Out of 100 applicants, Ibex hires two — and that is the problem

The fifty lakh number, and why Muzamil keeps coming back to it

The episode opens with a number Muzamil has been circling for months on this show. Fifty lakh young Pakistanis enter the job market every year. The country needs dollars. The only realistic way to earn dollars at the scale required is to sell services to the world. So why has Pakistan never produced an Infosys, and why is the country’s BPO industry roughly one one-hundredth the size of India’s?

To answer that, he has brought in Yasir Rafiq, head of recruitment at Ibex — the largest BPO operating in Pakistan, with a domestic headcount of around 8,500 and a global headcount of close to 27,000 across seven countries. Last year, Yasir notes early on, Ibex brought more than thirty million dollars in export receipts into Pakistan. The growth has been steep. The hiring problem, as the conversation makes clear, is steeper.

Muzamil introduces Yasir not as a recruiter but as someone who has been inside the same building, watching the same Pakistani talent walk through the same door, for nearly two decades. “I have been trying to understand,” Muzamil says in his opening, “why the growth the region saw, the growth India saw, the growth the Philippines saw — Pakistan could not see it.” The rest of the conversation is Yasir’s answer.

A computer-science student who joined a call centre in 2006

Yasir’s own arc explains a lot about the industry. He joined Ibex in 2006 while still finishing his bachelor’s in computer science at Karachi University. A friend told him a new company had opened and he should apply to make some money on the side. The stigma at the time was severe — a computer science graduate working in a call centre was, in his words, the kind of thing people raised eyebrows at.

He joined as a sales agent selling phone lines. Even as a fresh graduate, mid-semester, he was taking home a six-figure paycheque. When his degree finished, he made a deliberate choice: this was the work he enjoyed and the work that paid. Over the next nineteen years he moved through sales, training, quality assurance, back office, and operations. Three years ago, the country head walked into his office and told him he was going to run recruitment — a function he had never formally done. “I have never done mock recruitment at all,” Yasir says, half-laughing about it. “And he said, you know, you’re gonna do recruitment.”

That story matters for a reason Muzamil draws out later: Ibex is, structurally, an entry-level employer. Most people who join leave for other careers within two or three years. A small number, like Yasir, realise the work itself is their craft and stay.

What a BPO actually is, and why AI is not the threat people think

Muzamil pushes Yasir to define the business plainly, because the term BPO has become hazy in public discourse. The answer is precise. A BPO takes over the standard, repeating operational functions of another company — customer service, HR, payroll, IT, anything that needs to keep running month on month — and delivers them at lower cost and, ideally, better quality. Global BPO revenues sit somewhere around 250 to 260 billion dollars a year.

The natural follow-up, the one Muzamil knows the audience is waiting for, is the AI question. If the entire pitch of a BPO is doing repetitive work cheaply, surely the entire pitch of AI is doing repetitive work even more cheaply.

Yasir’s answer is more textured than the headline version. Chatbots, he points out, have existed for years. The industry has been working with automation the whole time. The work BPOs handle splits into tiers. Tier one — basic queries, where is my order, what is my balance — is exactly the surface area AI will eat first. But tier two and tier three, where the customer wants a different solution, where the underlying system has limitations, where the request does not match any script, still requires a human in the loop. “AI sort of gets bogged down there,” Yasir says. Ibex itself is building chatbots for its clients, deliberately, to be the company doing the automation rather than the company being automated.

Muzamil offers a sharper test from his own experience. In Dubai, when he hits a chatbot at the start of a customer service flow, he hammers next, next, next, next until he gets a human. Not because the bot cannot solve his problem, but because he wants to hear another person acknowledge what happened. Yasir agrees, and adds the underlying mechanic: “Whenever you are on a call with somebody, if you feel somebody is just sympathising, you won’t feel the same way. But if you know there’s somebody across, in front of you, and they’re empathising with what you’re going through, you’re more likely to take that answer.”

