French IT services company Capgemini will hire up to 8,000 people for its delivery operations in India this year, a top company official said.
This is in line with the company's publicly stated vision of having the Indian workforce account for 50 per cent of its overall employee base in the next 2-3 years.
As of March 31, 2011, the €8.7-billion Capgemini group had a total headcount of 1,12,127 employees.
“Last year, we grew our India headcount by around 20 per cent…this year also the HR additions should be in a similar range,” Ms Aruna Jayanthi, Chief Executive Officer of Capgemini India, told
Ms Jayanthi is the first lady CEO to head operations of a software services company in India. She was one of the three Indian leaders who was promoted and given global roles in a restructuring exercise by Capgemini earlier this year.
In her earlier role of Global Delivery Officer for Capgemini Outsourcing, Ms Jayanthi was responsible for improving the quality, productivity and profitability of Capgemini's outsourcing operations worldwide.
In addition to recruiting heavily from engineering campuses, Ms Jayanthi said that the company is also on the look out for science graduates. It has had success by taking the ‘off campus' route to further flatten its employee pyramid.
Off-campus hiring
Off-campus hiring refers to the incremental fresher hirings done by IT companies when their need for entry level graduates exceeds the numbers they have picked up during campus recruitment drives. In such cases, IT companies conduct walk-in-interviews of fresh engineers who have not been picked up by any company during on-campus drives.
“Even the off-campus route can throw up high quality candidates if you are careful with the selection procedure. Having said that, if you select one out of four during campus drives, now you may do only one out of 10,” said Ms Jayanthi.
For the quarter ended March 31, 2011, the company has already made net additions of roughly 3,000 persons, taking its employee count to 33,510. Capgemini follows a January to December accounting calendar.
Capgemini, which has about eight delivery centres in India, is now looking to expand into smaller cities.
Its first move in that direction was made couple of years ago when it setup a centre in Salem, Tamil Nadu.
“We have used Salem for providing finance and accounting BPO services to clients and the experience so far has been very positive…the endeavour is to now take this model to other cities in South India,” said Ms Jayanthi.
Hub-and-spoke model
The company wants to operate on a hub-and-spoke model, targeting cities that are ‘just an overnight journey' from Chennai so that it does not have to invest in local management talent.
Apart from servicing overseas customers, Capgemini also works with India-based companies. In November last year, the company had bagged a workshop management system contract from the Indian Railways.