Bangalore, June 13: The booming ITES-BPO industry, faced with shortage of talent and high attrition, is now attracting "under graduates". Industry managers told reporters here today that the trend of hiring skilled and experienced under graduates (school graduates who don't have a university degree, or who are studying for a degree, diploma etc) in the last one year had yielded good results.

"We started hiring non-graduates more as an experiment and the team is growing. They are experienced, have skills and perform well," 24/7 customer.Com general manager (human resources) G V Giridhar said.

Several firms in Delhi and Mumbai including ICICI Onesource are hiring under graduates who are paid the same salary as graduates and undergo the same training to serve calls from overseas customers.

The trend may increase as the industry, which employs 1.70 lakh people, would need to ramp up on a massive scale to reach the target of 1.1 million jobs by 2008 and hiring was likely to move to smaller cities and towns, where firms plan to start their operations.

"We are seeing the trend of firms moving into B class cities like Coimbatore, Mysore, Jaipur (where GE has set up its centre) and Indore," ICICI Onesource Ltd vice-president (human resources) Aashu Calapa said.

Digital Globalsoft Contact Centre head Prashant Sankaran said his company had formed a task force to identify locations in small cities.

Bureau Report