The COVID accident that finally put Pakistan on the map

The most consequential section of the conversation is Yasir’s account of how Ibex actually grew. The pre-COVID story is one of stigma. American clients did not see Pakistan as a viable option. Yasir tells a story about one client visiting the Karachi facility and admitting, on the spot, that he had assumed people in Pakistan were still moving around on camels. “I thought you guys were probably, you know, moving around in camels,” the client said. Yasir’s response: “What? You thought we were roaming around in camels?”

COVID broke the stigma by force. Ibex’s geos in other countries could not hire. The company’s leadership made the case to clients: try Pakistan, just for the season. One of the biggest retail giants in the world agreed to a 200-seat trial purely because they had no alternative. Out of Pakistan, those 200 seats ranked number one in customer satisfaction against every other geography that client was running. The client extended the trial for a year to make sure it was not a fluke. Four years later, Pakistan operations make up 35 to 40% of that retailer’s entire workforce.

The same pattern repeated with one of the largest finance firms in the world. Pre-COVID, Yasir says, the Pakistan headcount sat around 3,500 to 4,000. Today it sits at 8,500. The country doubled because the world had no other choice and then discovered the work was good. “COVID has been a boom for us,” Yasir says, with the flatness of someone stating an industrial fact.

Why India is 100x bigger, and what the 1991 reform actually did

Muzamil presses on the comparison everyone in the room is thinking about. India’s BPO and IT services sector together generate revenues in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Pakistan’s is a rounding error in comparison, despite a population only six times smaller. What did India do?

Yasir’s answer has two parts. The first is policy continuity. India locked in a strategy in 1991 — investing heavily in linguistics, in universities, in ease of doing business for foreign clients — and carried that strategy through every change of government for the next thirty years. “Whoever came in, they just toed the line and said, we’re gonna do the same thing and we’re gonna keep progressing.” Pakistan, by contrast, has not been able to hold a single policy through more than one political cycle.

Muzamil adds the macroeconomic layer Yasir’s answer implies. India’s 1991 reform under Manmohan Singh was not just about BPO — it was about letting go of the rupee. India accepted short-term pain by allowing the currency to find its level, which made export businesses viable for the first time. Pakistan’s obsession with holding the dollar at an artificial rate did the opposite: it kept the import economy alive and starved the export economy of oxygen. Yasir agrees with the framing. “Short-term pain ever, short-term, and they saw that gain. It set up a launching pad for them to leap forward, and that’s what they’re seeing.”

The second part of Yasir’s answer is the one Muzamil sits with for the rest of the conversation. India invested in language. Pakistan did not.

Out of 100 applicants, one or two are hireable

This is the line that should be circulated as a public service announcement. Out of every 100 people who apply to Ibex, Yasir says, only one or two actually make it through. The job posting clearly specifies that strong English is required. People apply anyway. People get rejected anyway.

And the rejection is not on hard skills. Ibex is not looking for Python engineers or data scientists at the entry-level call centre tier. They are looking for someone who can speak English well enough to handle a conversation with an American customer. “In this country English is the official language,” Yasir says, “and still to this date when we talk about conversions, out of 100 people that apply only one or two make it through.”

This is, in Yasir’s view, the single largest constraint on the Pakistani BPO sector. Demand is not the problem. Clients are moving headcount into Pakistan because Pakistan is roughly 30% cheaper than India and the Philippines and the quality of work is competitive. The bottleneck is the funnel itself. To hire 100 people at a 2% conversion rate, Ibex needs to source 5,000 candidates.

Ibex Learning Academy, and the asymmetry of a free product

Six years ago, Ibex looked at the 98 out of 100 they were rejecting and asked whether any of them were close enough to be salvaged with a few weeks of training. The answer was yes. They launched Ibex Learning Academy — a free, in-house programme covering grammar, vocabulary, comprehension, soft skills, and the specific muscle of telling a customer no in a way that does not lose them.

