes. One who practices engineering is called an engineer, and those licensed to do so have formal designations such as Professional Engineer, Chartered Engineer or Incorporated Engineer. The broad discipline of engineering encompasses a range of specialised subdisciplines that focus on the issues associated with developing a specific kind of product, or using a specific type of technology.
Engineering, much like science, is a broad discipline which is often broken down into several sub-disciplines.
Aerospace Engineering
Biomedical Engineering
Chemical Engineering
Civil Engineering
Computer Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Environmental Engineering
Instrumentation engineering
Mechanical engineering
Manufacturing engineering
Industrial Engineering
Mining Engineering
Production Engineering
Software Engineering

Pharmacy / Pharmaceutical
Pharmacy is the health profession that links the health sciences with the chemical sciences, and it is charged with ensuring the safe use of medication. The scope of pharmacy practice includes more traditional roles such as compounding and dispensing medications on the orders of physicians, and it also includes more modern services related to patient care, including clinical services, reviewing medications for safety and efficacy, and providing drug information. Pharmacists, therefore, are experts on drug therapy and are the primary health professionals who optimize medication use to provide patients with positive health outcomes.
A pharmaceutical company, or drug company, is a commercial business whose focus is to research, develop, market and/or distribute drugs, most commonly in the context of healthcare. They can deal in generic and/or brand medications. They are subject to a variety of laws and regulations regarding the patenting, testing and marketing of drugs.


Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)
Business process outsourcing (BPO) is the contracting of a specific business task, such as payroll, to a third-party service provider. Usually, BPO is implemented as a cost-saving measure for tasks that a company requires but does not depend upon to maintain its position in the marketplace. BPO is often divided into two categories: back office outsourcing, which includes internal business functions such as billing or purchasing, and front office outsourcing, which includes customer-related services such as marketing or tech support.
Information technology enabled services, or ITES, is a form of outsourced service which has emerged due to involvement of IT in various fields such as banking and finance, telecommunications, insurance, etc. Some of the examples of ITES are medical transcription, back-office accounting, insurance claim, credit card processing and many more.
Outsourcing
Offshoring
Nearshoring
Homeshoring

Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO)
Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is a form of business process outsourcing (BPO) where an employer outsources or transfers all or part of its recruitment activities to an external service provider.
RPO may involve the outsourcing of all or just part of recruitment functions and process. The external service provider may serve as a virtual recruiting department by providing a complete package of skills, tools, technologies and activities. The RPO service provider is "the" source for in-scope recruitment activity.
On the other hand, occasional recruitment support, for example temporary, contingency and executive search services is more analagous to out-tasking, co-sourcing or just sourcing. In this example the service provider is "a" source for certain types of recruitment activity.differentiating between RPO and other types of staffing.

Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO)
Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) is the industry in which in-house legal departments or organisations outsource legal work from areas where it is costly to perform, such as the United States or Europe to areas where it can be performed at a significantly decreased cost, primarily India. Legal Process Outsourcing is a high end industry that has been growing rapidly in the recent years.
Legal Process Outsourcing covers the following services in general:
Legal Research
Document Drafting like standard contracts, agreements, letters to the clients, patent applications etc.
Legal Billing activities like preparation of invoices, collation of time sheets etc.
Intellectual Property research--substantive and administrative
Paralegal Services
Administrative and secretarial activities like following up with clients, etc.
The work is done by experienced paralegals and attorneys using industry standard databases like Lexisnexis and Westlaw.

Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO)
Knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) is a form of outsourcing, including legal process outsourcing. These are both high-value-added forms of business process outsourcing (BPO). KPO firms provide domain-based processes and business expertise, rather than just process expertise, and actually make many low level business decisions - typically those that are easily undone if they conflict with higher-level business plans.

Telecommunication
Telecommunication is the transmission of signals over a distance for the purpose of communication. In modern times, this process typically involves the sending of electromagnetic waves by electronic transmitters, but in earlier times telecommunication may have involved the use of smoke signals, drums or semaphore or heliograph. Today, telecommunication is widespread and devices that assist the process, such as the television, radio and telephone, are common in many parts of the world. There are also many networks that connect these devices, including computer networks, public telephone networks, radio networks and television networks. Computer communication across the Internet is one of many examples of telecommunication.

Retail
Retailing consists of the sale of goods or merchandise, from a fixed location such as a department store or kiosk, in small or individual lots for direct consumption by the purchaser.[1] Retailing may include subordinated services, such as delivery. Purchasers may be individuals or businesses. In commerce, a retailer buys goods or products in large quantities from manufacturers or importers, either directly or through a wholesaler, and then sells smaller quantities to the end-user. Retail establishments are often called shops or stores. Retailers are at the end of the supply chain. Manufacturing marketers see the process of retailing as a necessary part of their overall distribution strategy.