The first version of the programme was six months long and free. People dropped out. “You give them something for free, it loses its value,” Yasir says, quoting Azad Chaiwala. The second version was three to four months. People still dropped out. They eventually settled on a three-to-four-week module — long enough for participants to invest, short enough for Ibex to recoup the investment by hiring them. The graduation rate is roughly 80%. Roughly 9,000 people have been through the programme in six years. The Government of Punjab has now licensed the same model with a target of training 5,000 people over four to five years.

The selection criterion inside the academy is also pragmatic. Someone at IELTS band six can be moved to band seven in four weeks. Someone at band five cannot. So the academy filters at the door — not to be exclusionary, but because the goal is a job at the end, not a certificate.

A small but telling detail: Ibex tried to run the training online. They could not crack it. Pakistani home internet is unreliable, attention drifts, trainers cannot tell who is paying attention. The in-person classroom remained the only delivery mode that produced the 80% number.

Work ethic, and the phones-on-the-floor problem

Muzamil opens the second-hardest conversation in the episode by sharing what he has been hearing from employers across the Middle East. Pakistani candidates show up to interviews lying in bed wearing a vest, with their shalwar hanging in the background. They write applications that have nothing to do with the job posted. They mistake hustle for shortcuts. The complaint, repeated everywhere, is not about talent. It is about discipline.

Yasir does not flinch. He gives the inside-Ibex version of the same problem. One of the most consistent pain points BPOs face is the rule that phones cannot be carried onto the operations floor. The reason is non-negotiable: clients are housing customer credit card details and personal information, and PCI compliance forbids cameras. Employees push back constantly. “This feels like school,” they say.

The other version is breaks. Everyone wants to break at the same time. “Imagine you work for a giant like a bank and you call in and nobody picks up the phone because everybody wants to take a break together.” The point Yasir is making, gently but clearly, is that the requirement is not a negotiation. The business defines it. The worker can agree or disagree, but it is the requirement.

Muzamil names the consequence directly. Pakistani candidates routinely lose global contracts not because the work is beyond them but because they treat structure as oppression.

Thirty-five percent women, working nights

One of the most quietly significant numbers in the entire conversation comes near the end. Thirty-five percent of Ibex’s workforce is female. Almost all of them work night shifts because the clients are American and the time zones do not bend.

Yasir describes the protocols in detail: PCI-compliant floors, parents invited to tour the facility before their daughter joins, transport provided to and from home. The framing is not about diversity messaging. It is about the practical question of how a Pakistani family says yes to a daughter working overnight. Ibex has answered that question well enough that 35% of its floor is women. Very few sectors in the country can claim the same.

Twenty years out, and the talent pool problem

Muzamil closes by asking Yasir where Ibex and where Pakistan are headed. Yasir’s answer on Ibex is concrete: 8,500 to 10,000 by year-end, then a doubling every two years, because clients are now actively moving headcount in. His answer on Pakistan is less certain but more important. Pakistan adds fifty lakh entrants to the job market every year. Five lakh of them have a degree. The rest are unaccounted for in the national conversation about where they will work.

Yasir wants more BPOs in Pakistan, not fewer. Competitors would expand the talent pool, force a culture shift, and create the kind of ecosystem India built around its IT corridor. “Right now we are the biggest player, but there are other players as well — but let’s open it up just like India did, and the talent pool will then increase.”

Muzamil’s closing reflection is the one he keeps returning to on this show. There are only two professions Pakistanis are taught to value — doctor and engineer. The vast majority of university students end up in natural sciences. The vast majority of those graduates are not employable in the global services economy that is the only realistic dollar-earning path for the country. Yasir tells a story about one of his most successful managers — a PhD in biology who could not explain why she did a PhD in biology — to underline the same point. The talent is there. Nobody told her where it would be best used.

By the end of the conversation, the diagnosis is clear and unflinching. The Pakistani job market is not short on people. It is short on people who can hold a conversation, accept a rule, and take a job that does not match the parental script.